Sermon – Parashat Yitro: What does it mean to be chosen?

Written by Rabbi Hannah Kingston — 9 April 2023

Parashat Yitro – What does it mean to be chosen?

Love is certainly in the air at the moment. In the lead up to Valentines day wherever you walk you are accosted by red roses, heart shaped balloons and teddy bears clutching messages for your sweetheart.

As Jews, our most complicated love affair is with God. How does God show love for us, the Jewish people. For we are in some form of intimate relationship with God, aware that we are chosen. But are we really aware of what it means to be chosen?

The ancient Rabbis of Midrash and Talmud seem to struggle with this concept, grappling with the mixed metaphors that fill Torah. Just this week, we read in our Torah portion two different and conflicting ways that God manifests love for us.

We are introduced to the concept of chosenness with the following words, uttered by God to Moses to be relayed to the Israelites; ‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles wings and brought you to Me.’

This suggests a protective relationship, one of a parent to a child, one of unconditional love.

A second century halakhic midrash on exodus (Mekhilta de rabbi Ishmael) explains that the eagle is used because it is different from all other birds. The majority of birds place their young between their feet when they fly, because they are afraid of another bird that could fly above them and threaten their offspring. The eagle fears none except humankind. Therefore, when an eagle is in flight it places the young on its wings for fear that a person may cast an arrow at the bird. A statement of ‘better the arrow should pierce me than my young.’

This metaphor is the beginning of us as Jews being distinguished from all other people. God is compared to a bird that acts like no other type of bird, and we are God’s young, lifted so high that we cannot be touched by another. We are special and God shows us this through loving us like a protective parent.

From this midrash we can deduce that we should not fear others like us, but those who are outside of us. It creates a distinction between us and them, those who fear other birds and those who fear the other.

But this is not the only version of love we read about in Torah. For from the following verse of our parasha, we understand that the chosenness prescribed in Torah isn’t an unconditional chosenness. There are expectations and boundaries to this relationship with God. We begin to understand that chosenness as a concept does not work unless it is a two way street.

Our Torah portion continues:

Now therefore, if you will hearken to My voice, and keep My covenant, then you shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.

This love is conditional, a love formed around obligation. We act in a certain way and then we are given God’s love, given our status as a chosen people. There is no better demonstration of this love, than in the Midrash found around the giving of the Torah, a time when we were treated not at all like the children God favours with unconditional love, but rather as a nation put to the test, needing to act correctly.

We read that rather than standing at the bottom of Mount Sinai, the Jewish people stood beneath the mountain, and the Holy One, Blessed be God, overturned the mountain above the Jews like a tub, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial.

Our status as a holy nation is conditional on our work. The gift we are given of being a chosen people, is only a gift when we chose it in return. When we embrace the ideals and the obligations set out to us by Torah, by our narrative and by our religion.

With these two conflicting messages around God’s love and our chosenness as a people, how do we maintain the most important relationship in our Jewish lives, the one between us as a people, and God?

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, writes:

‘The “chosen people” means a people approached and chosen by God. The significance of this term is genuine in relation to God rather than in relation to other peoples. It signifies not a quality inherent in the people but a relationship between the people and God.’

Maintaining our relationship with God is the most important aspect of our chosenness. And to maintain that relationship with God, we must uphold the covenant made with God, by living out the precepts set by our own Torah, and by acting as a light unto the nations. And then we fulfil the status of being chosen, because we act as if we are chosen.

And this chosen status does not mean that we are a superior people, or that we should assert ourselves as better than the other. Because helping those outside of our own religion is not a compromise of our chosen status, but a part of our covenant, a part of us acting as chosen.

It is a major part obligations set on us by the next few weeks of Torah, our obligation to help the stranger, to look after the widow. Because we are taught that the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come – our chosen status does not make us any more likely to reach salvation. It is our righteousness that helps us.

So when we act like the young of the eagle, born on its wings, believing that we are special just by virtue of our relationships, fearing not our own kind but the other. When we reject others because of our chosen status, we are not enacting chosenness at all.

And when we conflate our chosen status with our political narrative and when we try to project our beliefs about it onto others, the narrative of chosenness becomes one that can feel especially difficult and divisive.

Because then we create a people who believe there is a hierarchy of humankind. And if this is believed by those who are in positions of leadership it might lead them to make decisions that are not for the good of all, but only for the good of the people they deem to be of higher status.

And then our choseness becomes a divider. Something people become resentful of, that can generate hatred or suspicion. Something that causes conflict, rather than something that unites us with others. And something that distracts us from the obligation put on us by the very centre of our Torah, to love your neighbour as yourself.

Our chosenness is a gift, a marker given to us as a people, but not as a nation. It is something owned by Jews all over the world, those spread out in the diaspora. And it is a reciprocal relationship, one we only get when we choose to act as the children of Israel should, as a light to the nations.

To be Jewish, to be chosen, is in the words of Rabbi Eric Yoffie:

To be obligated to bring repair, wholeness and sanctity to all of humankind…to be aware of each and every instance of human suffering and to resuscitate throughout the world the fundamental values of Torah – that human life is sacred, that justice is a supreme value, and that freedom is the touchstone of civilisation.

To be Jewish, to be chosen, is in the words of our prophet Micah:

Only to do justice
And to love goodness,
And to walk modestly with your God.

And to be Jewish, to be chosen, is in the words of our Torah portion:

To hearken to God’s voice, and keep God’s covenant.

May we see our choseness not just as an unconditional gift, but as something that we need to constantly work for. May we not see it as a demarcation between us and others, but rather as a marker of the relationship we are able to form with the divine. And ultimately may we choose to live like that chosen people in all that we do, loving the stranger, taking care of the widow and being a light unto the nations.