Ki Tavo · Deuteronomy 26:1–29:8
By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
Nothing makes modern Jews fidget quite like “God’s Chosen People.”
Say it aloud and watch the synchronized wince. Someone reaches for “Well, technically…” which is how you know a doctrine has become socially inconvenient.
Toward the end of the war my grandfather, Moshe Samuel, filed the complaint after several of his children were murdered: “God, if we are Your Chosen People, why don’t You choose someone else for a change?”
Tevye would have bought him a drink. Stars and sand—thank You very much. Perhaps the Swedes are free. S’iz shver tsu zayn a Yid. [It’s hard to be a Jew.] Some weeks the title feels less like a crown than jury duty with no end date.
What we forget when we apologize: Jews are not the only people who have thought themselves chosen. We are only the ones trained to blush.
Christianity reused and co-opted Israel’s vocabulary. First Peter tells the church: “You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession” (1 Peter 2:9)—Exodus 19 with a new address. For much of history the Church did not merely claim a calling. It claimed to replace the first trustees.
Islam is no less explicit, and unlike contemporary Judaism it has rarely been shy. “You are the best community ever raised for humanity: you enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong, and believe in God” (Qur’an 3:110). The ummah is elect—the community charged with the last revelation and with carrying that claim to the ends of the earth. Mission is not courtesy. It is the point.
Nor is the hunger unique to monotheism. Civilizations baptize power as vocation. Alexander marched as if the world were waiting to become Greek. China named itself the Middle Kingdom—the civilized center around which others were expected to orbit. America spoke of Manifest Destiny: a continental errand dressed as providence. Peoples do not only conquer. They explain the conquering. “We were meant to” is the oldest political theology on earth.
A further twist of our age is theft of the metaphor. Some Islamist movements—and their fellow travelers in media and on campuses—have inverted the twentieth century: Jews recast as the new Nazis, themselves costumed as the new Jews. That is not comparative religion. It is the looting of someone else’s wound to bless someone else’s politics.
Buddhism does not speak of a chosen ethnos. It speaks of a chosen task: the bodhisattva vow to awaken all sentient beings. The Dharma is not a private night-light. Someone has to carry the lamp.
The famous psychologist Carl Jung translated the same hunger inward. “True personality is always a vocation,” he wrote, “and puts its trust in it as in God.”
Individuation is inner election: the Self calling a person out of the herd. Not a passport. A summons you cannot return without remaining half-born.
Human beings need a story in which life is not an accident. Peoples need a story in which survival means something. The question is never whether someone will claim chosenness. The question is what they claim it for—and whether they will let others keep their names.
Ki Tavo does not whisper:
“The Lord has affirmed this day that you are… His treasured people… high above all the nations… a holy people to the Lord your God” (Deut. 26:18–19; cf. 28:1, 9–10).
Am segulah. Am kadosh. Treasured. Holy.
Then the invoice: blessings and curses. Amos without a publicist: “You only have I singled out of all the families of the earth—therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). Chosen first means chosen for the audit.
Then Amos refuses the crest: “To Me, O Israelites, you are just like the Ethiopians” (Amos 9:7). Heschel: God is either the Father of all men or of no man.
Ewer’s heckle: How odd
Of God to choose
The Jews.
The replies: not so odd as those who choose a Jewish God and spurn the Jews; it isn’t odd—the Jews chose God; God chose this people to show what He can do with unpromising material. Moses had already conceded the last. We are “a crooked and perverse generation” (Deut. 32:5). If holiness can be made here, it can be made anywhere.
Kaplan tried deletion, striking “who has chosen us from among all peoples” from the Torah blessing. After enemies wore election as a racial costume, many Jews preferred: leave us alone; we will bring the bagels.
Understandable. Incomplete. Church, ummah, empire, enlightenment, Manifest Destiny—everyone else kept a vocation. We were asked to misplace ours, then watched others wear our metaphors as camouflage.
Maimonides will not flatten this into vanity or silence. God did not pick a bloodline like a mascot. Abraham discovered God. Israel accepted Torah. Anyone who sets himself apart to stand before God, to serve and to know Him, “is consecrated to the Holy of Holies.” A convert who takes on the work stands inside. A born Jew who treats the title as furniture does not keep the holiness as a souvenir. “Chosen people” is not one of the Thirteen Principles. The principle is Torah. The people are the first trustees.
That is the fork. Alexander’s destiny ran through the sword. Manifest Destiny ran through land. China’s center ran through hierarchy. Israel’s election, at its best, runs through commandment—and through the clause that the elect are the first to be judged.
Israel Zangwill: a chosen people is a choosing people. The nations were offered the teaching. Israel said yes. Not a raffle. A vow.
As children of survivors, we cannot scold grandfather’s protest. A theology that cannot absorb a survivor’s anger is customer service, not Tanakh.
But Ki Tavo will not let protest be the last word. It begins with first fruits: Arami oved avi—my father was a wandering Aramean. Vulnerability first. Gratitude second. Mission third.
Chosen from the nations makes people nervous. Chosen for the nations is what the prophets meant. A kingdom of priests is not a country club, not an empire, and not a monopoly. Let others have their vocations—and let them stop borrowing our corpses for slogans. Israel’s claim is narrower and harder:
We are not chosen because we are better. We are chosen to witness ethical monotheism to the world.
We are chosen to become better than yesterday—and to leave the world slightly less abandoned than we found it.
The rest of humanity is entitled to its vocations. No one is entitled to steal ours.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.