Flabbergasted wrote:jumpy64 wrote:I feel challenged both by its length and its format [...] could you please point me more exactly to the section that deals with the positive, religious understanding of being a "chosen people"?
Heavens, how hard is it to find an entire section intitled "The Chosen People" (pp. 17-18) in a document consisting of 20 page-scans in coffee table book format?
jumpy64 wrote:I also found Huston Smith's biography a bit questionable...
I am fully aware of the usual damning connections attributed to the author, and I am myself quite apprehensive about his championing of entheogens during part of his life, but sometimes it's wise to defer character judgments and allow yourself an open-minded first-hand impression of a writer's mind and style.
I know Flabbergasted is your forum name, but now, after reading the section of Huston Smith's book "The World's Religions" that you suggested (and also the last one titled "Israel"), I must say I'm a bit flabbergasted myself.
I remember you saying, on the first page of this thread, that you were linking to it "for the sake of information, not as an endorsement", so I'm sure you won't take personally what I'm going to say about it. Probably you will even agree with me, having "very little affinity with the 'spiritual economy' of Judaism", as you said.
As I agree with you on the fact that "it is as positive a look on Judaism as one could reasonably demand" (I'm quoting your words again).
Indeed! What the author says about Jews considering themselves "the Chosen People" is very nice and even poetic, but does it have any bearing with what we can observe in reality? I'm transcribing here some passages I have highlighted, with my comments below when needed.
They were chosen to serve, and to suffer the trials that service would often exact.
Of course the author refers to the Jews. And he clearly implies that they were chosen to serve the rest of the world, so that includes the goyim, I guess.
Funny how this conflicts with statements in the Talmud like the following: "Even though God created the non-Jew, they are still animals in human form. It is not becoming for a Jew to be served by an animal. Therefore he will be served by animals in human form." - Midrasch Talpioth, p. 255, Warsaw 1855
Maybe Smith, who's not a Jew, doesn't know much about the Talmud, since he defines it as just “a vast compendium of history, law, folklore, and commentary that is the basis of post-biblical Judaism”.
Anyway, among the comments the author makes about the religious group he's talking about, I couldn't find one that was less than flattering. They might be truthful, I don't know, but maybe the author should have substantiated them with at least a few examples.
Like when he says that "their election imposed on them a far more demanding morality than was exacted of their peers", that they had to "shoulder a suffering that would otherwise have had to be distributed more widely", or that "they were singled out for a special role in the redemption of the world".
Another quote from Smith's section on "The Chosen People":
Through the three thousand years that have followed [their liberation from slavery] they have continued their existence in the face of unbelievable odds and adversity, and have contributed to civilization out of all proportion to their numbers. Even objective assessment must grant that the Jews have been unique. Their rise as much as their continuance, historians generally agree, is rationally inexplicable.
If that is the case, there are two possibilities. Either the credit belongs to the Jews themselves, or it belongs to God. Given this alternative, the Jews instinctively turned the credit Godward.
And then Smith continues:
One of the striking features of this people has been their persistent refusal to see anything innately special about themselves as human beings. So the specialness of the Jewish experience must have derived from God.
Well, if that was really the case, they must have taken it on board at a certain point, because it can't be said that we don't hear about the specialness of Jews very often. The Talmud is all about Jewish superiority, and even the Bible goes a bit in that direction, it seems. Maybe it's just God who's insisting...
Then Smith goes on, unabashed
Choseness, a concept that appears at first to be arrogant, turns out to be the humblest interpretation the Jews could give to the facts of their origin, survival, and exceptional contributions to civilization.
Today Jewish opinion is divided on the doctrine of the election. Some Jews believe that it has outgrown whatever usefulness or objective validity it may have had in Biblical times. Other Jews believe that until the world’s redemption is complete, God continues to need people who are set apart; peculiar in the sense of being God’s task force in history.
I must say I find it a bit difficult to see clearly the contribution of this particular "God's task force" in the redemption of the world, but maybe it's just me, I don't know.
Anyway, Smith proceeds to the following section on "Israel" by saying that
the 20th century has also brought two agonizing problems for the Jews. The first relates to the Holocaust. What meaning can the concept of a Chosen People have in the face of a God who permitted this enormity? The other problem relates to the idealistic argument for the state of Israel that was mentioned. Having all but scripted the ideals of freedom and justice for Western civilization if not for the entire world, Jews now find themselves withholding these rights – forced for security reasons to withhold them, many Jews believe – from Palestinians whose territory they occupy as a result of the 1967 war.
Again, maybe it's just me, but doesn't it sound as a poetic but not very realistic justification of Jewish policies in the "Occupied Territories"?
Here's Smith's conclusion:
Without presuming to answer these problems, we can appreciate the burdens they place on the conscience of this exceptionally conscientious people. Facing their gravity, they take courage in the fact that at least now they are politically free to confront their problems. As the Star of David waves over their spiritual homeland, the dominant thought in the minds of the Jews is: Am Yisrael chai, Israel lives! How wonderful to be living when all this is happening.
Fade out music.Violins, I presume.