SAPIR Journal invited me to write this article at the end of March, 2025, shortly after much of the world blamed Israel for breaking the Gaza ceasefire and for unleashing one of the deadliest-ever bombing campaigns on the Strip. Hardly a propitious time to write about Israel’s chosenness! Yet, without fully grasping my argument, much less anticipating my conclusion, I accepted the assignment, and got to work.

I was fully prepared to find that Israel was not, in fact, chosen and might just represent the opposite–a nation that had failed to fulfill its Biblical mandate as the am sigula. Yet, in the course of researching, wrestling, and meditating on the topic, I discovered that Israel is not only the chosen state but why, how, and for what ends it has been chosen.

Call it my silent and deeply introspective revelation.

The article was completed on time for SAPIR’s June issue, but just then the war entered yet another, utterly anticipated, phase. As IDF jets blasted Iranian military and nuclear facilities, achieving one of modern history’s most impressive military victories without losing a single plane, I realized that my article remained unfinished. Israel was more chosen than even I had concluded. SAPIR’s editors kindly let me add a paragraph.

The issue finally appeared last week, precisely at the time when Israel’s feat in the skies over Iran was obscured by the disastrously deteriorating situation in Gaza and preparations for a new and likely more devastating Israeli offensive. Seemingly incapable or unwilling to defend itself against escalating libels, Israel stood accused of committing genocide and pursuing a policy of deliberate mass starvation.

The Jewish people, the article points out, have long regarded their demonization as yet another sign of our chosenness. Today’s slanders, many of which have already proven to be baseless, are no exception. That Israel has made egregious errors in Gaza is indisputable, but not the charge that it purposely made them to annihilate an entire people.

For all its setbacks, the war in Gaza continues to demonstrate how a fundamentally good and life-loving society can battle, even under the most hellish conditions, pure evil. Irrespective of the vicissitudes of this war, Israel remains unassailably chosen.

SAPIR Journal, August 10, 2025

Is Israel the chosen state? Syllogistically speaking, it must be. If we Jews are the chosen people and the Land of Israel is the chosen land, then the people who dwell in that land, and the Jewish state established on it, must also be chosen. But chosen how, one must still ask, and for what? Can a country founded largely on secular and universalist principles lay claim to a uniqueness grounded in spiritual, particularist ideals? Is Israel, a country widely accused of the darkest transgressions — racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide — chosen only to be doomed?

As a divinely bestowed status, chosenness is introduced in the Book of Exodus 19:5, “Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples.” The Children of Israel receive this declaration just prior to receiving the Ten Commandments. The notion reappears in Deuteronomy 7:6–8 and 14:2. But in all these cases, the term chosen people would be a mistranslation of the Hebrew am sigula, “a treasured people.” And even that is conditional; Israel must accept and keep the law. While God chooses Israel — so the Talmud teaches us — Israel chooses God.

With the exception of a brief reference in Amos, chosenness all but disappears from most of the biblical narrative. The Jews are depicted as just another Mediterranean people, no better, and sometimes worse, than any other. Their sole distinction is their special relationship with God and their continued obligation to His law. Not until the post–Second Temple exilic period does chosenness resurface as a defining Jewish characteristic. It does so by turning on its head the classic Christian view of Jewish suffering as proof of the loss of God’s love. On the contrary, the rabbis argue, the Jews’ suffering is a sign of their chosenness. “Just as the olive only produces oil after being crushed,” the tractate Sanhedrin (101a) tells us, “so, too, Israel fulfills its purpose through suffering.”

Suffering as the source of chosenness has a higher, eschatological, purpose. The Jews have been chosen to be a “light unto nations” (Exodus 19:6) and to spread monotheism, such that “all peoples on Earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Commentators from Rashi and Maimonides to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch agreed: Chosenness does not bestow a superior or privileged status on the Jews, but rather a profound moral and spiritual responsibility. Chosenness is the Jews’ duty to humanity.

Israel’s chosenness had great meaning for medieval and pre-modern Jews. It peppered their liturgy from the Aleinu to the Kaddish prayer to the benediction for reading the Torah. But for Zionism, emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, chosenness was not necessarily a blessing, but a challenge.

For many of its secular pioneers, Zionism was a revolt against chosenness. It was an attempt to become a nation like every other. Rooted in the suffering caused by statelessness, chosenness was an affliction that only Zionism could cure. For all their differences, Herzl and Jabotinsky similarly dreamed of creating a modern, largely secular, liberal Jewish state, a normal state like the many others that dotted the map, the France or Austria of the Middle East.

Yet Zionism’s normalizing mission, its attempt to extricate Jewish peoplehood from chosenness, was only partially successful. Many Jews refused to abandon their religious beliefs and, together with Christian Zionists, viewed the rebirth of Jewish statehood in the biblical homeland as a millenarian event. That state would be, in the words of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.” Celebrating its creation was an article of faith.

Despite these dissenters and their religiosity, secular Zionism managed to establish a state that in many ways did resemble France. The music, the museums, the universities and research centers, the food — all were appurtenances of normalcy. Yet the Jewish impulse to chosenness, even among those who eschewed it, proved irrepressible. No sooner had the state come into being, as it grappled with seemingly insurmountable economic and security challenges, than it dispatched agricultural delegations to Africa and South Asia. The Foreign Ministry opened a special department, Mashav, for aiding developing countries. The IDF deployed rescue missions to disaster-struck areas abroad. While these humanitarian initiatives also brought diplomatic advantages to a small and embattled state, they served as evidence of Israel’s moral preeminence — implicitly, its chosenness.

Not surprisingly, then, Israelis are ambivalent about their chosenness. We want our soldiers to be judged by the same standards applied to others while at the same time insisting that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. We strive for normal ties with foreign nations, but with the United States, where tens of millions still believe in Israel’s chosenness, we claim a special relationship. Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, the majority of Israelis agree, but that same majority takes pride in the assistance we render to other nations in need. We are Israel First and tikkun olam all at once.

Much of the world, by contrast, shows no such ambivalence about choosing Israel. The singling out of Israel by the United Nations and other international bodies, the media’s malign obsession with the Jewish state, and the transformation of elite universities into hotbeds of anti-Zionism — all suggest that Israel is, in some obverse way, special. Israel’s detractors today see it much as the medieval church regarded Jews, as chosen not for admiration but for contempt. Those who denounce it as a “white settler state” and call for its destruction differ little from those who, centuries ago, considered Jews to be the spawn of Satan and condemned us to expulsion or death. Today’s anti-Zionists, much like the Jew-haters of the past, adduce our wholesale demonization as proof of our inherent wickedness. After all, those countless keffiyeh-clad college students chanting “from the river to the sea” can’t be all wrong.