The blessings and burdens of being chosen
The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, by Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz.
Simon & Schuster, 2010. $26.00, 250 pp.
In a speech marking the 60th anniversary of Israel’s statehood, President Bush said that Israelis are a “chosen people” who can forever count on American support. To be chosen: a biblical concept, layered with ambiguity, difficult to define. In The Chosen Peoples, this is what American academic Todd Gitlin and Israeli journalist Liel Leibovitz set out to do: to trace the idea of “chosenness” in Israel and the United States, two nations that were born out of this concept.
Tests and Trials
In their telling, America and Israel were chosen in separate but related ways. In Israel, chosenness comes from God and his promise to Abraham. The Jews were not a preexisting group selected by God, but a group that “came to be because they were chosen by God.”
Israelis have seen this not as an unambiguous blessing, but as a double-edged sword, “dependent on the people’s ability to live up to their potential.” For all of their blessings, the Jews would also have to suffer trials, like wandering in the wilderness and the exile to Babylon.
America, on the other hand, took the concept of chosenness and shot it through with irrepressible optimism. While in the Revolutionary period Americans explicitly compared themselves to the ancient Israelites, they eventually developed a kind of civic religion, not explicitly theological, imagining themselves as a prophetic people meant to spread hope and innovation. In contrast with Israel, which grapples with God’s high expectations, the authors argue that America has never seen a crisis severe enough to cause deep doubts about its chosenness.
Choice Words
This may sound like a lot of ground to cover in one book. It is, and yet Gitlin and Leibovitz finish their analysis in less than 200 pages. The result is a brief overview that introduces us to the topic, but never digs deeply into any particular issue. The close relationship between Israel and America, and their fraught relationships with the Palestinians and Native Americans, respectively, receive only a few rushed pages.
This leaves us with more questions than answers. One might infer, for instance, that Gitlin and Leibovitz view the Tea Party as rallying around American chosenness in the face of relative decline, but this topic is never broached. Similarly, we are left to infer Palestinian perspectives on Israeli chosenness from a discussion of Palestinian poetry about Israeli settlers. The authors leave room for inference, but fail to connect the dots themselves.
Primary Sources
However, this is not to say that the book is not extensively researched. The authors display a remarkable depth of knowledge. They engage with foundational expositors of chosenness like John Winthrop and Theodor Herzl, as well as contemporary interpreters of American identity, from Bob Dylan to Drew Faust. But they never expand on any topic enough to illuminate current debates about national chosenness. As a result, readers already well-acquainted with the Judeo-Christian tradition may not gather anything particularly new from this book. But for those puzzled by the religious language that marks modern American and Israeli discourse, The Chosen Peoples will serve as an engaging primer.
Raúl Quintana ’14 is a Staff Writer.