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The Lessons of Chosenness in America ~Wl!E HAVE NOW traced two generations of American WI Jewry's public conversation about the meaning of its chosenness. Recalling R. W. B. Lewis's comment that "every culture seems, as it advances toward maturity, to produce its own determining debate over the ideas that preoccupy it."! we have argued that chosenness preoccupied American Jewish thinkers because it was essential to their maturing definition of who and what American Jews were. They would not be mere Americans--but, as part of the chosen people, would somehow stand apart. Yet they would be Americans-and, if chosenness involved more exclusivity, a more demanding covenant, or a more avowedly elitist mission than was compatible with being Americans, then chosenness would have to be reinterpreted. So it was. After a close reading of the various reinterpretations of chosenness proposed over the past fifty years, these generalizations should carry a richness of reference which they did not have at the outset. In conclusion, I would like to reflect on two matters: first, on what American jewry's debate on chosenness can teach us about the ways in which Jewish-or any religious-tradition can be appropriated in America today; and, secondly, on whether the Jewish reinterpretation of election could have worked out any differently, either in its substance or its (ideological) form, given the constraints under which the Jewish thinkers labored. The debate on chosenness, we recall, occurred within a fairly narrow range of opinion defined by the idea's traditional meanings on the one hand and the situation of the community on the other; individual thinkers, moreover, generally adopted positions in keeping with the course charted by their respective movements. Fifty years of debate resulted in only four or five essentially different positions. These 173 174 • CONCLUSION merit brief review before we proceed to examine what the debate as a whole can teach us. Reform, having abrogated the authority of the mitzvot, found in "mission" a rhetoric of activity which mythologized and legitimated a relatively contentless Judaism. However, mission itself proved too elitist a rhetoric in egalitarian America, and so some in the movement fell back in the second generation on the original substance to which the rhetoric had been intended to move its audience-universalist ethics. Then, recoiling from the loss of meaning to Jewish identification implied by such a completely universalist commitment, the movement eventually found its way back to the symbol of chosenness and the qualified affirmation of particularity. Neither Reform's beliefs nor its level of prescribed observance were compatible with the doctrine of chosenness traditionally understood. An ideology which invoked election despite the lack of prerequisites to its affirmation was called in to fill the gap. Mordecai Kaplan, having found chosenness incompatible with the integration of the Jews to America, and having denied the existence of a "choosing" God in his "trans-naturalist" theology, staked out his own position vis-a-vis Reform by refusing to reinterpret the idea of election or to accept it as a symbol. Instead he renounced it at every opportunity. Religion in his Durkheimian perspective had become ideology, the content of which was to be determined by functional criteria. These could be relatively more noble (e.g., advocating the "God-idea" best suited to the promotion of morality) or, as we have seen, rather less so (e.g., the identification of the contemporary Jew's only meaningful vocation with "Reconstructionism: A Program.") Having taught American Jewry to see the tenets of faith as symbols which expressed meanings inaccessible in propositional form, and having reinterpreted most of the tradition symbolically , Kaplan refused to accept chosenness in those terms. He did so in part because, as he stated clearly in Judaism asa Civilization, the very need for Reconstructionism vanished if Israel's chosenness was affirmed. Conservatives, who generally avoided divisive issues of substance which might have threatened their fragile consensus of the center, had even more reason to avoid a clear stance on chosenness. For chosenness could not be interpreted unless one also clarified one's position on God, revelation, and Torah. These issues lay at the heart of the movement's raison d'etre and were potentially most demonstrative of the split between the "elite" of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the congregational "folk." Conservatives meant to be the Orthodox of twentiethcentury America: continuous with the tradition, obligated to obey its halakhah, yet adaptive to the changed environment of modernity. To say, with the Orthodox, "we are...

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