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CHAPTER XIX CULTURAL NATIONALISM AS THE CALL OF THE SPIRIT
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CHAPTER XIX CULTURAL NATIONALISM AS THE CALL OF THE SPIRIT The need of reinterpreting the doctrine concerning Israel as the elect of God-The mission idea advocated by Reformism a wrong reinterpretation-Why the Jews regarded themselves the only true nation-The Jews' way of validating nationhoodThe level of self-consciousness attained by Jewish nationhood. OF the conscious factors which formerly contributed to the survival of the Jews in the face of systematic persecution and oppres· sion, first place is undoubtedly to be assigned to the belief that they were the special object of divine providence, a belief held alike by the sophisticated and the naive. The Jews could never have displayed such power of endurance had they not been fortified by the doctrine of election. To assume that it is possible for the Jews to maintain their nationhood at the present time without believing that there is something in it of universal significance is to reckon without human nature. Jewish nationali~ts, who contend that the sense of nationhood requires no justification in any universal purpose, are correct only as far as the challenging outsider is concerned. To be sure, one cannot change one's grandfather, but one's belief does affect one's grandchildren. If they are to be born into a Jewish nation, that nationhood must constitute a high moral asset. Jews must therefore find a meaning in their status as a nation, or, fail· ing this, must construct one that will justify the effort and struggle involved in upholding that status. Such a meaning would be the equivalent of the traditional belief in Israel's divine election, and, therefore, the functional revaluation of that belief.' It is the purpose of what follows to establish this point. The Reformists have proposed an equivalent for the traditional doctrine of election. By maintaining that the Jews, as a race, have a genius for religion and are therefore entrusted with the mission of upholding the cause of true religion, the Reformists believe they 253 254 JUDAISM AS A CIVILIZATION have saved the doctrine of election from obsolescence. But the trouble with the mission idea is that it has not gone far enough in the process of revaluation. It has stopped midway between the theurgic or semi-anthropomorphic conception of God's choice of Israel as his people and the humanistic conception of groups and individuals living with a sense of purpose. Morris Joseph, for example , believes that he has entirely rationalized the traditional belief in divine election when he says: "It is in no arrogant temper that we claim to be the chosen people. We thereby affirm, not that we are better than others, but that we ought to be better."· He is apparently unconscious of the presumption implied in assuming that "we ought to be better" than others. We ought to be better than we are. But to say that we ought to be better than. others implies that we regard ourselves as being inherently superior to them. Such notions may have been tenable in the pre-enlightenment outlook. but today seem obsolete or arrogant. Likewise, the doctrine that the Jews had the task of making God known to the nations was relevant only at a time when the Jews could claim that they alone had received supernatural revelation, and that they alone had been granted an infallible code of laws. As long as they were so minded they had good reason to set up their claims against the claims of other nations. "To make God known" has the ring of an authentic mission that seeks to proclaim a supernatural revelation as an historic event. To an historic event, all can serve as witness, men, women and children, regardless of their intellectual development. But when the task of making God known depends not upon the affirmation of the historicity, validity and superiority of a specific supernatural revelation, but upon a mode of spiritual life that is calculated to reveal the reality of God in the world, or the meaning of God in human experience, then the mission idea is in no sense a revaluation of the doctrine of Israel's divine election. That task can be fulfilled by anyone, Jew or Gentile, so long as he lives up to that high standard. The career of Israel viewed as a manifestation of the divine in the world may, no doubt, act as an incentive to living an exemplary life. But that career as a past event is the spiritual heritage...