Q and A with Liel Leibovitz

Michael Orbach: How did the book come about?

Liel Leibovitz: Todd [Gitlin], my professor at Columbia University, and I started talking about this book two years ago. We began to talk about the political situation and what should be done. One of the things that we kept coming back to was this idea of being “chosen.” We wrote an eight page book proposal that said we should put an end to this wild and dangerous idea, and that we should essentially tell Jews in America and in Israel, as well as Americans in general, to disabuse themselves of this heady, potent, and very bad idea. Then we started studying. [Laughter]

We started reading the Bible, the Mishna, Rav Kook — all these sources and scholars — and we understood that the idea of chosenness is so profound to the being and essence of the Jewish people that we cannot wish it away. It is there in our foundation and in our fundament. And, very far from being a chauvinistic and jingoistic concept that says we are better than everyone else, it is actually an invitation to a terrible and awesome responsibility. It is not a divine mandate; it is a burden. It is a deep commitment to justice and compassion and progress, which has, I think, both plagued the Jews and also propelled them, and the State of Israel, to immense heights. I fell in love with this idea, and fell in love with the logic that propelled it. At the height of the Biblical narrative, G-d comes and says, you will be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The Israelites—and us, their progeny— are left to wonder: why are we chosen? Chosen to do what? Can we ever be unchosen? You realize as you get deeper and deeper into the text that the ambiguity is the point, that we are left wondering what it means, and that this consistent questioning drives us to be better, to be more just, to be more G-dly. I think that is a profoundly inspiring logic, and it has changed the way I feel and the way I think.

MO: What is the central thesis of the book?

LL: The central thesis of the book is whether or not you're comfortable with this idea of choseness, Israelis, Jews, and Americans cannot escape the notion that belief in divine election is the foundational spiritual, political, and theological basis for the creation of both the Jewish people and the American republic. Ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. What we need to do is to look deep into it, into our own traditions, and understand that chosenness can be interpreted as a divine mandate — to go out and conquer and do as you wish with blatant disregard for the rest of the world, which has sometimes been the case with America and Israel — or it can be seen as a sense of responsibility, which has compelled Americans and Israelis to moments of sterling clarity and to shining their light on a benighted world. It's our responsibility to find our own meaningful path, to grapple with this idea and to let it inspire us.

MO: How do you think this affects Israel and America?

LL: I look at Israel, where I was born and where I lived for most of my life, and I see a county in a quagmire. On the one hand, the majority of Israelis don't subscribe to the theocratic, zealous, territorially obsessed ideas of a slim minority of the population. On the other hand, the majority of Israelis do not subscribe to the opposite extreme. The majority of Israelis want Israel to be a Jewish state, they don't want a plain Western democracy, they don’t want the so-called One-State solution. They want a particularly Jewish state, and therefore they're caught in the middle between these two opposing, very vocal, and very vivid ideologies. What they lack is a way out.

The way out, I think, is the way further in. If Israel wants to be a Jewish State, let it be a Jewish State, let it look at what makes Judaism the majestic religion that it is. At the heart of it lies this strange and powerful notion of chosenness, and Israelis should ask what this means. Instead of being uncomfortable with it, they should wrestle with it. We should see how it plays itself out in the concrete and earthly realm. One of our readings of this theory of chosenness begins with the question of why G-d chose the Jews — a people, as Moses reminds us again and again, that are the least of the nations and a stiff-necked people. In modern parlance, it means they're nothing to write home about, but they're chosen and they’re directed to a particular land to start a nation state. The reason is that a chosen people is only inspiring to the rest of the world if it operates in the real world. If they can have a modern state, and if they can show that their modern state is exemplary, the rest of the world would pay attention. In many ways, Israel does that: It has an immense, high-tech economy that is the fruit of genius, and a tremendous army born out of necessity. But, in order to survive and thrive, Israel also has to be, or be more of, a moral empire, and show the rest of the world that that morality we introduced to history after Sinai is still very much on top of our priority list.

That obviously means making a lot of decisions that are very painful, but at the heart of this divine election is the understanding that you're not chosen for pleasures. You're chosen for duty, and you have to do what you have to do, and it's going to be very costly. It's the exact same thing for America. Perceiving ourselves as a chosen nation means enacting many policies that are incredibly burdensome yet we have no choice but to undertake. If America wants to believe it was chosen, it has to act the part, often going off to war in distant shores to secure democracy and liberty at a great cost, financially and physically. That is part of the deal.