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From Election to Mission to Rejection: The Modern Divide

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From Election to Mission to Rejection: The Modern Divide

Modern Judaism's movements have not so much denied the biblical texts on Israel's election as argued over what they can still mean. Orthodox Judaism holds chosenness in essentially its classical form: God set Israel apart at Sinai for the Torah and its commandments, a particular relationship not extended to the nations in the same way, though classical sources hold that a righteous gentile has a share in the world to come regardless.

Reform Judaism reworked rather than discarded the doctrine. Its 1999 Statement of Principles affirms that the people of Israel is bound to God by covenant, calling Jews to religious and ethical responsibilities as God's partner and witness, language that keeps the idea of a distinctive vocation while dropping the exclusivist edge that had troubled the movement since the nineteenth century. The earlier 1885 Pittsburgh Platform had already reframed Israel's mission in universalist, ethical terms, as service to humanity's monotheistic future rather than as unearned privilege.

Reconstructionist Judaism, alone among the major movements, rejects the doctrine by name. Mordecai Kaplan argued in Judaism as a Civilization that chosenness was theologically indefensible, since it implies either arbitrary divine favoritism or an unprovable claim to superior virtue, and practically corrosive to relations with other peoples in a pluralist democracy. Reconstructionist liturgy accordingly rewrote the traditional blessing over the Torah, replacing language of having been chosen from among all peoples with wording honoring Israel's calling to service without asserting exclusive election, one of Kaplan's most consequential and most contested liturgical changes.

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