God Chose Israel and Kept Choosing, Every Day

Most people think the idea of Jewish chosenness is simple: God picked a people, made a covenant, and that was that. The actual texts say something far more complicated. Chosenness, according to the rabbis of the Midrash Aggadah, was not a permanent status. It was a relationship that had to be earned forward, generation by generation, through something the Torah calls love.

Sifrei Devarim, a tannaitic midrash on Deuteronomy compiled around the third century CE, wrestles with a verse that most readers pass right over: "He also loved the peoples." Does that mean equally? Does God love all nations the same way God loves Israel? The text does not soften its answer. The Holy One did not portion out love to the nations of the world the way He portioned it out to Israel. That is not a comfortable thing to sit with. The rabbis who preserved it were not trying to be comfortable. They were trying to be honest about what the covenant actually claimed.

But the same collection, in Sifrei Devarim 344, immediately complicates that statement with a story. A monarchy, the text does not say which, sends two commissioners on a secret mission: pretend to study Torah, learn what you can, report back. What they find disturbs them. The Torah is not a collection of laws designed to benefit the nation that holds it. It is something given from outside any nation's interest. Something that makes demands on the people who carry it. They study Scripture, Mishnah, Midrash, Halakhah, Aggadah, the whole tradition. They come away impressed, even awed, then troubled by one thing: a passage that seemed to extend different ethical standards to different peoples. They committed to returning home and not reporting that detail. But the fact that they noticed it, that they saw the tension and named it. is itself part of what the text preserves.

There is a harder question lurking in these sources. If Israel was chosen, what happened when Israel behaved in ways that made the choice look like a mistake? Devarim Rabbah, the great homiletical commentary on Deuteronomy, preserves a tradition from Rabbi Elazar that is almost unbearable to read. He describes a moment when the Israelites did not merely sin. They calculated. They sat together and determined which forbidden relationship carried the most severe prohibition, and they pursued it deliberately, specifically to provoke God. Not out of weakness or passion, but out of a cold arithmetic of transgression. The verse from Ezekiel they cite, (Ezekiel 22:11), uses a word the rabbis read as "with forethought." The sin was premeditated. The desecration was intentional.

Rabbi Yishmael presses further: the verse in Amos (2:7) says a man and his father share the same woman "in order to profane My holy name." Not as a side effect. Not out of lust. The profanation was the goal. The rabbis are preserving a tradition in which Israel reached a point of such deliberate estrangement that the choice itself seemed to be repudiation. Rabbi Levi adds the long historical view: Israel was not exiled until seven dynasties of wicked kings had embedded corruption into the structure of political life. This was not one man's failure. It was generational drift, slow and calculated, until the whole edifice gave way.

The rabbis who preserved that tradition were not enemies of Israel. They were the opposite. They believed that honest reckoning with Israel's failures was itself an act of love. The same Sifrei Devarim that insists on God's particular love for Israel also insists that the commandments do not evaporate when Israel leaves its land. The obligation goes with the person. It crosses borders. It survives exile. That is not the mark of a casual relationship. It is the mark of one that has been internalized so deeply it cannot be left behind.

What emerges from holding these three traditions together is something the word "chosenness" almost cannot contain. The rabbis are not describing a privilege. They are describing a weight. God chose a people, and that people kept failing, kept being called back, kept carrying commandments across deserts and exiles that had no legal obligation to enforce them. The Midrash does not resolve the tension between divine favor and human failure. It lives inside that tension. It reads like a long argument between God and Israel over whether the original decision still stands.

According to these texts, it does. Not because Israel deserved it. Because the alternative was a world with no one carrying the covenant at all.

The commissioners who studied Torah and walked away impressed had no personal stake in the covenant. They came as strangers and left as strangers. But they left understanding something. The Torah was not a national advantage. It was a demanding and beautiful thing that a particular people had agreed to carry. The Sifrei Devarim kept their testimony alongside the theology, which suggests the rabbis thought both mattered.