"Choose Another People!"

In the many years since the Holy Bible was cobbled together from the works of numerous theologians, antiquarians, historians, ancient science fiction writers, song writers, poets, dramatists, and others, and all through the many times it was revised by more theologians, translators, copyists, and the like, there is one expression that I would think Jewish people wouldn't be happy about having so permanently engraved in solid granite, and that is the reference to them somewhere in those pages as "the Chosen People."

I know the words express a deep and abiding pride in one's self and in one's group, and that's understandable, but from the very beginning no phrase could have been better calculated to bring about intense resentment among other peoples than the notion that this one group and it alone had been chosen by God to receive most of His attention and His greatest favors,

At first and for a few centuries, matters worked out so as to confine that expression largely to its most obvious and happier meaning, which was that that group had been chosen by God to demonstrate and to spread His word, and this circumstance appeared to be borne out profusely by the fact that, among many other things, the enthusiasts of those "Chosen People" spawned, directly or indirectly, at least three high-octane religions that eventually spread over most of the Mediterranean world and beyond. First they came up with Judaism, and from that Christianity arose, and a little later Islam started growing from what look suspiciously like the same roots. At least there's Abraham, a character who is prominent in the lore of all three theologies, though even more telling is the fact that both Christianity and Islam wasted no time in trying to base themselves in Jerusalem, the city that till then had been mainly the big Jewish hangout, and that caused a lot of heavy jostling that continues to this day despite other places having gotten a lot of play, chiefly Rome for the Christians, Mecca for the Muslims, and eventually New York City for the Jews out on the Diaspora.

But even before Christianity had gotten established, and well before Islam came in, the other deeper, darker events for which the Jews turned out also to have been chosen (provided that they had been chosen by some definite entity at all) began to take place. It appeared that they, more than other groups, had also been selected to go through so much persecution and general hard times that such oppression became the tradition in many otherwise civilized countries, and that horror reached an incredible nadir during the Second World War.

A recent film called "Defiance" illustrates this point with special vividness. It tells the story of Jews in Belarus, a nation that lies in an especially unhappy place to put a country, between Russia and Poland. As the German armies pour into Belarus, on their way to invading and eventually getting totally wasted in the Soviet Union during the War, the Belarus Jews are systematically hunted down and killed or carted away by the Germans, helped along at times by some of the Belarussians. Four brothers escape into the thick forests where they can't be easily followed, and they become the leaders of hundreds of other Jewish refugees, and for the next three years they have to scavenge for food, keep from freezing, and otherwise do all they can to keep from dying in the forests, which they largely succeed in doing though at some cost.

And I was struck by one scene, in which a professor who seems to be standing in for a rabbi delivers a prayer in which several times he asks God, with every atom of sincerity that he possesses, to choose another people to suffer the unending tragedies and crimes against humanity that they've been forced to endure simply because they were Jews.

"Please, choose another people!" he begs in so many words. "We've run out of blood, so please choose another people."

I was surprised. For someone who is not of that persuasion I pay unusual attention to Jewish matters. This must be because they have been so prominent in nearly every field that I thought was worth looking into, with the sole exception of beekeeping -- despite the frequent mentions of milk and honey in the Old Testament, I can't recall them having such a strong presence there, whether it was the actual keeping of bees or the scientific research behind it. Yet I had never heard of that rejection of being chosen being a part of any Jewish prayer, and I would never have expected it to be. Instead I had thought that Jewish people always held on tightly to that special status conferred on them by God, no matter what. And what about the notion that such a prayer was essentially asking for others to suffer those unspeakable disasters? Those were things that one would never wish on anybody, though it's certain that these sufferers had in mind only their oppressors.

In any case the professor's fellow starving applicants in that scene didn't find anything wayward about that request, and later I found that, near the end of a documentary that I had taped years ago, called "From Nuremberg to Nuremberg," survivors of the death camps and the German obliteration of the Warsaw ghetto are shown making that same earnest, desperate request of the Power Above. "Please God, choose another people!"

Maybe that was where the makers of "Defiance" got the idea. But that must be one main reason why not only Jews but also many other people are especially fond of migrating to the U.S. There they indeed have found their traditional fears lessened considerably by the presence in that New World of another group that seems to have been chosen instead to endure the chronic and traditional hard times, and, to greater or lesser degrees, that had been the situation for hundreds of years already, though those people are not of German, Russian, or similar origins. Instead they are the descendants of the slaves brought over from Africa.

Still, to make things even more secure for the formerly persecuted and newly arrived, those prayers have been answered with special generosity in the U.S. because in it live at least three other groups, though most likely more, that have also borne that unholy "chosen" status, at one time or another.