Chosen Peoples | Page 5

of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to understand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's, if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are rarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own individual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesus looked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the right hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the balance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of idealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate serves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When he brought the Roman ensigns with C?sar's effigies to Jerusalem, the Jews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defiling deification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiers and menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester and went home. "But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their necks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed." And Pilate, touched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how the Jews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him.
"God's witnesses," "a light of the nations," "a suffering servant," "a kingdom of priests"--the old Testament metaphors for Israel's mission are as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur are unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passion with poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of Isaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of the Bible we owe to America.)
Behold My servant whom I uphold; Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth; I have put My spirit upon him, He shall make the right to go forth to the nations: He shall not fail or be crushed Till he have set the right on the earth, And the isles shall wait for his teaching. Thus saith God the LORD, He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth, He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it, He that giveth bread unto the people upon it, And spirit to them that walk therein: I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, And have taken hold of thy hand, And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, For a light of the nations; To open the blind eyes, To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.
Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all civilization. "Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream." "Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall there be war any more."
Nor does this mission march always with the pageantry of external triumph. "Despised and forsaken of men," Isaiah paints Israel. "Yet he bore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors ... with his stripes we were healed."
Happily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or Matthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that this ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less understood of the world. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast chosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law." Here is no choice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that "from Zion shall the Law go forth" it is obvious what that servant's task is to be. "What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of Israel," says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love consist? Is it that we have been pampered, cosseted? The contrary. "A Law, and commandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us." Before these were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records, Israel was explicitly informed that only by obedience to them could he enjoy peculiar favour. "Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation." A chosen people is really a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert that the Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israel accepted the yoke.
How far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen People postulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr. Lucien Wolf once urged that "the