God's first love: Michael Wyschogrod on Israel's election

Christian Century, July 27, 2004 by Kendall Soulen

I FIRST READ Michael Wyschogrod when I was in graduate school. The experience was electrifying. As I sat in the library finishing his essay "Israel, the Church, and Election," I remember being overcome by an almost physical sense of discovery, as though I had bumped into a hitherto invisible rock. What I had just read was undoubtedly the most unapologetic statement of Jewish faith I had ever encountered. Yet instantly I knew that Wyschogrod had helped me to see something in Paul that his Christian commentators had not. It was the theological relevance of the distinction between gentile and Jew.

Of course, the distinction was not wholly unfamiliar to me; far from it. I was accustomed to writers who treated the distinction as a useful bit of historical, sociological or religious description. Above all, I was familiar with the traditional Christian view that held that since Christ's coming the distinction between Jew and gentile had lost whatever theological significance it may once have had. This, after all, was Paul's own view, at least according to his commentators.

But Wyschogrod treated the difference differently. For Wyschogrod, the distinction was the indelible mark of an irrevocable divine choice: God's choice to enter history as the God of Israel. The distinction therefore mattered not only in the past, but also in the present and future. What is more, Wyschogrod treated the distinction as something that mattered not just to Jews, but also to Christians. He addressed Christians not merely as Christians but quite specifically as gentile Christians. With a shock of discovery, I realized that in this respect Wyschogrod was closer to Paul than were his Christian interpreters.

Born in Berlin in 1928, Wyschogrod emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1939. He grew up in Brooklyn, where he received a Talmudic education at Orthodox Jewish schools. After studying at the City College of New York and Columbia University, be had a distinguished career as a professor of philosophy at several colleges in New York and at the University of Houston, a post he retired from in 2002.

Wyschogrod is best known for his book The Body of Faith, a comprehensive interpretation of Judaism. But over the years his primary mode of literary activity has been the short essay, of which he has published several score. Whatever the topic at hand, Wyschogrod's thought orbits a single center of gravity: God's free yet irrevocable love for the people Israel, and in connection with Israel, for the world as a whole.

A major theme for Wyschogrod is that God's election of Israel is based-solely on God's unalterable love and hence cannot be abrogated from the human side. "Now it is the proclamation of biblical faith that God chose this people and loves it as no other, unto the end of time."

God did not choose Israel because it was superior in any way to other peoples; indeed, in some respects it may even possess slightly more negative characteristics than other groups. Nor is God's election conditional upon Israel's obedience to the commands that God imposes on Israel as the expression of God's will for Israel's conduct. God's election brings with it God's command and the threat of severe punishment should Israel fail to live up to its election. Yet in spite of the fact that the Jewish people have struggled endlessly against their election, with the most disastrous consequences for themselves and for the rest of humankind, the divine election remains unaffected because it is an unconditional one, based solely on God's love. Ultimately, God's anger is a passing phase that can only temporarily obscure God's overwhelming love for Israel. Israel can be confident of its election and of God's special love for it amid all the families of the earth.

BUT THESE affirmations lead to difficult questions. Why should God be a God of election at all? Why should God love one people as no other? Wyschogrod's understanding of God's freedom prohibits him from arguing that God had to be a God of election, since this could be shown only by submitting God to a higher principle of justice or rationality. Yet it is possible, as a way of expressing praise, to seek reasons for what God has done, in order to display God's will as the basis for human gratitude.

Wyschogrod notes that it is common to distinguish between two kinds of love, agape and eros. Agape is charity in the purest sense, without superiority or condescension, while eros is sensual love, in which desire and jealousy are possible. The distinction corresponds to some degree to that between, soul and body. Agape is disinterested and impartial, without regard to persons, while eros is interested love, concerned with this person rather than that and desirous of the body of the other. Wyschogrod notes that God's love for the human creature is usually said to resemble agape rather than eros. As agape, God's love cannot exclude.

For Wyschogrod, this account of agape is doubly suspect. It is untrue to the human condition because it overlooks the fact that genuine human charity can be truly directed to particular persons only when it concerns itself with their particular identities.