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The Chosen
Some years ago I was invited to the Vatican, to the office of an archbishop who sat two doors away from the private apartment of the pope. The conversation went well--so well that the archbishop asked me whether I would want to see the pope. He then added that I would have something in common with His Holiness, because, like him, I was born in Poland. The archbishop presumed that I would be able to communicate with the pope in our native language. I replied that my native language was Yiddish and that I remembered only the little Polish that I had picked up on the street. The archbishop was curious. He wanted to know what Polish I remembered, so I told him. The words that still stuck in my mind, sixty years after I left Poland, were those that were flung at me by the children who chased me down the street screaming "parzhive zhid," "dirty Jew." Suddenly the atmosphere cooled. The archbishop seemed to fear that I might tell the pope the same story--he was right, I would have--so the meeting with the pope never took place.
I did not want to leave the archbishop with the impression that we could not be friends, so I told him another story. At the age of sixteen I was finishing high school in Baltimore and desperately needed a scholarship so that I could go on to college. It was 1937; the Great Depression had not yet lifted, and my parents had no money. It was also a time of the rising power of the Nazis in Germany and ever-increasing anti-Semitism in the United States. With some trepidation, I went to an interview that would decide my future. The interviewer was a professor from Johns Hopkins who had been born in Germany and was clearly very much a Christian. Hetreated me kindly and with a seemingly instinctive understanding of my nervousness. He knew, both from my resume and because I made a point of telling him, that I was the son of the rabbi of the Hasidic community in Baltimore and that I was personally a religious Jew. At the end of the interview the professor told me that he had chosen me for the scholarship. A few days later I got the official notice, so I telephoned the professor's office and asked to see him.
At our second encounter I thanked him profusely and even found a way of saying how deeply moved I was that someone of his background had shown particular concern for a rabbi's son. He did not respond. As I was getting up to leave I assured the professor that I would always be grateful and asked him what I could do to express my gratitude. He answered very quietly and very solemnly, "Young man, one of these days you will be sitting at the other side of the table. When you become the one to make the decisions, remember to help the littlest and the least." At the age of five I had run from Christians, but eleven years later a Christian believer had helped me--because he was a Christian.
The archbishop was comfortable again, and our meeting continued. But I knew that I had upset him because I spoke with a frankness that is uncommon in such encounters. Jews are supposed to be "nice," and here I was telling him that I had escaped a mob of Polish kids who had been taught that I was personally guilty for the death of Christ.
I didn't tell the archbishop how my childhood story ended. I succeeded in outrunning my pursuers (for many centuries Jews have become adept at finding places to hide). When, breathless and trembling, I burst into our house, my mother calmed me down. She told me that it was wrong of these Polish children to want to hurt me because I was different. So I asked her: Why are we different? My mother did not hesitate for one second. We are different, she explained, because God wants us to be. He wants us to behave better than those who try to hurt us. You are different, she added, because your parents expect you to study these holy books--she was pointing to my father's library of sacred Hebrew texts--so that you might know what God expects of Jews and what we expect of ourselves. Still afraid, I headed back to cheder, the traditional Jewish school that had existed for hundreds of years in my native Lubaczow. But I was sure that learning Hebrew, God's own language, was worth running the gauntlet every day.
This personal drama in 1926 reenacted an age-old story. That day, at age five, I learned from my mother what Jews have always known. Their basic emotion is pride, not fear. Affirming Jews cleave to their Jewishness in the conviction that they are the chosen people. This may be a delusion, or at very least an exaggeration, but this is at the very core of their self-image. It has given us the courage, in age after age, to go on and to raise our children within our tradition and community.
What evidence do Jews have to support so outrageous a claim? The best "proof" is that even our enemies believe some version of this assertion. The apostle Paul accepted this truth when he said of the Jews, "God has not rejected the people which he acknowledges of old as his own" (Romans 11:2). Islam is likewise rooted in the belief that God's first revelation was given to the patriarch Abraham and that the ancient Hebrews were God's first messengers. And so most Christian and Muslim theologians would agree that God first addressed the world in the language of the Hebrews.
