(RNS) — As antisemitism, Zionism and Judaism continue making daily headlines, I frequently find myself in conversations about what it means to be Jewish. The conflict in Gaza has generated a slurry of confusion about Judaism, anti-Judaism, Zionism and anti-Zionism and led to utter chaos with regard to perceptions of Jews, by Jews and by others. Jews are being pressed to define who we are, how we belong and what responsibilities we carry.
The holiday of Rosh Hashana offers a vital place to begin. Other Jewish holidays focus on ancient Israelite history; Rosh Hashana is universal. It celebrates the creation of the universe and humanity. Its prayers describe God as the judge of all life, not only of Jews. The Jewish story is, it tells us, a story about the whole world.
This emphasis on the universal is especially important as much of Jewish discourse in America has become consumed by ethnonationalism. Jewish nationalism (or Zionism) is said by some to be inseparable from Judaism itself. Others, myself included, look to the kind of Jewish universalism found in Rosh Hashana as a call to resist nationalism’s exclusionary and often supremacist logic.
This debate itself is rooted in rich theological and historical questions: What does it mean for Jews to be “chosen,” and how did the modern concept of “Jewish peoplehood” arise from that idea?
The notion of Jews as “chosen” by God has been interpreted over the centuries as divine favoritism, as a burden, as an aspirational motivation to model justice. Accordingly, Jews have celebrated chosenness as a gift or discarded it as an outdated relic that invited resentment and arrogance. But at its core, chosenness has been about covenant. Jewish teachings and practices, or Torah, provided tools to connect to the divine and humanity’s highest aspirations. Jews, born or by choice, were “chosen” by choosing to take on the commitments of Torah.
In mid-20th-century America, a new idea of “Jewish peoplehood” was popularized by Rabbis Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and Stephen S. Wise, a major shaper of Reform Judaism. This described Jews as an ethnic collective, and in so doing it adopted the ideas of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ American Zionism. In a 1915 speech, Brandeis said:
A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state. … Every Irish American who contributed towards advancing home rule (in Ireland) was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.
The new language of peoplehood proved enormously successful. It embodied Brandeis’ goal of making Jewish difference legible to the American mainstream as a European-style national people with a singular history, language and land. This was attractive in an era when European Jewish immigrants sought to integrate into white ethnic America, while strengthening ideological ties to the emerging state of Israel.
But what was actually on offer was a chosenness remodeled into ethnonational exceptionalism. Kaplan’s basic premise was, as he wrote in his 1955 book, “A New Zionism,” rooted in the “persistence in the Gentile consciousness of Jews as an identifiable group.” The problem with this ideology is that it smuggled into the very heart of Jewish identity a belief central to the most virulent antisemitic views, that Jews are united as a singular, global group with shared nationalist goals. It also flattened the immense diversity of Jewish cultures into a nationalist identity consistent with European, generally Ashkenazi, Judaism.
Building on this premise, Kaplan reframed Judaism as “a non-creedal religious civilization, centered in loyalty to the body of the Jewish People throughout the world.” In “The Religion of Ethical Nationhood,” written in 1970, he made this more explicit: “Judaism … has pioneered in adumbrating man’s potential in achieving that collective religious experience which can motivate men and nations to achieve ethical nationhood.”
“Peoplehood” became a powerful framework. It not only gave American Jews a sense of unity but provided a narrative linking the Holocaust to the state of Israel: Jews were a people nearly destroyed, now restored in their land. It dovetailed neatly with American exceptionalism, casting the U.S. as the rescuer of Jews and the guarantor of Israel, and Israel as the unifying thread linking all Jews. Israel became the necessary “homeland for the Jews,” and support for Israel became the litmus test of belonging. Those who dissent are often accused of betraying “the Jewish People.”
But this framework distorts Jewish history. For most of Jewish existence, there was no unified “Jewish People.” Jews have lived and thrived heterogeneously in places as widespread as Aleppo, Mtskheta, Addis Ababa, Baghdad, Sanaa and Cochin, each with distinct practices, customs and self-understandings. They often disagreed sharply with one another, and rarely imagined themselves a single, homogeneous nation.
A man blows a shofar, a ram’s horn, marking Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, overlooking the port of Haifa, Israel, Oct. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
Instead of nationalism, Jewish collectivity was mythopoetic: a spiritual understanding of covenant via Torah, which expressed itself in many differing, and often mutually exclusive, forms throughout the world.
Rosh Hashana reminds us of this historical reality. On this holiday, Jews do not celebrate the birth of a single people, but the creation of the world. The image is expansive: Every creature passes before the Creator, every being is judged, every life matters.
That vision undercuts the narrowness of a falsely homogenizing peoplehood. It reminds us that the Jewish story is bound up with the story of all humanity — as Jews have dwelled among all humanity. Torah is a wisdom tradition carried in Jewish form and meant to be tested, adapted, shared and lived out in relationship with the rest of the world.
Jewish texts echo this universalism. Classical rabbinic midrash teaches that the Torah was offered to all nations. The medieval rabbinic giant Maimonides wrote to a convert that Abraham’s lineage is spiritual, not genetic. These perspectives affirm what Rosh Hashana proclaims: that Jewish distinctiveness is real, insofar as it complements the distinctiveness of each facet of the whole of humanity.
In her 1991 feminist classic “Standing Again at Sinai,” Judith Plaskow critiques the patriarchal notion of chosenness and sees Jewish identity as one thread in a wider tapestry. Within the Jewish community, diversity is a divine guide to connecting with the non-Jewish world. Jews are called to live fully as themselves and as Jews, always in relation to others, always as part of a larger human ecosystem.
Judith Butler, in their 2013 book “Parting Ways,” develops the idea of “unchosenness,” arguing that Jews live in “irreversible heterogeneity.” Jewish identity arises precisely from the fact that we do not choose our neighbors, our histories or our vulnerabilities. In this, we are inescapably bound to others who are different from us. Diaspora is not a problem to be solved through nationalism, Butler says; it is the essence of Jewish ethical life. To be Jewish is to practice responsibility amid difference, to learn how to cohabitate in a world we share.
Plaskow and Butler, taken together, offer a vision of Judaism that resonates deeply with the spirit of Rosh Hashana. They move us beyond exceptionalism toward interdependence. They remind us that Jewish flourishing requires many communities, locally grounded, engaged with Torah and committed to justice with their neighbors.
This is not an abandonment of Jewish identity. On the contrary, it is a recovery of Judaism’s richest strands. The idea of “the Jewish People” as a unified nation is a modern invention. Jewish flourishing has happened best in conversation with neighbors and by applying ethical practices to daily life.
Rosh Hashana’s universalism calls us back to this truth. All humanity shares one origin. All life stands before one Creator. If we truly believe this, then the Jewish task is to defy nationalism and live out Torah’s wisdom in ways that build solidarity and justice across boundaries.
This year, as Jews around the world gather for Rosh Hashana, I invite us to let go of myths that no longer serve us. Let us question whether “peoplehood” is the foundation we want. Let us reclaim a Judaism that is at once particular and universal, distinct and connected, local and global. May we not strive to be a singular “People” above others, but communities among communities, committed to the flourishing of all life.
(Rabbi Andrue Kahn is executive director of the American Council for Judaism. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
