Finding A Chosen Place

Any Jew aware of their Judaism finds themselves asking the question: “What should my relationship with Jewish tradition be?” While we spend time weighing the merits of various practices or observances, it often feels like tradition fails to acknowledge the reality that we are independent agents: that we are ultimately making a choice about how we engage with our Judaism. Popularly conceived, Judaism flatly tramples our individuality and asserts, “Your path is already chosen for you, accept it”! Does tradition itself concede any flexibility as to how I personally engage with it? Can tradition acknowledge that the way in which I relate to and practice my Judaism will be a result of the unique choices I make as an individual, rather than something that has simply been chosen for me? This Dvar Torah is an argument for conceiving of our relationship with tradition and God as just that, a relationship. It is an argument for finding a chosen place[1].

The book of Deuteronomy speaks to the wilderness generation, the generation that arose during the desert wanderings and is preparing to complete its spiritual journey through the conquest of the land of Canaan. The Israelites are instructed that, once the land is conquered, their spiritual centre is to be a special place that the deity will choose,

…[you shall go] to the place that the Lord your God will choose from [amongst] all your tribal territories to establish his presence; you shall seek out his dwelling place and go there[2]. (Deut 12.5)

The fact that the location of this ‘chosen place’ is not mentioned is often glossed over: the temple was later built in Jerusalem, and the book of Chronicles (a much later Second Temple period composition) identifies the precise mountain on which it was built as being Mt. Moriah (2 Chron 3.1). There is great significance to this identification, for Genesis tells us that Abraham was commanded to offer Issac in ‘the land of Moriah…on one of the mountains that I will show you’ (Gen 22.2). The fact that Deuteronomy chooses to say none of this, however, is often ignored.

Why are the Israelites told to go somewhere, without being told where to go? Why is their spiritual destination, at the end of all their long desert wanderings, kept hidden from them?[3] Our verse recognises this tension: ‘[you shall go] to the place that…God will choose…you shall seek out his dwelling place’. If the place is already chosen by God, why do the Israelites need to seek it out? The Sifre, a tannaitic halakhic Midrash, notes this difficulty and responds,

You might think you must wait until a prophet tells you [where it is]; hence the verse continues ‘seek out his dwelling’; search for and find the place, then the prophet will tell you. (Sifre Deuteronomy Pisqa 62)

The Israelites should not wait for God to tell them where the place he has chosen is, rather, they must seek it out and find it by themselves. Once they have found it, it is the function of the prophet to ‘tell them’. What this means remains unclear. It may mean that this becomes a game of divine ‘hide and seek’, the prophet telling them whether they ‘got it right or not’. However, it seems more likely that the prophet role is to simply put the divine stamp of approval on their endeavours. The divinely ‘chosen’ place is ‘chosen’ by Israel.

The problem of chosenness seems to be one that is almost unique to Deuteronomy. Of the twenty occurrences of the phrase ‘x that the Lord will choose’ (asher yibhar Hashem) in the Torah, nineteen of them occur in the book of Deuteronomy. While most of these – fully eighteen of them – concern the chosen place, one of them concerns the king. Surprisingly, we here find an almost identical problem regarding the indeterminate divine-human nature of the process by which the king is ‘chosen’. The verse states,

You shall surely place a king over yourselves who the Lord your God shall choose; you shall place one of your brethren over yourselves as king, you may not place over yourselves a foreigner who is not of your brethren. (Deut 17.15)

Here we have the same problem: If the king is chosen by God, why the injunction to make someone king? Why the detailed instructions as to who qualifies and who does not? Nahmanides’ comment on this point (ad. loc.) is truly startling,

In my opinion the simple meaning of the expression ‘whom He will choose’ is that every ruler over people receives his position from God, as it is written ‘until you will know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomsoever he will’ (Daniel 4.29). Similarly the Rabbis have said: ‘Even a superintendent of the well is appointed in heaven’ (BT Berakhot 58a). Thus the verse is stating: You shall surely place a king over yourselves – whoever is decreed by Heaven that he is to reign…– but you are never to invest a foreigner with regal power. Similarly…the expression ‘the place that the Lord your God will choose’ (Deut 12.5) means that wherever God’s sanctuary shall be built, was all the will of God[4].

Nahmanides here asserts the ‘divine right of kings’: however the king becomes king and however the temple site comes to be chosen, all of these things are expressions of the will and workings of the Deity in human affairs. Again, we see that the divine ‘chosen place’ is ‘chosen’ by Israel, but in this case, the human choice requires no direct divine seal of approval.

We mentioned earlier that the book of Chronicles identifies the mountain on which the temple was built as being the same mountain on which the Binding of Isaac occurred. The nature and purpose of this identification is rarely examined. Does the book of Chronicles simply intend to provide us with geographical information? It seems more likely that Chronicles was making a profound exegetical link between the two episodes. We noted earlier that the Israelites were being sent to a seemingly precise destination without being told where to go. This occurs explicitly in two other instances in the bible[5]. The first occurs when Abram is first spoken to by God, “Leave (lekh lekha) your land, your birthplace and your father’s house for the land that I will show you” (Gen 12.1). The second occurs with the ‘Binding of Isaac’, where Abraham is told “…go (lekh lekha) to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as an elevation offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you” (Gen 22.2).

This is not the only link between the ‘chosen place’ and the ‘Binding of Isaac’. After the ‘Binding of Isaac’ episode we are told, ‘Abraham called that place “The Lord Will See”’. The voice of the narrator then reminds us of a common saying, ‘of which it is said today, “on the Mountain of the Lord, He [the Lord] will be seen”’ (Gen 22.14). Here we find an identical dialectic to that which we found earlier, namely: Does the sanctity of the place stem from God’s ‘seeing’ of the place, or of the people’s ‘seeing’ of the godly in that place? Here too, the godly path is the one that finds favour, both in the eyes of God and in the eyes of man.

We stand at a crossroads with many paths available to us. Each path is meticulously signposted, with the destination and distance clearly marked. But these are paths that have already been trodden by others, meticulously plotted and mapped. Sometimes these will take us where we want to go; sometimes they will simply force us into living the lives of others. Often we will need to cut our own path through the undergrowth, and we won’t know where it will take us; we will need to have faith in ourselves and in our own convictions. This kind of journey is a negotiation between ourselves and the terrain that is offered to us; our end destination will be the result of dialogue and compromise. It will be both the destination-place we have chosen, and also that which has been chosen for us. We will have found a chosen place.

A person is more satisfied with one measure of his own [handiwork] than with nine of his fellow’s. (BT Baba Mezia 38a) [6]

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Endnotes

[1] This Dvar Torah is significantly indebted to another Dvar Torah by Rabbi David Dov Levanon, entitled ‘Jerusalem – Seek Her Out and Find Her’. He takes a similar, though not identical, set of sources in a completely different direction.

[2] Biblical translations are my own. The structure of the sentence makes it difficult to express clearly in English.

[3] The source critical stance enhances the weight of the question. If centralisation was in Deuteronomy’s mind, why not solve the problem once and for all?

[4] Chavel, modified

[5] There is no concordance for this kind of assertion. If I am wrong, please tell me.

[6] Rashi asks why Abraham, in his initial encounter with God (Gen 12.1), is not told of his destination. One of his answers is that this was in order to make it ‘beloved’ to him. The talmudic statement quoted above ‘A person is more satisfied with one measure of his own [handiwork] than with nine of his fellow’s’ (BT Baba Mezia 38a) can be used to explain what Rashi means. In his commentary on the Talmud he remarks on this point: ‘It is beloved to him because he has toiled for it’.