Q&A: Who Has Not Made Me…? A Matter for Pride? For Shame?
Who Has Not Made Me…? A Matter for Pride? For Shame?
Question
Lately I’ve stopped reciting every morning, with God’s name and kingship, the blessing “Who has not made me a gentile.”
A nation that again and again crowns over itself someone accused of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust [with rabbis and “spiritual” shepherds among them too…]—something that nowadays even lowly nations would be ashamed of.
Is it reasonable that the Sages instituted a blessing with God’s name and kingship even in a moral and ethical situation where this is not at all evident?
True, I’m quite embarrassed and ashamed by the bizarre state of my people. But that is more or less the reality…
I would be glad for the honorable Rabbi’s response.
Answer
You asked this here, and I answered.
And here is my answer:
I do not believe in the chosenness of Israel in its factual sense (that we are truly different from gentiles in some genetic or essential way). I think that being a chosen people is a mission (that we should conduct ourselves as a chosen people), not a given state. Consequently, it has no connection to the question of whether we actually do this in practice. We thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for choosing us to be His treasured people. It is like the Haredim who do not thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for the establishment of the State because of how it looks. He gave us a gift and we are using it improperly, so therefore we should not thank Him for it?! Absurd! It is like someone who received a gift from his friend and threw it into the sea, and now does not thank him because the gift is in the sea.
Discussion on Answer
The Haredi approach, and also the formal halakhic approach, is that secular Jews are regarded as apostates (or as children taken captive by certain ideas) and not really Jews. The State is a secular Western state like any other state.
The State and the secular are no different from gentiles, and “Who has not made me a gentile” refers to them as well.
Israelite apostates are even worse than the nations of the world, for Israelites without Torah are the boldest of the nations.
Interesting that the Rabbi is very stringent regarding “Who has not made me a gentile” [and interprets it in terms of the ideal and not the facts as they currently appear in reality].
A few weeks ago a similar question was published to Rabbi Shlomo Aviner. [Who is considered very conservative relative to the Rabbi.] And he answered that he does not know how to answer it…
Interesting.
By logic, it should have been the other way around…
Especially since in principle the Rabbi does not support the person accused of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. And Rabbi Aviner does.
Even so, the Rabbi says one should recite the blessing, and Rabbi Aviner claims he does not know…
Indeed, an upside-down world…