Whose God?

"How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews." The quip attributed to British journalist William Norman Ewer captures an eternal puzzle. Why would the God of all humanity single out one tiny nation as the vessel for revelation? The question proved vexing to generations of Jewish thinkers. Even Moses Mendelssohn, father of the Jewish Enlightenment and champion of Judaism as moral universalism, pondered the mystery in a 1773 letter to another rabbi:

How unspeakably miserable the human fate would be if the eternal felicity of all humanity were to depend on the interpretation of obscure passages in a book written for a particular people in Asia, a long time ago, in a foreign, now dead language, which was given as an inheritance to the congregation of Jacob alone?

This tension between universal monotheism and Jewish particularism permeates Exodus-at once Israel's national origin story and the account of a universal God revealed to the world. One verse crystallizes it. When God instructs Moses in his negotiations with Pharaoh, the language is striking: "And say to him, 'My God, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say: Let My people go that they may serve Me in the wilderness'" (Ex. 7:16).

Writing centuries before Mendelssohn, the medieval rabbi and poet Judah Halevi noted the distinction. God commands Moses to announce he is a representative of "the God of the Hebrews" rather than "the God of heaven and earth" who created the world.

Halevi celebrates Jewish chosenness. He notes that God also addressed Israel in this way, by saying, "I am the God who led you out of Egypt," rather than "I am the Creator of the world and your Creator." Humans grasp abstract truths through specific stories, Halevi reasoned. Israel therefore serves this unique function.

Yet Halevi's answer exposes the inherent flaw in all universalisms: they never fully escape their particular origins. His own vision, while aspiring to universal truth, ultimately remains captive to Jewish exceptionalism, as evidenced by his controversial doctrine of Jewish biological supremacy. For Halevi, Egypt must simply yield to Hebrew superiority.

Where Halevi endorses hierarchical particularism, the medieval rabbis of Midrash Tanchuma offer a different approach. They reimagine the verse in question by transforming its context.

In their telling (Midrash Tanchuma, Shemot 5:1-2), Moses and Aaron arrive at Pharaoh's palace on his coronation day, when neighboring kings gather to acclaim him as cosmocrator, "ruler of the world:"

"Two old men are standing at the palace door," Pharaoh's guards inform him.

"Do they hold a crown in their hands?" he asks.

"No."

"Then let them enter last," he declares. When they finally appear, Pharaoh demands: "What do you desire?"

Moses replies: "The God of the Hebrews has sent me to you to say: 'Let My people go that they may serve Me.'"

Pharaoh retorts: "Who is the Lord, that I should hearken unto His voice? Does He not know enough to send me a crown?"

Pharaoh consults his registry: "The god of Edom, the god of Moab, the god of Sidon… I have read the entire list, but the name of your god is not upon it."

Moses and Aaron rebuke him: "Fool, these gods that you mentioned are all dead, but the Lord, the true God, is a living God, the King of the Universe."

Pharaoh mocks: "Is he young or old? How many cities has he captured? How many provinces has he humbled? How long has he been king?"

They answer: "The strength and power of our God permeate the world. He was before the world was created, and He will be at the end of all worlds. He fashioned you and placed within you the breath of life."

Pharaoh rages: "You have been speaking falsehood from the start! For I am the lord of the world, and I created myself and the Nile."

Through this imaginative dialogue, the rabbis present a universalism that directly confronts Pharaoh's divine pretensions. God is precisely the Creator of the world, not despite being the God of the Hebrews, but paradoxically through that very particularity. Unlike the territorial deities of neighboring nations and their self-deifying kings, the Israelite God transcends all boundaries. Even as Israel seeks a homeland of its own, it must not turn nationhood into idolatry.

These ancient tensions remain urgently contemporary. Our world swings violently between dreams of universal humanity and the ugly realities of tribal hatred. Judaism faces this same threat in the form of a messianic ultra-right Zionism that preaches Jewish superiority and demonizes Palestinians, reducing political conflict to a cosmic battle between good and evil.

We need a universalism that honors rather than erases difference, yet remains alert to the dangers of hierarchy. Mendelssohn wrestled with the two models he inherited from the medieval rabbis. His solution was imperfect but instructive. He imagined Judaism as a concrete particularism compatible with universal redemption. He asked pointedly: "Shall all the inhabitants of the earth from east to west, except for us, be cast into a pit of annihilation"-simply for not believing in the Torah given exclusively to Israel? His answer: That could not be.

As contemporary British-Israeli philosopher Jeremy Fogel observes in his 2023 book, "Jewish Universalisms," Mendelssohn answered his own question by maintaining Jewish election while rejecting supremacism. Israel was "chosen by Providence to be a priestly nation," Mendelssohn wrote in his 1783 book, "Jerusalem," whose conduct, beliefs, and experience continually call "attention to sound and unadulterated ideas of God and his attributes." The nations would remain themselves, not collapsing into an imperial fantasy of uniformity. All could access God's salvation. Yet his solution-Jews as eternal witnesses-still bears the trace of the tension rooted in Exodus.

Exodus forces us to confront this inescapable tension: a universal God chooses a particular people, promising complete human redemption while dividing humanity. The text refuses easy resolution. Instead, it offers a perpetual challenge: to defend difference while recognizing universal humanity.