Photo Credit: Jewish Press
What Makes a Jew?
What makes a Jew? It is a simple question that feels especially pressing these days. As we know, the answer of “anyone born to a Jewish mother” is incomplete, as it excludes those who commit themselves to our covenant with G-d via our specific rituals of conversion. That centrality of our covenant to Jewishness is given famous expression by Saadiah Gaon, one of the great rabbis and teachers – literally one of the “lights” – of the geonic period. He wrote in his Book of Doctrines and Beliefs that “our people, the Children of Israel, are a people only by virtue of our laws” (Altman, p. 112). This idea is found in our parsha, when Moshe and the kohanim tell the people “Obey and hear, Israel. This day you have become the people of Hashem your G-d. You shall therefore obey the voice of Hashem your G-d, and do his commandments and his statutes, which I command you this day” (27:10-11).
As Chizkuni puts it, “On this day you have become a people – now that you accept upon yourselves the oath of the Torah.” That is, he says much like Rav Saadiah Gaon does. It is our promise to uphold our covenantal relationship with G-d that makes us into a people. It is a very interesting and important idea. Some nations are formed because they live in or are from a certain place. While we have a land, it is not the source of our people as much as our once and future destination. Further, we do not lose our identity when we are in exile. Another notion to explain peoplehood is ethnicity. Of course, this doesn’t quite work in Judaism because there is no particular Jewish ethnicity and anyone can join our people by committing to our covenant in the appropriate manner. This brings into sharp relief the fact that our peoplehood does, in fact, rest on our covenantal relationship with G-d.
Rashi, however, gives a different explanation to our verse. “On this day you have become a people – on each and every day it should be in your eyes as though you just entered into the covenant with Him.” Rashi does not so much argue with the idea put forth by Rabbi Saadiah Gaon and the Chizkuni as much as he modifies it. Yes, we are defined by our covenant, but that covenant is defined by a sense of excitement and joy in its perpetual newness. In the words of the Talmud in Berachot, the Torah should be “beloved to its students so that each and every day it is like the day it was given from Mount Sinai” (63b). Affection, then, defines our covenant with G-d.
Rav Yosef Bechor Shor writes along similar lines: “Today you have become a people, since you committed to perform His commandments and uphold His torah, and you are beloved before Him as though He chose you today for the first time.” If Rashi tells us that the covenant ought to be beloved to us, then Bechor Shor tells us that it is our commitment to Torah that makes us beloved to G-d, as though we were His new chosen one each and every day.
As we said earlier, these ideas are not really in tension with one another. But if we highlight that the Jewish people are a nation defined by a covenant without mentioning that it is a covenant of love, we will be missing something essential. This is what we must begin to say, then:
Defining a Jew
What is a Jew?
A person in a covenant of love with G-d.
We should therefore enjoy and pursue our covenant of love, just as we enjoy and pursue the person we love the most in the world. Just as that relationship can be new and then new again as we grow together, so too the covenantal Jew is new in G-d’s eyes and in his own. As we study and live Torah, we grow and change and our relationships grow and change commensurately. We are beloved on Sunday, and then, having studied and lived some more, we are beloved anew on Monday. So it goes each day. Our love for Torah makes us beloved and our commitment to it creates something new and lovely out of it – a person loved and then loved again by the Creator.