SPINOZA'S INVERSION OF THE DOCTRINE

No authentically philosophical attempt to recover the doctrine of the election of Israel and thereby explicate its truth for our time can hope to begin rigorously without first confronting Spinoza and then overcoming him. For it was Spinoza who presented what is still the most profound rejection of the traditional meaning of this doctrine. His rejection was one that greatly influenced almost every subsequent modern thinker who dealt with it. This was even the case with those Jewish thinkers who chose to remain part of the Jewish people, even as Spinoza had chosen to leave the Jewish people. It was even the case with those thinkers who were very much opposed to just about everything else in Spinoza's philosophy. It was even the case with those thinkers who probably never even read Spinoza carefully or even read him at all. The power of this rejection is that it was not a simple dismissal of the doctrine. Instead, it was a radical inversion of its traditionally accepted meaning, a deconstruction of it, if you will. In the traditional version of the doctrine, it is God who elects Israel and institutes the covenantal relationship with her. Spinoza, conversely, inverts this relationship and asserts that in truth it was Israel who elected God and instituted the covenantal relationship with him.

This inversion of meaning was accomplished by an explicit reading of the doctrine's biblical sources, a reading he thought far more convincing than that of the Jewish tradition thereto–fore. However, the real power of the inversion is that it is based on the very foundation of Spinoza's whole philosophy, his intellectual vision of God.