Just Google “light unto the nations” and you will get lots of references about the Jewish mission to the world. The formulation stands as a central pillar when Jewish leaders call the people to act justly in the world.
We should scrap it.
Referring to the mission and purpose of Jewish existence in these terms is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive to our people’s spiritual health. The reference comes from this week’s Haftarah, where God tells Israel:
I the Lord summoned you
And I grasped you by the hand
I created you, and appointed you
A covenant people, to bring light to the nations
Opening eyes deprived of light,
Rescuing prisoners from confinement,
From the dungeon those who sit in darkness.
But as the rest of the Haftarah makes clear, God very pointedly explains that we failed in that mission:
Listen, you who are deaf;
You blind ones, look up and see!
Who is so blind as My servant,
So deaf as the messenger I send?
Who is so blind as the chosen one,
So blind as the servant of the Lord?
Seeing many things, he gives no heed;
With ears open, he hears nothing.
From the very beginning, then, we learn that although we should be a light to the nations, we blew it. That should warn us not to emphasize a project for which we are manifestly incompetent.
Somewhat more subtle formulations concede that we are not a light to the nations, but that we can aspire to it. But such views contain significant problems as well.
Even aspiring to being a light to the nations contains a severe danger, because it pushes the Jewish people in a chauvinistic direction. If the Jewish people is a light to the nations, then that arrogantly assumes that we have a moral and spiritual potential that other nations do not. Why should our moral aspirations require the denigration of others?
Rejecting arrogance hardly requires abject self-hatred. Jews are not perfect, but we have acted pretty well, all things considered. In the United States, “>in Great Britain, Muslims far outpace Jews in per capita charitableness. And just doing better than other groups hardly constitutes being a light to the world.
Still, arrogrance beckons. Once we accept that God summoned us to be a light to the nations, the question immediately arises as to why God did so. (Various Midrashim attempt to explain why God gave Israel the Torah, a related but hardly equivalent issue, but none are conclusive and in fact they contradict each other: one says that Israel was the only nation to accept it, and another says that God suspended Mt. Sinai over Israel until they accepted it). And if we ask why God did so, and assume that the summons is still in force, then we cannot help thinking that the Jewish people has some merit that other nations do not. Despite all of our efforts, chauvinism creeps in.
David Ben-Gurion relied heavily on the “light to the nations” formulation in his policy justifications, and since he got most things right, we should listen. But claiming unique morality is especially pernicious when it comes to statecraft. To put it mildly, diplomacy and national security policy is a messy business. Precisely because the state has no monopoly of legitimate force in the global arena, no policymaker alive or dead has ever avoided brutal and searing compromises. The international system might not be a pure Hobbesian war of all against all, but to deny ongoing interest and value conflict is to deny reality. History is littered with statesmen – from William Gladstone to Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush – who vowed to base their foreign policy on moral principle, and wound up crashing and burning.
For all these reasons, we should reject the formulation entirely. No rabbi should cite it, no spiritual leader should rely on it. It sits there in Isaiah, both in this Haftarah and elsewhere (49:6), and we should let it sit there, reading it not as guidance for action, but rather as a warning against arrogance and exclusivity.
Perhaps the strongest objection to removing the concept from the Jewish moral canon is that ironically, by doing so, we are undermining the very universalism that such removal seeks to promote. There is something to this: it is very easy for a rabbi or speaker to argue for universal values by citing Isaiah and saying that it requires us to have a higher moral standard.
But such an argument reflects lethargy rather than morality. Jewish text and wisdom is chock full of passages admonishing us to respect the Other. We should reject the one that provides respect through condescension.
Consider that the most repeated commandment is “you shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (This precise language is from Exodus 22:21). Or Exodus 23:5: “If you see your enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him.” Or the Talmud’s gloss on Exodus 23:5: “If [the animal of] a friend requires unloading, and an enemy’s loading, you should first help your enemy – in order to suppress the evil inclination. (Baba Metzia 32b).” Or even, as Lord Jonathan Sacks has observed, the Aramaic translations (Targum Onkelos, and more explicitly Targum Yonatan), which take the phrase ‘You shall surely release’ to mean not just the physical burden, but also the psychological burden: ‘You shall surely let go of the hate you have in your heart towards him.’
Or still even Proverbs 25:21-22:
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat;
And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink;
For so you will heap coals of fire on his head,
And the LORD will reward you.
Note that every single one of these injunctions carries vastly more power than the light-to-the-nations formulation because of their specificity. They don’t tell us to generally be inspirational: they tell us to treat the Other with honor and respect even if she is our enemy. They are stronger and more powerful because of it. Ditto with injunctions about caring for the poor (Jerusalem Talmud Peah 1:1) or Maimonides’ ladder of charity, or the constant and specific injunctions about caring for the earth, or even about intergenerational justice (Ta’anit 23a).
The Jewish people has a mission in the world – to spread Torah, Torah values, and the wisdom we have learned from our tradition and experience: to love the stranger, to care for the earth, to understand our enemies, to “love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8). Surely walking humbly means that we should avoid claiming an exalted position. Let us understand that holy work redounds to God’s glory, and not ours.
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