Thrown into the World

And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, Romans 9:10-11  NASB

Choice– Why were you born?  What difference does your life really make in the great scheme of things?  And since you were thrown into this world, not by your own choice, you might also like to ask, “Why am I treated the way that I am since I had no part in the choice to be here?” Who decided that you should live the life you have?  Who determined your point of entry, your culture, your heritage, your inherited trauma?  Certainly not you!  And yet, here you are, victim of circumstances that occurred eons before you were even an idea in someone’s mind.

Paul comments on this unsettling fact.  Before the twins were born, before either one had done anything good or bad, God chose.  And that choice, independent of any voluntary submission, determined the pathway of each child, the inexorable journey of suffering and trauma that led to Jew and Gentile. The inheritance of your existence.

Choice. It’s a term we like to banter about as if it makes up the critical element of being human.  The truth is far more calamitous.  The truth is—you didn’t choose!  You weren’t asked.  Not even consulted.  You were thrown into the mess, cast into the cycle of family, nation and ethnic chaos handed to you without your consent.  And for the most part, who you are and how you are has been determined by when you are and where you are from the moment you were. God’s choice of His people is pregnant with trauma.

“ . . . trauma is not simply the effect of external violence but of an essential incomprehensibility:  . . . so that the wound—the meaning of the Greek trauma—is not directly perceptible.  The shock is ‘a break in the mind’s experience of time.’”[1]

“As bearers of an experience that they cannot fully claim as their own, the Jewish people become an exemplar of the historical sense of having been incomprehensibly chosen to survive.  What returns, then, in both the individual psyche and the structure of Jewish historical experience, is the sense of ‘being chosen for a future that remains, in its promise, yet to be understood.  Chosenness is thus not simply a fact of the past but the experience of being shot into a future that is not entirely one’s own.’”[2]

Fair Warning:  Most non-Jewish want-to-be believers think that joining the Chosen People is participating in a favored and blessed existence.  Perhaps it would be better to be informed about the nature of this “blessing” beforehand.  Then the shock of the ensuring trauma of believing might be more tolerable, even if it can’t quite be understood.

Topical Index:  Chosen People, choice, trauma, Romans 9:10-11

[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. 243.

[2]Ibid., p. 244, citing Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Departures: Survival and History in Freud,” in Trauma and Self, eds. Strozier and Flynn (1996), p. 29.