About this episode

Rabbi Ari Lamm discusses the biblical concept of chosenness and its implications within Jewish tradition and theology.

This week, Rabbi Ari Lamm joins Mosaic 's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss the biblical idea of election or chosenness. Rabbi Lamm has argued that Genesis itself is a long sequence of choosing and rejection—Adam over the animals, Abel over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau—and that the Bible never once tells us why. We learn how God assesses a life after the fact; we are never shown the reasoning behind the choice itself. One midrash even imagines Abraham chosen by lottery. Rabbi Lamm suggests that this silence is deliberate: chosenness is a mystery, an acknowledgment of the limitations of human understanding. Naturally, the subject of chosenness has long been discussed within the Jewish tradition, and Rabbi Lamm focuses on the debate between Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides about whether divine election is earned or something carried through inheritance. With this in mind, the conversation turns to the theological puzzle facing 17th-century English Christians: should Israel in Scripture be understood as the church or as the actual, literal, Jewish people? And once some concluded it meant the latter, an old the­ological problem became a new and productive one. Rabbi…

People in this episode

Host: Jonathan Silver

Guest: Ari Lamm

Topics covered

• chosenness
• biblical election
• Jewish tradition
• theological debate
• political thought
• human understanding

Keywords

• chosenness
• election
• Judah Halevi
• Moses Maimonides
• Abraham
• Genesis
• Jewish people
• political thought

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Genesis

More episodes of The Tikvah Podcast

• George Deek on Israel's Relationship with the Christian World · July 9, 2026 · 1h 2m
• Michael Doran and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on Power, Ideology, and Understanding the Middle East · June 26, 2026 · 40 min
• David Arnovitz on the Tanakh of the Land of Israel · June 18, 2026 · 45 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Tikvah Podcast podcast page.