No One Else Can Define Our Greatness

Thursday afternoon, a Jew walking home from Tisha B’Av services was stabbed a few blocks from here. By itself, an act like that is so disturbing and infuriating. But more than that, there is the fact that it happened on a day already devoted to Jewish grief, and in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. For months now, we have watched the Jewish community become the subject of political speeches, campaign ads, protests, social media videos, and endless online commentary. Israel, and by extension the Jewish people, gets discussed with an intensity that no other issue seems to generate. There is nothing new about this. Despite our miniscule population, everyone has an opinion about the Jews.

In his speech in Parashat Va’etchanan, Moshe told the people, כִּי מִי גוֹי גָּדוֹל אֲשֶׁר לוֹ אֱלֹהִים קְרֹבִים אֵלָיו – “For what great nation is there that has God so close to it” – וּמִי גוֹי גָּדוֹל אֲשֶׁר לוֹ חֻקִּים וּמִשְׁפָּטִים צַדִּיקִם, “and what great nation has laws and statutes as righteous as this Torah?”

How does Moshe get to calling us a goy gadol, a great nation? The question becomes even sharper because later in this very parashah Moshe says, לֹא מֵרֻבְּכֶם מִכָּל הָעַמִּים חָשַׁק ה׳ בָּכֶם… כִּי אַתֶּם הַמְעַט מִכָּל הָעַמִּים! God did not choose you because you were more numerous than the other peoples, “for you are the fewest of all the nations.” In the very same parashah, then, Israel is called both a גוי גדול and המעט מכל העמים. Clearly, gadol cannot mean large.

Rav Yehuda Herzl Henkin points out that if we read the verses a little differently, we can understand what it means. We usually read Moshe’s words as rhetorical questions: “What great nation has God so close to it?” But Rav Henkin suggested reading it as a question followed immediately by its answer. 

כִּי מִי גוֹי גָּדוֹל? אֲשֶׁר לוֹ אֱלֹהִים קְרֹבִים אֵלָיו. 

What is a great nation? One that has God close to it! 

וּמִי גוֹי גָּדוֹל? אֲשֶׁר לוֹ חֻקִּים וּמִשְׁפָּטִים צַדִּיקִם. 

What is a great nation? One that possesses righteous laws and statutes!

That is Moshe’s definition of greatness. It is not our population statistics, our territory, or our wealth. The greatness of Israel is measured by our closeness to God and by the righteousness of the Torah we brings into the world. That is what makes us a great nation.

There is no reason, objectively, that a people of fifteen million should occupy the space we occupy in the world’s imagination. No reason every politician, every campus, every international body, every newspaper should feel entitled to an opinion about the Jewish people or the Jewish state. But perhaps that disproportion reflects what it means to be a goy gadol: what we represent matters enough to other people that it’s worth arguing about. Jews have occupied an outsized place in the imagination of the world for thousands of years. We have been admired beyond what our numbers would predict, we’ve been hated beyond what our numbers would predict. We’ve been held up as a model and denounced as a menace, sometimes in the same week. The attention was never going to be proportionate, because we were never a people whose significance was proportionate to our size.

That should not surprise us. If Moshe defines greatness by what a nation contributes rather than by its size, then the history of the Jewish people begins to make sense. A tiny nation has given the world an extraordinary legacy of prophets and sages, scholars and teachers, poets and philosophers. In every generation Jews have also played a remarkable role in the professions, the sciences, the arts, medicine, law, and public life. Again and again, Jewish people have sought to alleviate suffering, expand human knowledge, pursue justice, and enrich the moral and cultural life of society. That is what Moshe meant by goy gadol. The measure of a nation is not how many people it has, but what those people bring into the world.

Yet there is a spiritual danger in becoming preoccupied with how the world sees us, even when the attention is positive. Our identity cannot depend on the world’s admiration, and it certainly cannot depend on its hatred. But when the hatred grows as loud as it has, that becomes very tempting. We can start to believe that the defining fact of being Jewish is that people hate Jews.

Moshe is telling us, in this very verse, that this is not so. Before the nations get to decide who we are, God has already told us who we are. We are not, first and foremost, the object of the world’s fascination or the target of its hatred. We are אֲשֶׁר לוֹ אֱלֹהִים קְרֹבִים אֵלָיו, a people defined by its closeness to God. That identity does not come from the world’s relationship to us. It comes from our relationship with the Almighty.

That is a truth we cannot afford to lose sight of right now. We absolutely have to fight Jew hatred: demand that our leaders condemn it not just with their words but with their actions and policies, and insist that Jews can walk the streets of this city safely and openly. None of that is optional. But we cannot allow a slippery slope; we cannot let antisemitism become the thing that defines Jewish identity for us. If it does, the antisemites win something they do not even have to work very hard for: they get to make hatred the organizing fact of Jewish life, so that we begin experiencing ourselves primarily through the eyes of the people who hate us.

The response to that is to become more fully what we already are. That means living more deeply as Jews. More Torah. More mitzvot. More prayer. More acts of chessed, of kindness. More confidence in who we are. Every mitzvah and every act of Jewish life is a declaration that Jewish identity is not built on what the world says about us, but on what God asks of us.

Moshe already gave us that definition:
!כִּי מִי גוֹי גָּדוֹל? אֲשֶׁר לוֹ אֱלֹהִים קְרֹבִים אֵלָיו.

Before the world had an opinion about the Jewish people, God already did. And that is an identity no act of hatred from anyone can ever take away.