Chosenness
There’s a basic theological failure when non-Jews appropriate Jewish symbology.
They do it because they feel it’s closer to Source, like the Hebrew/✌️“Old Testament”✌️ forms are MORE ✌️“monotheistic”✌️ somehow, and they’re signaling that. By worshipping particular forms. Oops.
If people who did this had real contact with Jews, rather than mental projections of their own religious mythologies, they would know that they are performing an obvious hodgepodge of Jewish cultures throughout time and space as though it were one consistent and eternal form.
The theological failure should be obvious, but in case it isn’t, the entire kernel such people are trying to extract from Judaism as a universal principle is the nameless, formless, eternal One who forbids worship of concrete graven images as mere particularities.
You might wonder where that leaves JEWS as far as form goes, and yeah, that’s fair. I have a pretty dim view of it myself, but surely that’s because I’m from a transitional generation in terms of emptying the forms, which happens from time to time. Maybe it takes a few centuries.
This is not separate from the Biblical drama of the Jewish people oscillating back and forth between intimate Divine service and idolatry. It’s the same story. Arguably it’s the WHOLE story. And this is something Christian philosemitic mythologizing fundamentally does not get.
There’s this mess caused by mainly foreign misinterpretations of a Biblical concept of Jewish “chosenness.” Since use of the Jewish bible and culture inside of other mythologies renders it a kind of fairy tale, it imposes this very fraught charge as a historical “role” for Jews.
This externally imposed and fantastical role requires Jews to be this avatar of eternal, faithful Monotheism™ to play the Christian historical drama off of.
It has nothing to do with the internal experience of Jewishness, which is defined by the dramatic irony of this charge.
When you read Tanakh in order to retcon a future religion into it, it’s easy to ascribe the fallenness of the Jewish People by the end as a setup. A prequel for the incarnation of God (see theological failure above).
When it’s your culture, though, it’s just… familiar.
