The Jewish Supremacism of the Aleinu Prayer
The Aleinu prayer – or more properly the Aleinu leshabei'ach (‘It is our Duty to Praise God’) prayer – is one that is said daily by jews when the Ark is closed. (1) In my recent article on the subject I demonstrated that it was conceived of – as well as used – being an anti-gentile and specifically anti-Christian prayer. (2)
What I didn’t include within that article was the rather obvious jewish supremacism in the Aleinu prayer itself, which deficiency I propose to remedy here.
To recap the Aleinu prayer runs as follows:
‘It is our duty to praise the Master of all,
To ascribe greatness to the Author of creation,
Who has not made us like the nations of the lands,
Nor placed us like the families of the earth;
Who has not made our portion like theirs,
Nor our destiny like all their multitudes.
For they worship vanity and emptiness,
And pray to a god who cannot save.
But we bow in worship and thank
,The Supreme King of kings,
The Holy One, Blessed be He,
Who extends the heavens and establishes the earth,
Whose throne of glory is in the heavens above,
And whose power's Presence is in the highest of heights,
He is our God; there is no other.
Truly He is our King, there is none else,
As it is written in His Torah:
"You shall know and take to heart this day,
That the Lord is God,
In the heavens above,
And on earth below. There is no other."’ (3)
Now re-read the following lines:
‘It is our duty to praise the Master of all,
To ascribe greatness to the Author of creation,
Who has not made us like the nations of the lands,
Nor placed us like the families of the earth;
Who has not made our portion like theirs,
Nor our destiny like all their multitudes.’
If we summarise and simplify this language we get the following:
The Creator and Master of the Universe has created the jewish people as a tribe of human beings who are completely different as well as superior to the various tribes of non-jews. Their destiny is of a different order.
Since as the Aleinu prayer says:
‘For they worship vanity and emptiness,
And pray to a god who cannot save.’
So in other words; Yahweh – the jewish deity – is the only god who is real and ‘can save’, but yet as we learned earlier. He will only save the jewish people not those who aren’t jewish because the former are his tribe and the latter ‘worship vanity and emptiness’.
Thus in the Aleinu prayer; jews identify as an exclusive biological group (i.e., a tribe) as the chosen people of the creator and master of the universe as well as stating that they have a different (i.e. superior) destiny to non-jews.
If that isn’t jewish supremacist sentiment then I don’t know what is.
References
(1) Joshua Kohn, 1973, ‘The Synagogue in Jewish Life’, 1st Edition, Ktav: New York, p. 123; Tzvee Zhavy, 2000, ‘Jewish Piety’, p. 183 in Jacob Neusner, Alan Avery-Peck (Ed.), 2000, ‘The Blackwell Companion to Judaism’, 1st Edition, Blackwell: Oxford
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/idolaters-and-the-abomination-in
(3) From: Jonathan Sacks, 2009, ‘The Koren Sacks Siddur’, 1st Edition, Koren: Jerusalem