First paragraph: The notion of chosenness, that God has chosen one religious community from among all the peoples of the world, is a corner-stone of monotheistic religions and has become a point of contention and polemic between them. All monotheisms include this notion in one form or another, but Judaism seems to contain the earliest expression and has openly struggled with its meaning in the face of a long history in which the Jewish people have seemed to be any-thing but chosen. Destruction, dispersion, exile, and the demolition of the most sacred religious shrine of the Jerusalem Temple all would seem to demonstrate that the Jews have lost any possible status as chosen people. And yet the notion has survived among Jews, who have tried to make sense of the meaning of chosenness for thousands of years.