The vocation of the Jewish people, he suggested, was not to win, not to achieve power or even nationhood again, but rather to live in such a way as to absorb willingly the world’s hostility, to drain from people their anger, accepting it and returning it to them as love. “The servant,” a symbol for that nation, was to be a willing victim, one who would be “rejected, despised, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). He was to make the people whole by accepting their abuse, never returning it in kind, but responding to it only with love. That ancient portrait, drawn by this
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