As Christmas approaches, the odds get better that I will preach about Jesus of Nazareth, his life and ministry. In similar fashion, with Passover less than two weeks away, I remembered that a number of reviewers, including one of you, had recommended a book by Thomas Cahill called The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.

 Obviously, with a title like that, Cahill is setting his sights pretty high, but that is the man’s style. I know a number of you read his previous book, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. These were the first two in a seven-book series he has planned called “The Hinges of History,” in which he means “to retell the story of the western world as the story of our great gift-givers….” The third book is the series is already out, titled Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, which sounds like just the thing for some Sunday mid-December.

 But back to Cahill’s ambitious claims in The Gifts of the Jews, which he puts right out there at the very start: “The Jews started it all – and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. And … we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experiences differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.

 “By ‘we,’” he continues, “I mean the usual ‘we’ of late-twentieth-century writing: the people of the Western world, whose peculiar but vital mentality has come to infect every culture on earth, so that … all humanity is now willy-nilly caught up in this ‘we.’ For better or worse, the role of the West in humanity’s history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the inventors of Western culture, is also singular: there is simply no one else remotely like them; theirs is a unique vocation.” [3]

 Clearly Cahill is not one to defer to the latest fashion, which has been inclined of late to be wary of making too big a deal of Western civilization, as if it were the centerpiece of human history. And he gets away with it, to judge from the reviews so far. Oh, there have been a few criticisms, but of other things about the book -- for instance, that the Greeks had as large as role to play in inventing Western culture as did the Jews.

One Jewish reviewer (Yossi Prager in Commentary) began by praising the book’s main points, which she saw as the claims that as opposed to previously prevailing view that the future is cyclical and predetermined, Judaism posited a future that was open, unpredictable, and influenced by our behavior. So thanks to the Jews, we now believe that “human behavior is morally significant, [people] are free, and progress is possible.” But then she went on to say that Cahill “eviscerates the essence of Judaism: the rules, traditions, and practices….” And it is true, Cahill thinks all the dietary restrictions, the dress codes, the temple measurements, and the like are little more than biblical clutter, inserted by religious bureaucrats into what is otherwise the stirring history of a people’s evolution into whole new ways of thinking, ways that much of the world has come to share.

 I might as well get a reservation of my own out of the way before proceeding with Cahill’s lively argument. The most perplexing parts of the book to me are his claims that the biblical accounts of Abraham and Moses are indisputably historical. He is even sure that King David wrote the twenty-third psalm. He separates himself from fundamentalists on other issues, especially those involving social stands. But he is right there with the most orthodox Jews and conservative Christians in accepting what is pretty dubious, unless scholarship has shifted dramatically with my getting the memo.

 As far as I know, the consensus among the learned, unbiased, and thoughtful is that Jesus probably was a real person once, and Paul as well. More recent figures like Mohammed and Thomas Aquinas certainly were. Some folks before Jesus we know to have been living once, like Alexander the Great or Socrates. But last I knew, the jury was split down the middle regarding Moses, and disinclined to accept that Abraham is other than a legendary figure. Which is not to say that ancient Judaism did not have something very much like the influence that Cahill ascribes to it. But maybe not exactly in the way that Cahill believes.

Whether he lived once in the flesh or not, the story starts with Abraham, when he heard a voice telling him to leave his land and his extended family and set off “for the land that I will let you see. I will make a great nation of you and will give you blessing and will make you great.” And so “Abraham went.”

 Cahill finds these “two of the boldest words in all literature. They signal a complete departure from everything that has gone before in the long evolution of culture and sensibility. Out of Sumer, civilized repository of the predictable, comes a man who does not know where he is going but goes forth into the wilderness under the prompting of his god…. Out of ancient humanity, which from the dim beginnings of its consciousness has read its eternal verities in the stars, comes a party traveling by no known compass…. Out of mortal imagination comes a dream of something new, something better, something yet to happen, something – in the future.” [63]

 The thought that the future holds something new, as yet unknown, that we set out after, seems utterly unremarkable now; but Cahill claims it was uniformly unthinkable in Abraham’s time. Until Abraham (or who ever it was) and his (or her) descendants came along with their new religious outlook, “Human life [was] seen as a pale reenactment of the life of the eternal heavens, … ruled by a fate beyond the pitifully limited power of human beings…. One’s fate was written in the stars and could not be changed.” [46] “The perception of … life on earth as a fleeting reflection of the eternal life of the heavens, the insight that the moon especially mirrors our earthly condition … express mankind’s original religious experience and form the foundation for all the world’s most ancient religions.” [47-48]

 “On every continent, in every society [Abraham] would have been given the same advice…: do not journey but sit; compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow … until you have absorbed the pattern and have come to peace with the Great Wheel and with your own death and the death of all things in the corruptible sphere.” [64]

 But Abraham went. Inspired by this voice, this promise, this new idea that one did not have to accept that human life was endlessly cyclical, doomed, and fundamentally unreal as compared to the stars, Abraham took his immediate family off on a migration that Cahill contends “would change the face of earth by permanently changing the minds and hearts of human beings.” [59]

 The choosing itself is something new, the idea of opening oneself up to an unknown future by choice – not in consultation with those who interpret the stars, but by one’s own deciding. And furthermore, this new idea of deciding to follow this unique new form of deity, a god not in some more real realm of the universe, but a god in our world, who comes to Abraham, and not the reverse, a god who enters into a relationship with Abraham, a covenant, a personal friendship.

 Cahill contends that in his ability to enter into such a relationship, Abraham is all but inventing individualism, as if individuality were the flip side of monotheism. [72] Cahill is aware throughout the book that he is addressing two audiences, those who believe in God, as he does, and those who don’t. At times he addresses the two groups in turn. Cahill himself thinks that God was acting in history to bring these new ways of thinking into the world, like the reality and importance of individual lives.

But he urges even non-believers to see how radically different this viewpoint was from any other in the world at the time, and how critical it was to humankind that for whatever reason, Abraham emerged as a person, an individual, and one who saw himself as having the power to make choices, to control to some degree his own destiny, if he was willing to accept the unpredictability that came with that choice.

 Because this god that Abraham teams up with is inscrutable. He cannot know what God is up to. But he gives himself over to God’s will with trust. So another thing that Cahill thinks the Jews invented is faith. And for Cahill, this even justifies what he admits is the most troubling story in the Bible, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. Cahill admits it’s a difficult call, but he says, in his usual, brisk, colloquial style, “I, for one am willing to give God the benefit of the doubt in certain dubious cases – even in an episode as grotesque as the near-sacrifice of [Isaac]. [God] had to jump-start this new religion, and he didn’t always have the best material to work with.” [245-6] Me, I’m not so generous.

 But I probably shouldn’t get drawn very far into the discussion of whether there’s a god or not; you can work that one out for yourselves. Suffice it to say that Cahill follows the development of the idea of there being only a single god, a god of all being, from Abraham’s finding that one of the many gods of his time was greater than the others – what Cahill calls “Abrahamic henotheism” [145] – to the truly monotheistic god of Moses, whose name is a verb, a form of “to be.” Asked to identify himself – and let’s be frank, he is a he as the story is told -- God reveals the name as YHWH, which we don’t even know how to pronounce, and orthodox Jews won’t say it anyway, but it translates into English as something like, “I am what is,” or “I am what I am,” or even “I am is” or just “I am.”

 And this god also develops over a somewhat longer evolutionary period from the sort of god that all the other gods were, who most demand and expect sacrifice and ritual, to the god of the young David who defeated Goliath and the god of the prophets, the god who is on the side of the underdog, the small, the weak, the poor, the god who most demands and expects justice and mercy.

 Cahill does a fine job describing this gradual change, but it is less innovative and provocative than his claim that Jews invented things like individualism but indeed, history itself, the sense the life is not a wheel but a one-way street. The past and future are not spins of the wheel, but segments of a line down which we travel. As Cahill would have it, the Jews invented time.

 I should probably note that he used “the Jews” as a conscious anachronism, because the word was not invented when most of the people he is writing about were alive. They were known then as Israel or as Hebrews or whatever, but Cahill wants to bundle them up with the word by which their descendants will eventually be known, and call them all Jews, and give them the credit for inventing all the things I have mentioned, and more.

 He thinks that with the ten plagues on the Egyptians, for whom the Hebrews were slave labor, challenge was first raised to every political structure that claims to act in the name of God. He thinks that Jews invented the idea that new could be a positive thing, and that one could welcome surprise. He thinks that in the Torah the Jews invented the literary form called history. He thinks that the Jews invented the Sabbath, and so invented the idea of vacation. He thinks that in the poetry of David, recorded in the Psalms, we have the first expression of an interior self. He thinks with Ruth we have the first sense of universal commonalities. He thinks that in its universalism and in its sense that life is one, that the sacred and the material are one, that the intellectual and the moral are one, Judaism, made science possible, grounded on a sense that the universe makes sense.

 He thinks we are especially indebted to the Jews for the Ten Commandments, which give us enough guidance to live in the frightful nowness of the present. And as much as he finds a lot of the other laws of little use, he thinks that on the whole they are liberal and humanizing for their time, with an underlying belief in the sacredness of all life and a unique bias toward the poor. “However faint our sense of justice may be,” he writes, and he does not think highly of our current treatment of the needy in this world, still “insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.” [155]

 He thinks perhaps the deepest Jewish insight is that “accomplishment is intergenerational” [170] – it only happens over with ages, with persistence from one age to the next. He thinks the Jews first understood that God speaks to the inner soul of every person, in the still, small voice of conscience. He thinks that Ruth is the first short story starring women, and that the Song of Songs is the earliest text about a reciprocal relationship between a woman and a man.

 He thinks that all liberation movements derive from the Jewish understanding of their own past as a holy exodus. He thinks capitalism and communism alike derive from the processive worldview born in Judaism in opposition to the previous cyclical view of things. And he thinks our ideas of equality, personalism, and indeed, democracy itself all derive from the ancient Jews. He thinks that for all times the prophets voiced our highest aspirations.

 And maybe he’s overstated it some (!). But Cahill reminds us that much of what we take for granted and what we most value are gifts to us from the motley crew that wandered the wilderness eons ago. In no small measure, “We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes.” [240-1] We are where we are, at least in part, because some one, some time, represented in the lore by Abraham, and then again by Moses, broke free from old ways of thinking and went off to seek the future.
 
 
 

  Back to the beginning of the First Parish homepage