Why We Are Deeply Indebted to the Jews

    Where did we every get the basic ideas that drive modern life: freedom, change, progress, and so on?

    Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews tells us the answer. Subtitled “How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels,” this is a wonderfully readable summary of the Old Testament and its central story – the history of the Jewish people.

    The first thing to realize, according to Cahill, is that no other ancient society thought or acted like the Jews. Before the Jews, “reality seemed to be a great circle, closed and predictable in its revolutions.” There was no sense of time, or future, or progress; humans were born, lived, and died just like their ancestors did and just like their children would do.

    Then a man named “Avram” (or Abram) heard a mysterious voice, telling him to leave his home and his clan and go to an unknown destination. And “Avram went” – Cahill says these are “two of the boldest words in all literature. They signal a complete departure from everything that has gone before .... Out of Sumer, civilized repository of the predictable, comes a man who does not know where he is going but goes forth into the unknown wilderness under the prompting of his god.”

    From that point onward, Abram and his descendants think and say and do things that turn established ideas upside down. For example, he says, “There is no document in all the literatures of the world that is like the Ten Commandments.” He says that ethical guidelines from other cultures were always legalistic (do this and this will be the consequence) or advisory (if you want to lead a happy life, do this or don’t do that). But the Ten Commandments offer humans “a code without justification.” In other words, do this ... because God says so.

    On the Sabbath: “No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. The God who made the universe and rested bids us do the same, calling us to a weekly restoration of prayer, study, and recreation (or re-creation).”

    Cahill also finds the beginning of individualism in the Bible. Into a world in which all identity and validation came from solidarity with a group or tribe, the idea of the individual – the single spirit – who can make a difference begins to take hold in the lives of Abraham’s descendants.

    At the end of the book, Cahill looks back and says Abram “did something no one had ever done before him: he put faith in this Voice and upended his whole life, becoming in the process a new man with a new name and an individual destiny, a destiny that was only his, a personal vocation, not something written in the stars – something no one before him had ever imagined possible.” He was followed by many others, like Moses, who also heard a Voice and were willing to put their trust in it.

    Following the Voice, making individual choices, leads to time becoming real; a real future is possible. Because all outcomes have not been predetermined, the present is full of adventure, and when the present is past, that creates history.

    Thus life is not like the movement of a wheel, as all other societies had imagined; it is not cyclical, coming around again and again. Rather, each moment is unique and unrepeatable; life is a process, it is going somewhere, and because it is not preordained, individuals are free to imagine progress.

    That is why, according to Cahill, most of our best words – new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice – are all gifts of the Jews.