The Gifts Of The Jews: How A Tribe Of Desert Nomads Changed The Way Everyone Thinks And Feels (2015) - Plot & Excerpts
". . . the Bible is full of literature's two great themes, love and death (as well as its exciting caricatures, sex and violence) . . . " (7).I thought this insight that sex and violence are caricatures of the great themes of love and death was really interesting!"The sky shows itself as it really is: infinite, transcendent . . . . 'Most high' becomes quite naturally an attribute of the divinity" (40)."We may consider naive the absolute confidence of primitive peoples in the rightness of their interpretations of reality. But we should not forget that their sense of corrrespondence is founded on metaphor (as in a poetic phrase like "the vault of heaven") and that metaphor is the basis of all language and thought, as it is of all religion" (49)."And for the more mystical among them, there was the belief that this knowledge could put them in touch with something beyond themselves. Every rite has its irrational, mystical center, its acme of consecration, its moment out of time . . . and its purpose is ecstatic union, however fleeting, with transcendent reality, with the ultimate, with what is beyond mutability" (56)."On every continent, in every society, Avram would have been given the same advice that wise men as diverse as Heraclitus, Lao-Tsu, and Siddhartha would one day give their followers: do not journey, but sit; compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow--on all that is past or passing or to come--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)."Despite the radical break, there is much continuity between the old world of the Wheel and Avraham's new world of the Journey. Avraham does not turn overnight into a wide-eyed desert mystic, seeking only the Lord. He seeks the things all sane men see--pleasure and security--though he hopes for something more, something New" (93)."This God is the initiator: he encounters them; they do not encounter him. This God is profoundly different from them, not their projection or their pet . . . This God gives and takes beyond human reasoning or justification. Because his motives are not interpretable and his thoughts and actions are not foreseeable, anything--and everything--is possible. Many new things have already come into being as a result of this relationship, but faith most of all, which prior to Avraham had no place in religious feeling and imagination. Because all is possible, faith is possible, even necessary" (93-94)."Yaakov, who has seen the face of God and lived, speaks the uncanny words [to Esav:] 'Just to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me so kindly.' The narrator, as is his custom, gives us no help in interpreting this gnomic expression. But we know that in this ancient world to 'see the face' of someone was to know him, to understand his character, to grasp his identity. Because Yaakov has seen the face of God--has been allowed, however partially, to know God as he really is, to see into the face of ultimate truth--he can also see an individual human being for who he is; and somehow this experience is like the experience of God. What this will mean for the future is yet to be spelled out, but the human being as pawn . . . . is quietly and subtly giving way to a more exalted vision of what a human being is" (95)."But for me, when I attempt to say the consonants [YHWH:] without resort to vowels, I find myself just breathing in, then out, with emphasis, in which case God becomes the breath of life" (110)."The Israelites, by becoming the first people to live--psychologically--in real time, also became the first people to value the New and to welcome Surprise" (128)."For the ancients, the future was always to be a replay of the past, as the past was simply and earthly replay of the drama of the heavens . . . . the history that is not history but myth [repeats itself:]. For the Jews, history will be no less replete with moral lessons. But the moral is not that history repeats itself but that it is always something new: a process unfolding through time, whose direction and end we cannot know, except insofar as God gives us some hint of what is to come . . . . We do not control the future; in a profound sense, even God does not control the future because it is the collective responsibility of those who are bringing about the future by their actions in the present. For this reason, the concept of the future--for the first time--holds out promise, rather than just the same old thing" (131)."This marvelous new sense of time did not descend upon the Israelites all at once. What began as the call of Avraham to leave his place and his people and set out for an unknown destiny blossomed into the vocation of Moshe to lead his enslaved people out of the god-haunted ambience of cyclical Egypt, where everything that would be had already been and all important questions had been answered . . . . In these two journeys we have gone from the personal (the destiny of Avraham) to the corporate (the destiny of the People of Israel). We have gone from a patronal god, a household god that one carries along for good luck, to YHWH, the God of gods, whose power is mightier even than the mightiest power on earth can summon. Taken together, these two great escapes give us an entirely new sense of past and future--the past as constitutive of the present, the future as truly uknown" (132)."But what of the present? Is it just a moment, glinting briefly between past and future, hardly worth elaborating on? No, it is to be the pulsing, white-hot center of all the subsequent narrative, the unlikely intersection of time and eternity, the moment where God is always to be found. This completion of the Jewish religious vision will claim the viture and intelligence of all the priests, prophets, and kings who will fill the rest of the story of Israel. For it will take all the skill and devotion of this people through all their history to revere the past without adoring it, to bow before the opaque mystery of the future without offering it the fear that is reserved to God alone, and to stand neither in the storied past nor the imagined (or dreaded) future but in the present moment" (132)."Besides the innovation of speaking the unspoken moral law aloud, one should note the lesser--but hardly unimportant--innovation of the weekend, which got its start in the Jewish Sabbath (or 'Ceasing'). No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest" (144)."The connections to both freedom and creativity lie just beneath the surface of this commandment: leisure is appropriate to a free people, and this people so recently free find themselves quickly establishing this quiet weekly celebration of their freedom; leisure is the the necessary ground of creativity, and a free people are free to imitate the creativity of God" (144)."Well, the truth is that YHWH is something of a bull--and he shouldn't be so surprised that the people have decided to picture him thus. It is obvious that at this period--a period in which this odd little phyla of Semites is ever so gradually evolving from polytheists to monotheists--they are attributing to their favorite God the qualities of other principal Middle Eastern dieties: he is a storm god, who appears in heavenly fire and fog and whose angers, like his thunderbolts, are sudden and destructive, fulminating and volcanic . . . . As we shall see, these depictions of divine wrath will eventually give way to a purer understanding of God, but at this moment we have a snapshot of monotheism in its tadpole stage" (151-152)."It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God's own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God--the Real God, the One God--was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of hearing him, it could happen only in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature (which was so imbued with contrary, god-inhabited forces) seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings imagine becoming human in a new way. Only under a sun without pity, on a mountain devoid of life, could the living God break through the cultural filters that normally protect us from him" (161)."Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love" (Rienhold Niebuhr quoted on 169-170)."That accomplishment is intergenerational may be the deepest of all Hebrew insights" (170)."This is the great moment, the moment of maximum anticipation--to go the way one has never gone before, and yet to go home . . ." (170)."And the truth--for eight-century Samaria--was this: to serve God means to act with justice. One cannot pray and offer sacrifice while ignoring the poor, the beggars at the gates. But more radical still: if you have more than you need, you are a thief, for what you 'own' is stolen from those who do not have enough" (214)."It is no longer possible to believe that every word of the Bible was inspired by God" (245).Really?!! Believing in inspiration is different that reading it literally."But even without resorting to modern scientific methodology or noticing what an inconsistent palimpsest the Hebrew Bible can be, we must reject certain parts of the Bible as unworthy of a God we would be willing to believe in" (245).I am always tempted to do this...but it doesn't seem justifiable that I take on the role of editor.
Thomas Cahill celebrates Jewish values, which he believes were gifts that helped humans to see the world differently. Two of the most important gifts were that of new concept of time and that of a new concept of the individual. Cahill believes that the Jews were the first people to see time as linear rather than circular. In contrast, the ancients viewed the cosmos as a cyclical wheel of life that corresponded with what they observed in the natural world (phases of moon, changing of season, cycle of a woman’s body, birth, copulation, and death), and the ancients depicted this cycle in their ziggurats and mounds with their spirals and zigzags, ever turning and ever beginning again. Consequently, if time is nothing but a circle, nothing that we do matters. The individual does not matter because everything will happen again, regardless of the choices of the individual. Our actions don’t matter because those actions cannot influence the future circle where everything happens over and over. Starting with the story of Abraham, time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible. Everything matters—every choice and every act matters; therefore, individuals matter because each of us changes history in some way. This idea of personal destiny contributes to human freedom as exemplified by Moses and the Exodus. “We are not doomed, not bound to some predetermined fate; we are free. If anything can happen, we are truly liberated—as liberated as were the Israelite slaves when they crossed the Sea of Reeds.” Later Hebrew prophets would call upon society even more forcefully to grant social justice to individuals. Cahill argues that democracy grows directly out of Israelite vision of individuals who have value and a personal destiny because they are made in God’s image. The ramifications of this worldview were enormous because it bequeathed the great liberation movements: abolition; prison-reform; antiwar; worker’s rights; civil rights; indigenous and dispossessed peoples; anti-apartheid; solidarity; and free speech. Writing as a progressive Catholic, Cahill tries to apologize for the former anti-Semitism of his Church.``The hatred of Christians for Jews may have its ultimate source in hatred of God, a hatred that the hater must carefully keep himself from knowing about.'' This is one of a series of seven books (starting with “How the Irish Saved Civilization”) that explores the role of a culture or an idea in advancing civilization. I found this book and the Irish book to be accessible for well-informed readers with a solid grasp of history, but Cahill is sometimes so subtle in the presentation and location of his main points that I think casual readers might miss them. But there is no missing the fact that Cahill celebrates the triumph and survival of Jewish people and values. "Where are the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians today?'' Ultimately, Cahill believes that the survival of Jewish identity across millennia against impossible odds is a miracle of cultural survival.October 14, 2013
What do You think about The Gifts Of The Jews: How A Tribe Of Desert Nomads Changed The Way Everyone Thinks And Feels (2015)?
Cahill begins by explaining that the Jews created Western civilization. But then he goes on to show why this audacious statement understates the case. The revelation that came to the Jews broke the endless cycle of life and death to which the ancient peoples subscribed. Theirs was a world of monotony devoid of reason, purpose, and worth. The calling of Abraham changed everything. For the first time in history there was history. Man was part of a narrative in which he was given a unique role. He had dignity and was part of an ordered creation that could be deciphered. This understanding has led to every advance in human rights and made science and democracy possible. It has become so accepted around the world that its exclusive nature seems absurd. Most who have inherited these temporal gifts are ignorant of their source. Cahill writes as a skeptic. He questions the veracity of the Hebrew Scriptures and makes no reference to Christ, who is their fulfillment. Ironically, this perspective gives even greater significance to the revelation. Here you have a secular scholar attempting to explain the unexplainable: how an insignificant Semitic tribe came up with the only thing new under the sun. Something so revolutionary and profound that it changed the world forever. Something entirely outside of the human experience that manages to perfectly capture our condition. Cahill cannot help but acknowledge the divine nature of such revelation, even if he fails to fully grasp its source.
—John
tThis is an interesting book that explains how the worldview of the ancient Jews was especially unique when compared to their contemporaries. The Gifts of the Jews follows ancient Jewish history, as recorded in the Tanakh, providing a historian’s insight into the significance of the events and showing the reader how many aspects of our modern culture that we take for granted were so unprecedented and revolutionary back then. Without this unique culture of the Jews, Cahill argues, our tendency towards individualism would be unheard of.tThe Gifts of the Jews is full of interesting perspective on some of the most important stories of the Tanakh, such as those of Avraham, Moshe, Ruth, David, Solomon, and Elijah. A few of my favorites (Daniel, as well as his three friends, and Esther) are left out, but the book is only so long.tCahill does a good job at pointing out the terrible nature of YHWH. I believe that many of the LORD’s aspects are underplayed in modern Christianity. For one, he is the God of the Jews. America is not his chosen nation; we are not the “New Israel.” Secondly, he does not resemble a fluffy teddy bear in appearance or personality. He is not cute or cuddly, and he deals with sin severely. We see this aspect of God in the Bible, and The Gift of the Jews brings it out well.tCahill cites the actions that Yehoshua did in God’s name and makes the baseless claim that “there is no way of attributing mass carnage and vindictive slaughter to a God worth believing in (246)” and that every believer “must … admit that these operations were the work of human beings who wrongly convinced themselves that God was on their side (246).” While Cahill explains most of his arguments well, why one “must” admit such a thing is unclear. One cannot assume that such slaughters are outside the nature of a God who demands bloody sacrifice in atonement for sin, which is the very basis of Christianity. Furthermore, many people do not admit that this was the work of humans “who wrongly convinced themselves that God was on their side.” Unfortunately, some people seem to be able to embrace these slaughters with seemingly no struggle. I would question the humanity of such a person, as this is a grave and severe matter, just like most of the Bible and the revealed nature of God himself. However, many Christians believe that these incidents happened, that they took place by the order of YHWH, that the same is the God they still serve, and that they can only view God is a less brutal light because they themselves will not half to pay the hefty penalty for sin. I am currently of the belief that the image of a super-friendly God, which seems to me to be propagated from modern Christianity too often, is a lie and that the acts of God that Cahill wants us to reject are the ones that we must bring ourselves to accept, whether it comes easily or not.tHowever, my disagreements with some of Cahill’s conclusions aside, The Gifts of the Jews is worth reading for all believers, as well as non-believers with even the most casual interest in the roots of Western Judeo-Christianity.
—John
Rated solely on how interestingly Cahill writes, I would give it a five. This is a very enjoyable read, and may be beneficial to discerning lovers of our story who are able to eat the fish and spit out the bones.However, Thomas Cahill is thoroughly beholden to our current zeitgeist of secularism, and exhibits all the snobbery of a faithful worshipper of the gods of 'scientism' and 'scholarism'. Because of this, his highest standard for judging historical accuracy was the secular sensibilities of the modern; i.e. his own sense for what sounded realistic. Like Jefferson, every time the evidence pointed to a conclusion that conflicted with political correctness or suggested the supernatural, voila! it's just myth! Frankly, the predictability and childishness of it would have been funny if it hadn't been so frustrating.
—Donald Owens ii
