Hilton Head Island, SC – August 7, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 11:31-12:9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” – Genesis 12:2 (RSV)
In many ways the Jews are the most remarkable ethnic and religious group of people every to have inhabited this planet. They are by no means the largest nationality there ever was, or the strongest, or the most widespread (although for their numbers they are astonishingly widespread). Nobody else in world history has had as much influence on the entire human race as the Jews: not the Mesopotamians or Egyptians or Romans or Chinese or Indians or Russians or Germans or French or British, and certainly not the Americans. The Mesopotamians and ancient Egyptians and Romans are long gone, and the Russians and Europeans and Americans are decidedly johnny-come latelies compared to the Jews.
If the Bible is accurate in its essential chronology, there has been an identifiable people known as Jews for almost four thousand years. The same can be said for the Chinese and Indians too, who have far, far greater numbers. In my opinion, however, their overall influence cannot match that of the Jews. The Chinese no doubt think they have had a greater effect on world history, because the Middle Kingdom has always had an understandably lofty opinion of itself, much of which is deserved. Nonetheless, for affecting all human life in the world, especially the western world, no ethnic group, including the Greeks, can equal the Jews for how greatly they have touched the lives of countless millions of people for the past four millennia.
From the beginning, the Jews were never very numerous. Various Mesopotamians (Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians) flourished in much larger numbers a thousand years before Abraham came along. The Egyptians also had a major civilization a millennium before Abraham. If Genesis is to be believed, the Jews (or Hebrews or Israelites as they were known before they were called Jews) came about because Abraham’s father, Terah, left Ur in Mesopotamia (or modern-day Iraq) and went to the land of Haran (maybe in what is now northeastern Syria or southeastern Turkey). The Bible says the Jews did not originate as an entirely separate and distinct people, but as a small family grouping of just three individuals, Abraham and his wife Sarah, and Abraham’s nephew Lot. That was it. No more, and no less.
Abraham’s original name was Abram (Avram). The name means “Exalted Father.” Eventually God changed his name to Abraham (Avraham), which means “Father of Nations.” That occurred because of the incident described in our two readings today from the Book of Genesis. In the first few verses of Genesis 12, God told Abraham that He was going to lead him from Haran to a land he would give to his descendants. God said, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…. By you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves” (12:2-3).
Listen carefully. This passage of scripture is highly important to both Jews and Arabs. And why? Because the tradition of both peoples declares that Abraham became the father of the Arabs through his son Ishmael, and Abraham also became the father of the Jews through his son Isaac. Thus both peoples lay claim by means of the same verses of scripture to the land of Canaan or the land of Israel or the land of Palestine. Jews and Muslims each are convinced the land is their by divine birthright. And they both have thought it for many centuries and generations. To the degree that Jews and Arabs are religious – and not all of them are religious -- many of them are certain God means for them to have that small sliver of land on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean. That explain the basis an enormous political problem with which the world has been confronted since 1948.
However, that factor is only tangential to the thrust of this sermon. The point of all this, as I said earlier, it to extol the people we know as the Jews. No people, including all the Christians, have done more to advance the human race than the descendants of Abraham, if in fact there ever was an historical Abraham. Some scholars are very skeptical that there ever was an Abraham. For purposes of this sermon, I shall assume there was. And even if there wasn’t, by 1000 BCE or so, there definitely was a nationality known as the Israelites, who later were called Jews. Anyone who denies that is the obstinately anti-Jewish type of person who would also deny that the 20th century Holocaust ever happened. Such views are racist nonsense.
World morality and ethics are far, far more exalted because of the Jews and the biblical laws known as the Torah. World literature is greatly enhanced, first because of the Bible itself, and secondly because of the thousands upon thousands of books written by Jews over the past two thousand years. Civil law in many countries owes much to Jews who have been involved in their jurisprudence over the centuries. Some of our most eminent attorneys, judges, and Supreme Court justices have been Jews. Countless governmental leaders in nations around the world for numerous generations have been Jews. Many of the most brilliant and successful scientific researchers have been Jews. And all of the arts everywhere have been hugely enhanced because of the Jews.
On the basis of sheer numbers, all these accomplishments are astonishing. For every Jew in the world there are perhaps 1500 Christians, and for every Jew maybe 900 Muslims. Have Christians or Muslims produced 1500 or 900 times as many advancements as the Jews? No honest observer could seriously make that claim.
Thomas Cahill is a writer whose specialization is writing a comprehensive history of various ethnic groups in whom he has a personal interest. Three of his titles are How the Irish Saved Civilization, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. In the latter book he wrote this: “For [the Jews] only impersonal survival, like the kingship, like the harvest, mattered; the individual…could have no meaning. And without the individual, neither time nor history is possible. But the God of Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov – no longer your typical ancient divinity, no longer the archetypal gesturer – is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability. He will continue to intervene. And these interventions will gradually bring about in Avraham’s descendants enormous changes of mind and heart, some of which are only hinted at in the patriarchal narratives” (pps. 94-5).
And here is something else to ponder: If there were no Jews, there would be no Christians or Muslims either. Christianity and Islam did not emerge out of a vacuum. Both religions came into existence because Judaism first existed. That is what Genesis 12 unwittingly was making clear at least six hundred years before there was a Christianity and twelve hundred years before there was an Islam. Jesus, the apostle Paul, and Muhammad all three owe an immeasurable debt to the Jews. Without what Christians mistakenly call the Old Testament, there could not be a New Testament or a Quran. More than half of the world’s seven billion people are primarily what they are because of the two people who schlepped with Abraham from Haran to Canaan 38 centuries ago. God said to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…. By you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” As a particular people, the Jews are God’s greatest gift to the world. That has long since come to pass, Christian people. Much of what is good and worthy and wholesome in the world exists because for so long the Jews have existed. The Jews are one of God’s all-time best blessings to this small corner of the cosmos.
Am I trying to suggest that “the Jews” or individual Jews have made no mistakes over the past three or four millennia? By no means. You only need to read both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Bible to learn that, plus many histories of many places since then. The Bible itself, through prophetic and other voices, spoke with divinely-inspired high dudgeon to attack Jewish religious, ethical, moral, legal and societal misdeeds and misjudgments. But that too is one of the many gifts of the Jews. They are a self-correcting people. You could ask the fictional Portnoy about his fictional complaint or the bellowings of Saul Bellow to discover that Jews, like every other nationality or ethnic group, have made innumerable mistakes. But in their defense, Jews somehow seem to take their errors much more seriously than most of us. They brood over them, they argue about them, they maybe even obsess over them more than the rest of us do. And they do it because they care; Jews care immensely about their behavior and actions and decisions. The pursuit of righteousness is an essential Jewish characteristic.
Without question much of the rationale to explain the extraordinary influence of the Jews comes because of the Bible itself. Whatever you think about the Bible, whether it is divinely inspired or inspired solely by human beings or it is infallible or inerrant or whatever else, this collection of books (the Greek word biblos means “library”) in both the Hebrew and Greek sections has had an incalculable effect going east from San Francisco all the way around the globe to Tokyo and going south all the way from Point Barrow and the North Cape all the way to Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. The Bible is unquestionably by far the most influential book in human history and intellectual evolution. Nothing else, not the Quran or the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching or any other book from any other period of time or any other culture or religion has shaped contemporary life anywhere as has the Bible. It is impossible to gauge what we would be without the Jewish and subsequently the Greek scriptures. To Jews “the Bible” is what Christians call the Old Testament, but to Christians it is that plus the New Testament. Taken together, no other book has a fraction of the influence on world history as those roughly thousand pages. Furthermore, Christians who read only the New Testament cannot possibly fully understand the New Testament.
When Abraham and his wife Sarah and Lot got to Canaan, their prospects were grim. Eventually Abraham was really old and Sarah was merely old, and they had no children. So Abraham went ahead and had a son Ishmael by his wife’s slave, whose name was Hagar. In addition, Lot had no wife. Then Lot married a woman from what we now call Jordan, which was a biblical no-no. Still, it happened countless times afterward when Hebrew or Israelite men married shikse women. The Bible insists this was strictly forbidden by God. Abraham finally had a son Isaac by Sarah when he was 99 and she was 89. Don’t challenge me on their ages; I’m only telling you what Genesis tells us. And thus came the Arabs via Ishmael and the Jews via Isaac. True, the Bible doesn’t say that, but the tradition of both the Arabs and the Jews insists on it. And Lot had no part in the lineage at all; he disappeared from the narrative altogether after his wife turned into the famous pillar of salt when Sodom and Gomorrah were obliterated.
Here is a rapid summary of biblical history from Abraham on. The Hebrews got a foothold in Canaan and then, because of a drought, they went to Egypt, where they became slaves, and then, four and a half centuries later, Moses led them out of Egypt, and then Joshua and others conquered Canaan, and then they established a kingdom, and it split in two, and the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE and the southern kingdom by the Babylonians in 587 BCE, and then they were under the thumb of one nation or another until 167 BCE, when they became independent, and then, in 67 BCE, the Romans conquered them. It was just one thing after another. But through it all, God was with them, and incontestably they remained Jews. Most of them assiduously refused to follow other gods, and were solely faithful to God of Abraham, praised be He.
After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the Jewish Insurrection of 68-72 CE, Jews were scattered to the four winds. They established communities all over the Mediterranean world and in the Persian Empire, and they settled as far east as India and China. They became the divine yeast in the cosmic loaf. But often it was hard for them, because they looked differently and lived differently from everyone else, and many Gentiles took offense at that. The most horrifying example of that anti-Jewish bias occurred during World War II in the Nazi Holocaust. Over the course of time, many Christians have paid a price for being Christians, but on a statistical and proportionate basis, no people have suffered more for their faith and their ethnicity than Jews.
Here is something about Jews which countless Gentiles don’t understand. Almost all Jews are ethnically Jewish, with the exception of Gentile converts. But not all Jews are religious Jews. Christians think of Jews as a religious group, but Jews think of themselves as a religious and ethnic group. We all know Jews who are not religious, but who strongly consider themselves Jewish. I can’t think of anyone I’ve known who is ethnically Jewish who denies being a Jew.
Throughout my ministry, but especially in the past 25 years or so, many parishioners have told me that I seem like a crypto-Jew to them. They may be right. In my own mind, I am a Christian, but I think of Jesus as the Messiah (the “Christ” in Greek), and not as the exclusive Son of God or the Second Person of the Trinity. I also cannot affirm the very notion of the Trinity, which I think was deliberately used by 4th century Christians to create an unbridgeable gap between themselves and Jews. In summation, I’m probably a Christian Jew or a Jewish Christian.
In any case, it is a providential blessing that our Christian congregation is privileged to worship in a Jewish synagogue. We aren’t Jews, and Congregation Beth Yam aren’t Christians, but we are all spiritual if not genetic children of Abraham and Sarah. (Lot didn’t help a lot, so we can skip his influence, which was nil.) After all, it was God who declared to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…. By you all the families of the earth will bless themselves.”
As the old eight-line poem says, “How odd/Of God/To Choose/ The Jews.” But how blessed the world is because of that pivotal if ultimately inexplicable choice. Hallelu-Yudith: Praise to the Jews!