The Gifts of the Jews Catholic author thanks Jews for Western values Review by April Witt for Miami Herald Published: Tuesday, April 14, 1998, If not for the Jews, no one would know to love justice, yearn for freedom, struggle for faith in one God or hope for a tomorrow better than today. Jews helped invent Western culture and without Jewish ideas and values there would be no civil rights movement, democracy or even history. That’s the central, sweeping premise of The Gifts of the Jews, the latest book by Roman Catholic scholar and best-selling author Thomas Cahill.’ ‘The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside — our outlook and our inner life,’ ‘ writes Cahill, who will be at Temple Judea in Coral Gables tonight to talk about the book.’ ‘We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact — new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, program, spirit; faith, hope, just — are the gifts of the Jews.’ ‘Cahill, 58, has his own gift: making history accessible, even compelling to a mass culture largely ignorant of its patrimony. His last book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, was a New York Times bestseller for more than a year and a half.
The Gifts of the Jews, the second in a planned series, climbs onto the list next week.’ ‘I tell history as a story and people love stories,’ ‘ Cahill said in a telephone interview Monday. ”It’s a human need.’ ”’I tried to find a language that enables me to talk to Jews, to Christians and to secular Western unbelievers so they can all follow me through the story.’ ‘But Cahill has a grander purpose than telling stories or selling books.’ ‘I think we are, for all kinds of reasons, in danger of forgetting who we are,’ ‘ Cahill said. ”In education, in the culture at large, we have stopped naming our ancestors.’ ‘As head of religious publishing for Doubleday for many years, Cahill spent hours at meetings with young colleagues ”who seemed to think that most of what happened before the Kennedy assassination might as well have been in the Middle Ages,’ ‘ he said.’ ‘There’s just a real dumb ing down of where things came from and how we got to be who we are. We got to be who we are from all the people who came before us, and if we can’t name them, we are orphans cast adrift without a name.’ ‘In Gifts, Cahill portrays Abraham as the first human in history who welcomed adventure.
He retells the story of the Jewish patriarch and argues that when Abraham in Genesis heeded God’s call to go forth, leaving his land and kin — with faith, but no firm plan — something entirely new in history was happening. Abraham forged a relationship with one omnipotent God, acted on hope that tomorrow could be better than today, and fulfilled a personal destiny — all of which represents a complete break from all previous world views. Before Abraham, Cahill writes, man had such an unrelentingly cyclical view of the world that the very ideas of progress or history were impossible.’ ‘The thing that Newton said — that he didn’t do that much, he stood on the shoulders of giants — can be said of all of us. We are products of this long and multifaceted, varied journey that begins with Abraham and then goes for 4, 000 years down to the present.’ ‘The idea for a series of books on the ”hinges of history”s truck Cahill 28 years ago, while he was attending a raucous Puck Fair in Ireland — the remnant of an ancient pagan fertility rite — and enjoying himself considerably less than he’d expected to.’ ‘It was so totally alien to me. It came as a shock to me, over that period of time in Ireland, that the real difference between me and what I could feel of this alien culture was the Bible,’ ‘ Cahill said.’ ‘The Bible was the matrix of the values that I really care about. It came as a real shock.
I don’t think it’s taught that way, and I had a perfectly good education.’ ‘.