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Thomas Cahill's moving and intelligent book is largely not about its title, The Gifts of the Jews How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. Cahill's frequent intense points are about how the Jews changed the way everyone thinks and feels. The majority of the book is a relation to major stories of the Hebrew Bible telling the history of the Jewish people and the growth of their relationship with God, from Abraham to the prophets and the Hebrew Bible's writings.
First of all, the Jewish Bible altered history by plainly creating history. Every religion in the world saw the world in cyclical terms. In describing the cyclical worldview, Cahill cites Henri-Charles Puech, author of Man and Time No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once . . . ; every event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at every turn of the circle.
On the other hand Judaism was different. According to the Jews' way of life, events actually move forward; they do not only repeat themselves. In their denial of this common mode of thought, Cahill writes, The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle. . . . It may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings had ever had.In Cahill's words, Most of our best words, in fact new, adventure, surprise; unique individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice are the gifts of the Jews. Cahill is right to highlight this changeable Jewish contribution. If every situation is like a circle, nothing we do will matter, none of us will matter and life itself will not matter. It will just all happen again and again. For our actions to matter, they will have to be able to affect the future. But the future cannot be affected if everything happens over and over.
If the Jewish view is adopted everything will matter, everything we take on will matter, therefore we all matter. All of us will change history by what we do. Cahill offers two outstanding unique explanations of why the Bible's genealogies, sections of the Bible that bore most of us, are very important. One reason is that the listing of these individuals' names, even the names of women, was the Hebrew Bible's way of saying that every one of these people was different. Cahill's other explanation of the importance of the genealogical listings is that they are the Bible's way of telling us that the Bible is history, not mythology.Order custom research paper on GIFT OF THE JEWS BY THOMAS CAHILL
The second changeable Jewish gift was its understanding of God. The Hebrew God, unlike every god before, cannot be manipulated, and this God is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.
The third changeable gift is when God defeated the demi-god Pharaoh, In one fell swoop, and this subversive narrative delegitimizes all political structures claiming god as their author and delegitimizes, in fact, all the political structures of the ancient world. That is why the Ten Plagues were aimed at Egyptian gods and blood, the first plague, for example, changed the Nile-god into blood, and the ninth, darkness, blotted out Ra, the sun-god, chief god of the Egyptians.
The fourth gift was when the Jews gave the world the belief of human freedom on two levels. The first and most commonly known is the Torah's rejection of slavery as a norm in the human condition, which is why black Americans took so much relief in the Hebrew Bible's narrative. The least commonly known but just as important way was another result of the Bible's total refusal of the cyclical view of life We are not doomed, not bound to some predetermined fate; we are free. If anything can happen, we are truly liberatedas liberated as were the Israelite slaves when they crossed the Sea of Reeds.
The fifth gift, through the Ten Commandments, for the first time . . . human beings are offered a code without justification. Because this is God's code no justification is required. . . Who but God can speak ten words 'Thou-shalt' and Thou-shalt-not' with such authority that no further words are needed? Though Cahill does not get to involved in this and I found this a problem with this book the key point here, as I have always understood it, is that which is good is good because God says it is good; God does not say something is good because it is so already. God is the source of morality; morality does not exist without God. Moral feeling I do not like killing; I feel that stealing is wrong may exist without God, but they are only feelings.
The sixth gift, the Jews gave the world a day of rest. No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. As one observes the Shabbat, I can indicate to its life-changing effects. Cahill states, Those who live without such sentimental punctuation are emptier and less resourceful. Cahill's point about the center of human freedom in the Jewish idea of life is also made clear in the Shabbat commandment. Those people, who work seven days a week, even if they are being paid millions of dollars to do so, are considered slaves in the biblical conception.
The seventh gift, Israel was the first human society to so value education and the first to picture it as a universal pursuit.
The eighth gift, the Hebrew Bible's bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, in so far as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.
The ninth gift, the Torah's and Judaism's ideas, which ends with the words God is one, led to the possibility of modern science. For life is not a series of separate experiences, influenced by different forces. We do not live in a split universe, controlled by changeable and warring gods. The scientific search for a unifying theory of the universe is one of the effects of the Bible's monotheistic revolution.
The tenth gift, the Jews invented the idea of the spiritual. There is no way of exaggerating how strange a thought this was . . . The word that falls so easily from our lips spiritual had no equivalent in the ancient world.
According to Judaism, the Jews are God's third attempt to have people treat each another decently. The first was conscience, the voice in all human beings telling them that some things are right and some wrong. This didn't work. People acted bad from the beginning. So God destroyed the world except for righteous Noah and his family and started all over depending on the revelation of seven basic moral laws (The Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah), and not only on conscience. When that failed God revealed Himself and more laws to one people the Jews. Possibly eternal people can teach people morals even better than the eternal God.
This may help answer the question about Christianity and Islam at least in a way that one caring Jew can answer it. Though Judaism regards God's revelations to the Jewish prophets as God's last revelations, even Jews mainly Jews could see that a thousand and more years later the world was not getting much more moral, that for whatever reasons the Jews were not having a universal moral impact. It is fairly understandable, even for a religious Jew, to understand why some Jews believed that a fourth moral revelation was needed. Believers in this fourth effort to bring more love into the world became known as Christians. Some six hundred years later in Arabia, another part of the world influenced by the Jews, some non-Jews believed that a fifth divine revelation was in need also. They are known as Muslims.A believing Jew would regard these world religions as further evidence of the power and realism of God's gifts to the Jews.
As for what Jews should be doing now, the answer is more understandable than its execution. Jews should be spreading ethical monotheism to the world's peoples. Unfortunately, most do not. Most religious Jews live lives that are too limited to affect other Jews, let alone non- Jews, while many nonreligious Jews, if they recognize with a mission to influence humanity, choose to do so through worldly ideologies. To put it in a sentence, the Jews who most live Judaism don't talk to the world, and the Jews who talk to the world don't live Judaism. Both groups should read The Gifts of the Jews as should non-Jews, mainly those who believe that their religion has passed Judaism.
In conclusion, I mainly recommend anti-Jewish Muslims and Christians to read Cahill's one-sentence summary of anti-Semitism The hatred of Christians for Jews may have its final source in hatred of God, a hatred that the hater must carefully keep himself from knowing about. Now someone rather though not necessarily a non-Christian needs to write The Gifts of the Christians. For these are very great and include something called the United States of America. America is largely a Christian gift, and unless most of us Americans understand this, and unless Christian influence endures, this gift will surely be taken away. European denial of those gifts gave us Nazism and communism. Even a Jew knows that.
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