Has The Whole World Been Blessed?

Let’s start where the story starts. Abram is living in Ur of the Chaldees when, without explanation or preamble, God – the God of history – says to him, get up, get out of there and go where I send you – where I’ll make you “a great nation” and – “in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

In the years since the defeat of the last anti-Roman war for Jewish independence, ca. 135 CE, nobody who had sense or clout in history would have put money on that promise, at least in its original form, in Genesis 12:1.

By 135 CE, Jews weren’t the only stakeholders in the promise of Genesis 12. In the ensuing centuries, what did Christians make of it? In fact, never mind taking a share; they simply lifted it over to themselves, lock, stock and barrel. How’d they explain that? Not a problem. The people from whom they’d lifted it were absolutely the worst people in the world and could expect to be consigned after they died – by the same God of their forefather Abraham – to hellfire! Particularly infuriating was that the Jews seemed not to have gotten the message. They actually believed that the God of Abraham still loved them! Pfui! They should only burn in hell.

By now, roughly two thousand years later, those the-Father-likes-me-best-and really-abominates-you passions appear to have cooled. In the West at least, the temperature of religious disputes has gone down to approximately lukewarm. The damnation of non-Christians is no longer publicly affirmed and non-Western religionists get invited to contribute to the world conversation on what God is. And those who think God isn’t – the atheists, the agnostics who aren’t sure one way or the other – add their voices to the international cacophony.

One might suppose that, for sophisticated, modern people, the place of Judaism – as the primordial, ground-level layer under the many-storied edifice of the Western religions – would be simply taken for granted. So it’s odd that Jews and Judaism often don’t rate so much as a mention.

In this connection, a certain embarrassment may be relevant. Jews do get priority, but as the preferred target of a relatively new brand of excoriation. Masses of people who take themselves to be at the cutting edge of enlightened opinion have denounced the risibly small, militarily and propagandistically ringed-about Jewish state for daring to act on the conviction that its existence is – for the first time since 135 CE – worth fighting for.

Of course, the excoriators know, or have every means of knowing, what deeds the Jew-haters of October 7 bragged to their mothers about and filmed! The excoriators possess the intellectual means to distinguish between, on the one hand, the IDF’s war to remove from their enemies the power to do it again (even if those enemies hide under hospitals and kindergartens), and on the other hand, the barbarous acts that prompted Israel to enter Gaza. Such distinctions are not difficult to draw. A state where Jews report feeling safer under continuous rocket fire than they have currently felt on American campuses must do what it can to survive.

In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed? Whatever could that have meant? Does it now mean anything? Has history falsified God’s promise? Did they write it down wrong? Modern Christians probably suppose that it happened in some sense and probably didn’t get entirely transferred away from the Jews. (After the Holocaust, the doctrine of supersessionism looked a bit awkward.) Or are the atheists right? Is there no God and therefore no divine promise to make sense of? Or is divinity real “in some sense,” but not in the sense that allows it to make promises?

What is history? Does it have any meaning – any that could be captured in the terms set by such a promise? I’m addressing this question – not just to theists of a Judeo-Christian turn of mind – but to anyone who can entertain it as a thought-experiment. Whether or not there is a God, much less a God who is a player in history, what would it be like if the same God who made a history-laden commitment to Abraham were now in some way present and still a player in the current scene on the ground?

What’s going on elsewhere, outside of Israel and Gaza? Right now, Europe is in the throes of massive intellectual and cultural self-skepticism, even while some thoughtful Europeans are trying to find or renew their civilization’s raison d’etre (its reason for being). At the same time, the continent is on the receiving end of a migrant population whose most extreme members are openly anti-European triumphalists. In our country, the educational influencers appear significantly affected by a derivative mindset that runs along the same lines, wondering why the culture should continue to exist in any significant and recognizable form.

From many quarters, this cultural self-refusal crystallizes in editorials, letters and demonstrations that deny – to the Jewish nation alone – its right to prevent its mortal enemies from winning a victory whose openly-stated aim is to obliterate that nation. In contrast to its excoriators, the Jewish state, in its birth rate and its citizen army, is an example of a modern state that does not suffer from this sort of self-refusal. This despite a roar of almost global dimensions – urging it to refuse to be!

At the same time, individuals and groups not normally interested in Jews or their nation have stepped up to express horror at the atrocities of October 7, support for the military reaction forced on Israel by those crimes, and an allied sense that the defense of Israel has become the front line in the battle to save modern civilization from its current crisis of self-immolation.

In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed? To pursue our thought-experiment for a moment longer: If you were a God who was a player in world history – and you wanted to save civilization from its present self-despair – might not this be a way to do it?

*This essay was originally published at the Dear Abbie Non-Advice column and is republished here with gracious permission.

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