A hypothetical world without Jews?
Thoughts in response to opinions of Senior Rabbi Matthew Rosenberg
On April 21, 2024, The Times of Israel published a featured post by Rabbi Matthew Rosenberg, titled Imagining a world without Jews, who celebrated Judaism as the one and only progenitor of “the radical notions of intrinsic human dignity, self-determination and worth.”
The good rabbi went on to expound this notion in great detail suggesting Judaism, aside from giving us Jesus Christ, delivered to the world a collection of foundational ideas which “birthed the radical notions of intrinsic human dignity, self-determination and worth.” And he further added:
Through retelling the Passover story each year, the Jews taught the world that God cares about human suffering and intervenes in history to right moral wrongs, sometimes through miracles which transcend the natural order. Indeed, the Jewish story undergirded the very idea that time progresses at all—that there is a destiny and purpose to human existence beyond mere survival, that the long arc of history bends towards justice—all these game-changing concepts trace to the Exodus experience and the Jewish People that emerged from it.
Without the Exodus, human consciousness could have remained morally and ethically static, cryogenically frozen as of 1300 BCE. There would have been no Christianity, no Islam, no Scientific Revolution, no American Revolution. And no one to argue that slavery is wrong. Whether in bondage to this Pharaoh or that, the basic premise of Life would have remained exactly the same as it ever was, and always was to be. And that’s why, when the authors of the Haggadah asserted centuries earlier that we would have still been slaves today—they meant it.
In short, the good rabbi proclaimed the Jews are the uncontested sole deliverers of what is Good, Merciful, and Holy to the human race hands down.
I am not, by any measure, a philosopher of religion and/or a deep student of Judaism. I am an “off-the-shelf” Orthodox Christian and I feel comfortable being one. And I respectfully find the good rabbi’s assertions a bit too optimistic, not to say historically off the mark.
I am not particularly religious, but I do believe the Father above does have a scheme for each of us humans.
I am not church-going and/or a reader of the Scriptures, but I have gotten closer to the faith of my progenitors after the mysterious collapse of my family in 2019, and the continuing pestilential silence of my ex wife and two daughters residing in America, which has transformed my daily existence into a controlled nightmare relentlessly tortured by ME/CFS.
The good rabbi’s sweeping Jewish assertions, however, triggered in my nearly exhausted mind an almost instinctive response to his rather bold declarations suggesting, not so tangentially, the world would have been effectively a jungle without the “revolutionary concept” that Judaism was (and, apparently, continues to be).
But, while Judaism was growing across the sea, the Ancient Greeks were already busy in their mountainous rugged country developing human philosophies dealing directly with the often disastrous imperfections of human character.
Socrates and Aristotle, to name just two out of the long list of Ancient Greek deep thinkers, focused on the human character and the endless contest to correct its many imperfections via introspection and the never-ending struggle of ironing out the inevitable flaws of the finite human being. Ancient Greeks, for better or for worse, did not look forward to entering an afterlife of peace and tranquility awaiting them if they maintained a peaceful, pious and even-handed life on earth. They believed that all transgressions attracted earthly punishment delivered by the ever-vigilant deities of Mt Olympus.
The absence of a messianic religion commanded by the God (Father & Son & The Holy Spirit) of Christianity, the Jewish god, or the Allah of the Musselmans did not affect the Ancient Greeks in their constant battle to attain moral perfection, human wisdom, and discipline under the laws of earthly administration.
Individual effort to improve one’s shelf was the key to a person waging his own personal struggle to correct his faults and overcome his weaknesses. And as Leslie Robbins recently put it “By embracing humanistic principles, the ancient Greeks laid the foundation for Western civilization’s focus on human potential and intellectual development.”
The world is literally brimming with religions, cults, and innumerable traditional belief systems affecting the lives of hundreds of millions.
Many devout Jews (like many devout Christians) do believe in the existence of an afterlife of eternal peace and tranquility that can be achieved by being “good” right here on earth and properly following the liturgical form of their religion. But how this system affecting finite humanity works still depends on one’s personal willingness to believe and accept practices, like regular prayers and acts of philanthropy, as the avenues paving the way to eternal peace and tranquility after death. And this demand alone defeats the notion that the world would have been worse off if one particular system of religious beliefs would have been absent from history.
Just saying.