Why is Israel alone forced to justify its existence and questioned when it stands up to those who would annihilate it? Why was a worldwide campaign of hatred that reeked of anti-Semitism unleashed on Israel when it responded to the October 7, 2023, attack, while there was no criticism of Hamas? Why has the U.N. censured the Jewish state more times than any other nation, even China, North Korea, and Cuba combined?
The answer runs deeper than geopolitics, says conservative commentator and legal scholar Josh Hammer in his debut book Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. Western civilization is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and its enemies know well that to deny the existence of God and destroy individual rights, private property, and freedom, they must first destroy the Jews. Ergo, he argues, the preservation of the West is contingent on the welfare of the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel.
It was the People of the Book who first introduced the world to monotheism, and along with it, to ethical and legal codes that became the basis for the establishment and preservation of all civilizations. The West drew upon the Judaic idea of humankind as the pinnacle of God’s creation to give primacy to individuals, their freedom, and their rights. Many of America’s Founding Fathers admired Jewish history, culture, and its legal and moral teachings.
God made a promise to the Jews to protect them as long as they kept his covenant and followed his commandments. The Hebrew Bible speaks of the Divine Revelation of the Decalogue to Moses at Mount Sinai, the 613 mitzvot of the Torah, and the seven Noahide laws. The seventh Noahide law, as mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud — to establish courts of justice — is perhaps the first expression of the need for neutral forums and judges to deliver justice. It is by obeying these laws — divine and temporal – that Jews, often at great cost, have survived millennia of persecution.
The other big ideas that Judaism has contributed to the West, writes Hammer, are of individual dignity, self-worth, community, and collective holiness. The commandments emphasize a balance not only between the individual and the community, but also between the very human pursuit of pleasure and the ideals of work, duty, and honor. Hedonism and unrestrained passion are to be shunned in favor of a deliberate and lasting moderation.
Hammer warns Christians of the need to recognize how not only Jewish culture but Jews themselves are, in a way, the sine qua non of Western civilization. He writes:
For Christians, adherents of the West’s dominant religion, it is imperative to internalize the basic truth that the civilization they were so instrumental in building and developing is largely predicated upon values and principles derived from the Hebrew Bible. And it is not just the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud as well has been so central to the formation of Western civilization as a unique strand of the human experience. Rather, it is also the Jews themselves – the original People of the Book – who introduced monotheism to the world, who have always been foundational to the entire construct.
Unfortunately, the seminal role that Jews have played in the formation of Western civilization is being downplayed or criticized to pernicious effect. Morality, for the Jew, is absolute, permanent, unyielding. The Jew is a testament to the existence of God and His expectations from humans — that is, to reflect the Divine Image in all that humans do on earth. Therefore, for the God-less, postmodern ideologies of moral relativism, writes Hammer, the Jew is a prize target, for he is an embodiment and “an enduring testimony of God’s existence, his Kingdom, and His Divine Will.”
Today, with the denial of God, we are inching towards a paganism that manifests in self-worship (my gender, my skin color, my intersectionality) and an elevation of Nature above humankind. In Genesis (1:27, 28), God creates man and woman in his image, and asks them to multiply and have dominion over everything upon the earth. The verse establishes a human-centric worldview, one that has sustained the West, in truth, all human civilization. But today, that is considered controversial and deemed an anathema by the Leftist-anarchists set upon destroying the axis holding together the order that sustains civilization.
Science and reason, once tempered by God-dictated ethics and morality, and hence the impetus for true civilizational progress, have been elevated to replace the truth and wisdom of God. It was a purely materialistic science, shorn of human and Godly spirit, that impelled Nazi Germany to exterminate races deemed inferior and purify society for a master race. Again, it was fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, shorn of ethics, that made pagans believe that child sacrifice or the mass killing of enemy prisoners could bring prosperity.
Hammer writes that though he is Jewish, his childhood was secular. Jewishness only meant eating Jewish food, participating in cursory ritual observances, celebrating holidays, and lauding prominent Jewish entertainers. Recognizing the superficiality of this posture, he gave rein to his curiosity to explore his roots and seek a greater understanding of the tenets and history of a monotheistic religion that is at once a faith, an ethnicity, and a civilization.
Judaism, he writes, is unique in that it is the faith of a people with an eternal attachment to a very specific ancient land — Eretz Yisrael — promised to them as a nation by God. Other ethnicities may have lived there in the past, but none of them exist today. There is demonstrable, undeniable archaeological and biblical evidence that the Jews have had an uninterrupted presence in Israel since the time of Joshua — some 3,200 years ago.
Therefore, he writes, any attempt to sever the long-enduring ties of the Jewish people to their land amounts to antisemitism. Those who proclaim that “From the Jordan to the sea, Palestine will be free,” radical and Islamist groups that decry the collateral killing of Arabs as Israel defends itself from eradication, world leaders who ignore the October 7 massacres but censure Israel for its acts of self-preservation — they must all be viewed as those who would see the Jewish state destroyed.
Indeed, they must be viewed as those who would see the West destroyed. For, says Hammer, Israel is Ground Zero in the fight for Western civilization. It is the tip of the spear for the pushback against Islamism, wokeism, and globalism. The battle for Israel is the battle for the fate and the soul of the West, and blatant disregard for Jews is a sure sign of societal collapse. Unsurprisingly, those who rail against Israel and the Jews are both anti-American and anti-Western civilization.
October 7, 2023, shattered the misguided belief that Hamas would reform. Yet, the response was reprehensible. The world turned upon Israel — the victim of a monstrous Hamas attack — and even blamed Israel and the Jews for provoking the murders, the rapes, the torture that the Hamas perpetrated. At radical leftist infested universities across America and Europe, antisemitism was on full display, and some teachers defended calls for Jewish genocide. Several antisemitic attacks, including a murder, went unprosecuted and unreported.
If people understood the roots of Jew hatred and what it means for the West, writes Hammer, there would be a more strident pushback. History is witness, he notes, that no nation has prospered after persecuting its Jews. “So goes the Jew, goes the West.” Prescient words that the West would be wise to heed.
Hammer’s book was life-changing: it reoriented my perspective on Judaism, Jewishness, and made me better understand the underpinnings of antisemitism and how dangerous it is for the West. The book will be available on Amazon and other retailers as of March 18.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license.
Jesus Christ is King
