A Hidden Commonwealth

What do we mean by "Hebraic culture"?

In this episode, Robert explores the idea that Jews, Christians, and others who trace their deepest beliefs back to the Bible belong to a vast but invisible cultural community. Using an analogy from the Muslim world, he explains why he believes Jerusalem continues to exert a powerful influence on people far beyond the city itself—and why understanding our origins may help us better understand ourselves.

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Hey everybody, it's Robert. Welcome back to Hebraica. I want to answer maybe the most common question I get when I speak about the Hebraic world and this invisible commonwealth of Jerusalem. I think Jews and Christians and people outside both communities look at me with uh equal confusion and uh in many cases skepticism and uh say something like, What do you mean actually? Some people are are a little bolder, and they say, Is it possible that maybe you're overstating the fact that there is an actual community of people out there who share a common culture? It's a valid question. And uh the whole point of this podcast is to point out something that is, if you believe my argument, real but invisible. And uh it's not necessarily intuitive until someone points it out. The simplest way to answer the question is to say that the Commonwealth of Jerusalem is that community of people who trace their deepest beliefs about the world back to Jerusalem. And rather than lay all kinds of abstractions on you, I thought maybe the best way to answer the question is to give you an analogy. There's no doubt in the minds of Muslims all around the world that there is a global community that traces its deepest beliefs back to a city in the Arabian Peninsula, city of Mecca. Because it was in Mecca that the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, received his first revelations from the angel Gabriel or Jibril, as he's known in Arabic. And for that reason, Mecca is a kind of capital of a worldwide nation, and Muslims call it the Ummah, which is an Arabic word for nation. Now, every Muslim knows about the Ummah and considers himself or herself a member of that global community. Now, a Muslim may be an Arab who lives in Saudi Arabia, maybe even in Mecca, but he also could be a Muslim living in Mali or Kenya or Indonesia or Pakistan. He may not even know the Arabic language, may not be able to read the Quran, may never have visited Arabia, but he is in his own mind a participant in a global transnational culture, a fundamentally Arabic culture, insofar as Islam, which is the premier and highest source of his identity and his way of seeing the world, has its origins in a book, a set of revealed texts that were written in Arabic. And that text serves as the cornerstone of that global culture, even in places where the Arabic language is unknown and where the people who feel in allegiance to that book, people who believe in what that book says, are not Arabs. Arabic culture founded on the revelation of Islam is, in my mind, the best analogy to Hebraic culture, which is founded on the revelation contained in the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And it's from the Old Testament that our New Testament was born. There is no New Testament without the Old Testament. And the people who authored the New Testament under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit were not only Jews, but they were writing in dialogue with and in the context of that Hebraic canon. And even though I live in the United States of America, and a Frenchman living in France who is a Christian, lives in Europe, and a Christian in Kenya who reads the Bible and doesn't speak Hebrew, may never have been to Jerusalem, may never have met a Jewish person, all of us, by virtue of the fact that our deepest beliefs and way of seeing the world and our deepest identity is rooted in that book, part of a global culture, a Hebraic culture. We couldn't make sense of ourselves or our lives or of all the things that we think about and dream about and hope for without what is written in that book. And that book is written in Hebrew, and it was written by Jews, and it was written in and around the city of Jerusalem. And so just as there's a global community centered on Mecca and on the Arabic revelation contained in the Quran, there is a global community centered on Jerusalem and on the worldview contained in the book that was born there. Now, we may not see ourselves as members of a Hebraic culture, just as an Indonesian Muslim who may not be very religious, may never have read the Quran, may not see himself as part of Arabic culture. And yet both he and we belong to our respective communities. And the extent to which we Christians, especially those of us living in the West, find all of this very confusing just demonstrates in my mind how cut off we are from our own heritage. We've been alienated from our origins to the point where we can't even fathom what we could possibly have in common with the Jewish people. We are Christians, we're not Jews, and yet to some extent, spiritually, intellectually, we are. And in an instant, so many things started to make sense, or at the very least, began to look very different. It's almost like uh rummaging around in your parents' attic and stumbling across your birth certificate and finding out that you were not, in fact, born in the city and in the country into the family that you thought you were, but were actually born in some far-off country, and your name is not one you recognize, written in a language you don't know. In that moment, you will think of yourself and of the whole world in a very different light. And that was the feeling I had in that moment. And it was an important moment for me on this journey that I've been taking ever since to understand the full implications of that. What does it mean to belong to Jerusalem? And what does it mean that I belong to a part of that global community that doesn't, for the most part, recognize the other part? And that the other part also doesn't recognize my part. How do you explain that? What does it mean? Is it just an accident of history? Is it interesting but irrelevant? Or is there something much deeper going on? I think you can guess what my answer to those questions is. Uh and that answer is the reason I started this podcast. Because I don't think it's irrelevant. I think discovering your birth certificate and finding out where the source of your identity lies, where it comes from, where it's rooted, is maybe the most important thing that one can discover. And so with Hebraica, I'm hoping week by week to unspool that thread, or at least as much of it as I've been able to unspool myself. And for those people who've never thought about this, or who may have thought about it but not thought it was really all that important, I want to facilitate that same epiphany or at least a greater awareness and maybe some interest, some curiosity in that patrimony that they don't otherwise have. Because I believe that until Christians realize where we're from and where all these ideas in our head and all these beliefs in our heart actually originate, and who else is with us inside this house, we will always remain slightly confused and uh maybe even a bit untethered in a way that's dangerous not just to the Jewish people, but uh to ourselves. Until next time, I'm Robert Nicholson. Thanks for listening.