Book summary “This is my God”: summary

Introduction

You often confront a world of rapid change, spiritual disorientation, and fading cultural anchors. You look at the unbroken survival of the Jewish people across millennia of persecution and wonder what mysterious force sustains them. Herman Wouk explains that this persistence is no accident of history, but the deliberate result of a binding legal and spiritual system.

The Jewish tradition survives for millennia through the binding authority of the Torah and the daily discipline of its laws, offering a unique blueprint for human meaning and survival.

You will discover how traditional Judaism functions through law, symbol, and daily ritual rather than abstract theology. The book guides you through the theological meaning of chosenness, the stabilizing power of the Sabbath, and the dynamic legal structure of the Talmud.

• How do ancient dietary laws and daily prayers maintain a distinct community across centuries?
• What keeps the Jewish family intact through strict life-cycle disciplines and marriage customs?
• How does the rebirth of Israel interact with the eternal demands of the Mosaic code?

1. Who Are We and Chosenness

The Jewish people persist through the Mosaic Law, defining identity through covenantal faith rather than racial supremacy.

Over three thousand years of age, the Jewish nation stands as an exception to history. Secular historians view the Mosaic Law as an institutional survival system. The traditional view holds that it is the direct word of God given at Sinai.

Archaeology has verified the ancient Mediterranean history of the Bible. Nelson Glueck stated that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference. His findings in Rivers in the Desert confirm historical statements in clear outline or exact detail.

Identity and Definition

A Jew is defined by tradition through a kinship of faith. You commit to the covenant initiated by Abraham rather than relying strictly on blood descent.

The state of Israel faced intense public debate over citizenship criteria under the Law of Return. This political crisis forced the government to grapple with the definition of a Jew.

The Chosen People

The concept of the chosen people does not imply racial superiority or exclusive salvation. You inherit an election of Abraham's family to special disciplines and moral duties.

Judaism teaches that right conduct and salvation are open to all humanity. The universal ethical religion known as the law of the sons of Noah requires only seven grand precepts:

• The worship of God
• The ban on murder
• The ban on theft
• The ban on incest and sex aberrations
• The ban on eating the limb of the living
• The ban on blasphemy
• Justice and the establishment of courts

Job is cited as a supreme figure of faith who was outside the Jewish fold. Non-Jews can attain supreme heights of Godliness as righteous of the world.

2. Symbols and the Prevalence of Law

Symbols, dietary laws, and civil obedience provide the necessary shorthand framework for human morality and community survival.

Symbols and Ceremonies

Human life is too complex to function without symbolic shorthand. Religious rites mirror the formal ceremonies of modern law, finance, and legal contracts.

The transfer of ownership of a New York skyscraper involves a ceremony as complex and full of props as the coronation of a Roman emperor. The ancient sacred shorthand of the Torah acts as the hieroglyph of biblical master ideas carved directly onto daily life.

Human existence cannot be formless. All social groups, including secular non-conformists, rely on rigid patterns, uniforms, and rituals.

You might observe a seventeen-year-old college sophomore giving a sophisticated speech against conformity and ritualism while dressed in a highly stylized uniform of sweater wrinkles and smudge-marked saddle shoes. Other-directedness and acculturation shape secular dervishes just as much as traditional believers.

Law and Citizenship

When the ancient Jewish commonwealth fell and civil legislation ceased two thousand years ago, the Talmud sages established a binding rule. This principle is dino d'malkuto dino, meaning the law of the land is our law.

You are religiously obligated to be a law-abiding citizen of your home country, whether that is France, America, or Israel. The only exception occurs if the state decrees that you may not worship God.

The Jewish dietary discipline uses formal tokens to regulate sentient life, separating clean from unclean foods to instill holiness and daily self-discipline. Kosher animals like land creatures must possess split hooves and chew the cud, eliminating pigs, rodents, and carnivores. Sea creatures must have fins and scales, excluding shellfish and octopuses. These rules are formal and ceremonial rather than purely sanitary or climate-based.

The Torah establishes four principal rules for preparing meat that enforce humane treatment, remove blood, separate meat and dairy, and exclude prohibited fats:

• Refrain from eating flesh cut from a living creature.
• Exclude meat unless most of the circulatory blood is removed.
• Separate flesh and dairy food completely, avoiding them together on the table or using separate utensils.
• Ban the hard fat or suet formed below the diaphragm and remove the sciatic nerve from the hindquarter.

Maimonides linked diet laws to hygiene and fighting shamanism. Modern medicine validates many of these dietary restrictions regarding bacteria, blood consumption, and fats, while the laws simultaneously serve as powerful instruments of community identity and discipline.

You can experience this discipline directly:

• Drop the obvious excluded foods without worrying about punctilio to immediately start restoring Jewish identity.

Your adherence may run deep, much like the author's grandfather, who spent thirty years giving up beef rather than eat meat not slaughtered under his own supervision by a shohet using a glat kosher standard. Trained supervisors called mashgiah oversee the process, while rabbis handle complex shailas regarding the rules.

3. The Sabbath and Nature Festivals

The Sabbath and the annual holy days act as anchoring pillars that restore human perspective, celebrate creation, and commemorate liberation.

The Sabbath

The Jewish Sabbath is a demanding ceremony of complete withdrawal from productive labor that serves as the fulcrum of a practicing Jew's existence and the keystone of Jewish symbolism. From sundown on Friday to twilight on Saturday, you stop all work, travel, cooking, and the use of electronics or money. Far from being a mere day off, these strict disciplines transform twenty-four hours into a separated time of peace, family connection, and ennobled pleasure.

You can experience this discipline directly:

• Refrain from all work, cooking, traveling, using motors or electric appliances, spending money, smoking, and writing from sundown on Friday to the end of twilight on Saturday.
• Open the Sabbath with blessings over light and wine.
• Bless the children with the ancient blessing and sing Sabbath table hymns.

The author describes leaving behind the high-pressure, crisis-ridden atmosphere of Broadway theatrical rehearsals on Friday afternoons to enter the restorative peace of the Sabbath with his family, returning to the theatre on Saturday night with renewed perspective. All restrictive religious laws, including the stringent Sabbath rules, are instantly suspended in the presence of life-threatening emergencies.

The Festivals

The three major Jewish festivals—Pesakh, Shavuos, and Sukos—blend agricultural celebrations of nature's bounty with historic commemorations of foundational national events. Rooted in the early agricultural life of the Jewish people in the Holy Land, these festivals mark the spring, summer, and fall turns of the calendar. Each carries a dual significance: Pesakh celebrates the barley harvest and the Exodus, Shavuos marks the wheat harvest and the Sinai revelation, and Sukos celebrates the autumn fruit and grain harvest while recalling the forty years of desert wandering in a fragile hut.

You execute the strict house cleaning required for Passover through specific steps:

• Clean the home of all leaven and leavened foods before Passover starts.
• Boil metalware in water and lock away all-year dishes.
• Take out china and crockery reserved for the festival.
• Search the house by candlelight the evening before Passover for the last scraps of leaven for burning.

4. The Core of Judaism and Daily Rites

Active engagement in the marketplace combined with daily prayer and home rituals fulfills the six hundred and thirteen commands.

Unlike monastic traditions that demand withdrawal from society, Judaism commands believers to stay actively engaged in the ordinary world while stamping their time with religious commitments. The goal of Jewish law is not self-isolation or a paralyzing lifestyle. You live and work in the marketplace while subjecting your pursuits to the review of the Law and common sense.

The Dubno Maggid famously challenged the ultra-pious Vilna Gaon to leave his books and synagogue. He told him to go down into the marketplace and endure the common trials, skepticism, and distractions of ordinary Jews.

While traditional Judaism numbers six hundred and thirteen commands, the vast majority apply to dormant agricultural, temple, or criminal codes. A meticulous pietist today finds about a hundred applicable precepts. An orthodox Jew holds to a couple of dozen key observances.

A Gentile approached Rabbi Hillel asking to be taught all of Judaism while standing on one foot. Hillel replied with the golden rule of right conduct, stating the rest is commentary.

Prayer in Judaism is not viewed as a mechanical economic resource or a method to inform an omniscient God. It serves as a renewed commitment of one's fortunes and an act declaring Jewish identity.

Huckleberry Finn prayed for a fishing pole and received no hooks, giving up religion as an economic recourse. Herman Wouk calls this a perfect parable. Conversely, Wouk mentally recited the Sh'ma during a typhoon in the Pacific when nearly swept off a ship deck.

The synagogue originated as a popular law school and study hall over two thousand years ago. When the Temples fell, Jewish communities transformed houses of Torah study into houses of worship. You study fifty-two weekly sections of the Torah annually.

Clothing and Shelter

Traditional Jewish clothing symbols include fringed prayer shawls and phylacteries worn during morning prayers to physically connect daily actions to divine commandments.

• Wear a four-cornered fringed shawl during morning prayers.
• Tie black leather phylacteries on the forehead and left biceps containing the Sh'ma and other Bible verses.
• Cover the head during study and prayer.

The mezuza affixed to the doorpost serves as a physical declaration that a home is dedicated to God's service and identifies the dwellers as Jewish.

• Affix a small case containing Torah passages written on parchment to the doorposts of the house.

5. Life Cycle, Marriage, and Death

Jewish law sanctifies human life cycles through structured family disciplines, marital purity, and realistic mourning customs.

Birth and Marriage

Circumcision serves as the ancient physical seal of the covenant between Abraham and God, performed on the eighth day of life. The ceremony is traditionally conducted by a qualified religious specialist who takes the place of the father in the dedication rite. Four thousand years of tradition stand behind this observance.

Voltaire mocked circumcision as a meaningless detail, while Spinoza argued it was powerful enough to maintain the separate existence of the nation forever.

• Perform the circumcision on the eighth day after birth unless delayed for a delicate child by a doctor.
• Appoint a skilled mohel who is familiar with the religion to conduct the ceremony.
• Pronounce the traditional blessing designating the covenant of Abraham.

Bar-mitzvah marks the entry of a thirteen-year-old boy into responsible religious life, shifting from a simple scholarly transition to an elaborate folk celebration that requires renewed educational rigor. In the United States, the bar-mitzvah turned into a costly jubilee characterized by great natural gusto. Because of a decline in Hebrew literacy, boys were often drilled by rote to parrot unfamiliar words, prompting educators to reform the milestone by requiring comprehensive examinations in Hebrew, classical texts, and Jewish law prior to the ceremony.

The author portrayed a vibrant American bar-mitzvah in his novel Marjorie Morningstar, drawing both affection and bitter criticism.

• Begin serious training in Hebrew and religious laws by the age of eight or nine.
• Pass examinations in Hebrew, classics, and Jewish history.
• Receive an aliya and speak the blessing over the weekly Torah reading upon reaching age thirteen.

Judaism rejects both the worship of the flesh and the ascetic denial of it, viewing sexual love within marriage as a primary divine commandment rather than an inherent sin. Unlike Western traditions haunted by a residue of pagan guilt, Judaism treats sex as the binding cord for lifelong union, shared support, and procreation, classifying any sexual guilt purely as individual lawbreaking rather than an intrinsic evil.

Jewish law institutes a discipline of alternating sexual abstinence and enjoyment through monthly separation and ritual immersion. Couples sleep apart for twelve days after menses begin or seven days after they cease, a practice that naturally aligns re-union with the wife's most fertile period.

• Sleep apart for twelve days after menses begin or seven days after they cease, whichever period is longer.
• Mark the end of the abstinence period by immersion in an ocean, river, lake, or ritual pool known as a mikva.

Judaism treats divorce as a regrettable necessity for failed marriages while maintaining strict legal requirements for its execution. Rather than chaining incompatible partners together, Jewish law provides machinery for dissolution through a rabbinic court.

• Exhaust mediation, cooling-off periods, and persistent legal efforts at reconciliation before dissolving a marriage.
• Deliver an ancient legal bill of divorcement in the presence of a rabbinic court to formally end the religious marriage.

Death and Mourning

Jewish mourning customs enforce swift burial, structured periods of grief, and the recitation of the Kaddish to restore community connection and faith. Mourning is strictly limited through initial dazing shock handled by sitting at home for seven days, followed by a thirty-day restricted period, and a full year of Kaddish recitation for parents. The Kaddish acts as a community prayer affirming trust in God despite personal catastrophe.

• Bury the dead swiftly and austerely using a shroud and a plain wooden coffin.
• Observe the first seven-day period of Shiva at home receiving condolence calls.
• Observe the thirty-day period of Shloshim by resuming normal activity while avoiding entertainment.
• Recite the Kaddish prayer in unison with a community quorum of ten adults known as a minyan.

6. The Torah, Talmud, and Legal Codes

The authority of Jewish religious law derives from the Pentateuch of Moses. It forms an immutable constitution that you must independently choose to follow.

The oral law and the Talmud form a dynamic common law system that adapts divine principles through rigorous rabbinic debate.

The Talmud

The Talmud is a massive, two-part compendium of Jewish law and oral tradition. It combines the Mishna and the Gemara into a dramatic record of centuries of rabbinic debate. The Tanna'im spanned four hundred years of legal decisions.

You can open a set of twenty-one maroon leather tomes in the Vilna edition set. A central column of Hebrew text is surrounded by multiple layers of commentaries and variant readings spanning centuries, featuring more than one hundred commentators in the Romm edition. Rashi, Rabbi Shelomo Izaki, lived a thousand years ago. His commentary acts as an indispensable, accessible guide that keeps the Talmud and Torah alive for students.

Codification

Although Jewish law claims divine origin, it contains an internal mechanism for human amendment and interpretation. Historical changes include moving from permitted slavery and polygamy under the Torah to current prohibitions enforced by Jewish law. The Torah originally allowed fifty-year cycles for land leases and seven years for the remission of debts.

Maimonides revolutionized Jewish legal literature in the twelfth century. He practiced medicine as a busy doctor, eventually becoming court physician to the sultan in Egypt while completing his monumental legal code. The Mishna Torah structure contains fourteen books organized into clear language without citing tedious minority arguments.

Joseph Caro was born in Spain just before the expulsion in 1492. He later settled in Safed where he lived out his eighty-seven years, writing the Shulkhan Arukh, also known as The Ready Table. The work comprises eight tall volumes in four sections, serving as the undisputed standard manual and common law of working Jewish jurisprudence today.

7. Modern Eras, Israel, and the Future

Enlightenment and Assimilation

The Enlightenment and nineteenth-century modernizations created the conditions for a new era. Theodor Herzl formulated political Zionism, while Eastern European labor pioneers pursued practical Zionism through organizations like The Lovers of Zion. Forty-five years after Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat, his remains were brought to Mount Herzl.

Hitler viewed himself as an apostle of Nietzsche, who proclaimed the death of God. Nihilism attempted to stamp out God's existence forever by murdering six million Jews in Nazi death camps. Jewish persistence throughout history had always been taken as a witness to the presence of God.

The State of Israel

The rebirth of Israel and the preservation of religious tradition provide the ultimate answers to modern assimilation and nihilism.

The modern state of Israel was conceived by secular figures and established largely by non-observant pioneers. Yet it represents the ultimate fulfillment of sixty exiled generations who maintained the dream of returning to the land.

The author arrived at Lydda airport on an American delegation visit to celebrate the seventh anniversary of Israel's independence. He met his ninety-year-old grandfather in Tel Aviv and encountered young, secular Israeli officials, drivers, and soldiers who maintain the state. This small land can support four million Jews by far-reaching planning.

The German destruction of European Jewry struck the dispersed nation to the heart. Following the war, American Jewish migration to Israel rose from one thousand to four thousand a year. The vast majority of global Jewry now views Israel as its heart and a providential wellspring of culture, spirit, and faith.

You can gamble your existence on the hunch that being a Jew in the classic, observant way is the best thing in your life. Wouk made this experiment despite holding early intellectual leanings toward Nietzsche, Veblen, Shaw, Marx, Dewey, and Dostoevsky. He learned that the faith is a master resource for mental health and personal force.

The survival and revival of the Torah depend on attracting first-class inquiring minds rather than relying on watered-down dissenters' formulas. The law of Moses now rests increasingly in the hands of young men serving as military chaplains in the Israeli Army and Navy, or pursuing doctoral candidates in American universities.

10 Key Ideas

1. The Jewish tradition survives for millennia through the binding authority of the Torah and the daily discipline of its laws, offering a unique blueprint for human meaning and survival.
2. The Jewish people persist through the Mosaic Law, defining identity through covenantal faith rather than racial supremacy.
3. Symbols, dietary laws, and civil obedience provide the necessary shorthand framework for human morality and community survival.
4. The Sabbath and the annual holy days act as anchoring pillars that restore human perspective, celebrate creation, and commemorate liberation.
5. Active engagement in the marketplace combined with daily prayer and home rituals fulfills the six hundred and thirteen commands.
6. Jewish law sanctifies human life cycles through structured family disciplines, marital purity, and realistic mourning customs.
7. The oral law and the Talmud form a dynamic common law system that adapts divine principles through rigorous rabbinic debate.
8. The rebirth of Israel and the preservation of religious tradition provide the ultimate answers to modern assimilation and nihilism.
9. Classic, observant Jewish faith functions as a master resource for mental health, personal force, and community continuity against the backdrop of historical persecution.
10. The survival and revival of the Torah increasingly rest in the hands of dedicated young men pursuing rigorous study and military service rather than watered-down formulas.