Why Are Jews So Different?
Rabbi Halevi
My niece will soon go to the front of her congregation to read from the Torah. This is the act by which she will become a bat Mitzvah .. daughter of the law, a Jew entitled to lead other Jews in reading about our laws and history.
I hope she understand how unique amongst all peoples, her experience will be. The bar mitvot for boys (sons of the law) or for girls is a unique event, tied directly to our torah and our invention of the alphabet so that all people, not just the scribes, could read.
I hope she also understand how incredibly important the Torah, a book of laws ..of mitzvoth … is to ALL people. It was our law that existed in an era where most humans lived only by laws made by men acting under their interpretations of God’s authority. Judah Halevi, a great Rabbi from Anadalus, wrote of the mitzvot in his epochal book .. the Khazari.. Asked by a King whether the Jews’ unnamed God made these laws, Halevi answers that they were not made by the deity because both the unnamed God and the laws are eternal. No one made the unnamed God and no one made the laws. More recently Rabbi Soleveitchick, a great orthodox scholar of the twentieth century. compared these laws to the laws of physics, both were real for the Rabbi and he saw his job as rationalizing the realities found in the laws of the Torah with those we can discover as scientists.
For Jews, “thou shalt not lie” is as real as the law of gravity.
Mitzvot (or Mitzvah in the singular) is a commandment or a rule. In Judaism, there are 613 commandments that Jews are required to observe. Mitzvah can as well refer to any Jewish religious requirement, or more commonly to any good deed.
The mitzvot are supposed to be done not for the unnamed God, but because they are right in and of themselves.
It is, I believe, the concept of mitzvot that has held the Jewish people together and differentiated us from 
other cultures since the Greeks and Romans tried to make us adopt their religion, that is the process of Christianization that continues till today. As odd as the strictly observant Jews, our cheredim, may look to other Jews and to the rest of the world, it is their rigorous observance of the law that holds us together as a people.
How else does one explain the huge achievements Jews have made in the worlds of science, literature and art? The influence of the laws on Jews runs through a remarkable book put together Judea Pearl. Judea Pearl, one of the great computer scientists, is also the father of Daniel 
Pearl, the journalist murdered in Pakistan by Talibani. His last words were a proclamation not of Jewish faith, but of being a Jew. For Daniel, this meant adherence to the mitzvot, the heritage of humanity Jews have transmitted through our laws. The book has hundred of Jews, famous people who have devoted their lives to good deeds as well as Daniel’s famidy and friends, answering the question “Why am I a Jew?”
Ironically, Thomas Jefferson knowingly took this concept of eternal law as the basis for our own American system of law. Ironic? … Jefferson himself was a typical bigot of his time, seeing the Jews, as opposed to our laws, as a devious people. African Americans who admire Jefferson’s gifts of law to all of us, understand my pain.
At may age, 72, it is sadly likely I will not be there when own my own grand daughter becomes bat mitzvah, I do hope the she will read this post.