The logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. Ideals are aspirational, while absolutes are elemental.
For example, good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. When good is assumed to be aspirational rather than elemental, all the higher order complexity, subjectivity and nuance is lost, in the race to the bottom, of us versus them.
We just happen to be tactile, object oriented, signal distilling organisms, so we like a point to things, even it it is beyond abstract. The pot of gold, figurative or literal, at the end of the narrative arc.
To the Ancients, gods were like memes, or idealizations are today, the abstracted essence of something. That's why they had lots of them. As a political representation, it signified a monoculture, one people, one rule, one god. Such as tribes in the wilderness might develop an even more focused hive mind.
The Jewish God is pretty much as you describe, a tribal totem, that keeps the group centered.
The Christian God was something adopted by the Romans, as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being shed. Remember that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they were metaphors for multiculturalism. So by adopting and co-opting gnostic Christianity, to be the Catholic church, they were basically legitimating the authority of the Roman empire, aka, Holy Roman Empire, by giving it a formal basis/brand.
For Islam it worked in reverse. Rather than an established political system adopting it, those living in the shadow of that Empire saw the value of a common creed, with visions of empire, so the religion came before the political edifice.
The poor Jews just got caught in the middle, as their tribal totem got all blown out of proportion.
The problem of Israel though, is the political evolution of Judaism has been locked in amber for 2000 years and they are trying to pick up, where they left off, but the world has moved on since then.
Networks matter a lot more, in relation to the nodes.
More harmonization, than synchronization.
