Reflections of the Two Tablets

The Jewish Week ^ | 7/26/'07 | David Klinghoffer

[Zionist Conspirator]

With Judaism in the cultural spotlight, we may wonder if the present condition of Jewish belief is able to meet the challenge of this attention. Perhaps it’s time for a second look at the touchstone of our faith, the Ten Commandments, which our Torah reading of Va’eschanan conveniently recounts [Deut.5:6-18].

For evidence that Judaism is on many American minds, you only have to check out the bestseller lists. A series of atheist tracts, displaying an especially venomous distaste for Israel’s God, have sold a million copies (according to The Wall Street Journal.)

Not all the attention is negative. In Seattle, where I work, I’ve noticed that the unobtrusive brown yarmulke I have worn for years has been drawing an unprecedented volume of questions and comments from strangers.

A guy at the Central Library asks, pointing at my yarmulke, “Do Jews wear that on Thursday?”

The best question was from a shoe salesman at Nordstrom’s. Out of the blue, looking up from a pair of running shoes, he asked philosophically, “What is a Jew?”

I hesitated. What is a Jew, indeed? How many Jews could answer coherently, much less in a way that would provoke the kind of admiration we should be basking in, according to Va’eschanan, if we were committed to God’s Covenant with us?

“See, I have taught you decrees and ordinances...You shall safeguard and perform them, for it is your wisdom and discernment in the eyes of the peoples who shall hear all these decrees and who shall say, ‘Surely a wise and discerning people is this great nation!’”

In the text, the giving of the Ten Commandments is then immediately narrated.

The Ten Commandments, according to tradition, was revealed as a summation of the whole Torah. As the Midrash explains, the Torah itself is nothing less than the blueprint of reality. In the Ten Commandments, then, we have an almost unbelievably terse representation of the universe as God created it.

A Jew is a person committed to understanding this blueprint and applying its lessons in practical life. The world’s admiration functions as a useful gauge of what kind of a job we do in modeling this unique way of engaging with God. If a million book-buyers gobble up simplistic charges against the Torah, that is something to worry about for what it says not only about them but about us.

Since the Ten Commandments are the Torah in its most highly distilled form, it’s reasonable to look there for a hint of what our response should be to the New Atheist writers.

The week’s Torah reading underlines that the commandments were “inscribed ...on two stone tablets.” The Mechilta, a Midrashic work, explains that God put the commandments on two tablets in order to achieve a mirror-imaging effect. One tablet reflects the other, with a one-to-one correspondence between the commandments as they line up horizontally, opposite each other.

In this ancient understanding, observance of the commandments on the first tablet bear an if-then relationship to those on the second tablet, and vice versa. If a person or a society keeps the first five commandments, the second five will be kept as well.

The first five commandments describe our relationship with God — and with parents whom we are commanded to respect (the Fifth Commandment) as our most direct link with God’s revelation at Sinai. The second five deal with interpersonal relationships. In short, the quality of religious belief in a culture directly impacts the way the people in that culture will interact, with respect or with vulgarity.

It likely will not have that effect right away but must do so eventually, just as a person going off his medications against his doctor’s orders may feel fine initially. A survey of America’s increasingly vulgar and secular culture confirms that this is how reality works.

That is a message of the Ten Commandments. Yet many Jews would be more comfortable with their religion having no message at all for the rest of the world, no encompassing vision of reality. That may clarify why the rest of the world feels about Torah as it does, the combination of curiosity and contempt. It may also explain why Judaism as practiced fails to inspire many Jews. The book of Proverbs [29:18] reminds us, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Recovering the vision of Torah, it would seem, is a matter of importance for the world but also, more specifically, for our own people. So the Ten Commandments would beg to remind us.

David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. His new book, “Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril” (Doubleday), will be published next month.

[Zionist Conspirator]

I don't agree with David about everything, but he's certainly nailed it this time.

However, one point he failed to make was that all these people attacking the Torah and its G-d have no idea in the world that they're attacking Judaism. They are absolutely convinced that the Torah and its G-d are the creations of chr*stianity. In fact, chr*stian treatment of the Jews is invoked along with Israelite treatment of idolators as condemnations of chr*stianity!

Too many people (and far too many Jews) look upon the Jewish People as poor little minority victims of theocratic bigotry who were finally liberated by the "enlightenment" so they could enter the universities (which are of Ancient Greek and Medieval Catholic origin) and win Nobel Prizes.

Yeyasher koach to David for forcing these people to admit that the Bible they hate so much is Jewish!

[Zionist Conspirator]

Ping?

[hlmencken3]

One of my pet peeves is people who know better calling aseres hadibros ‘ten commandments’ instead of the more-accurate ‘ten things’ or ‘ten words’.

There are actually more than ten commandments there.

But i’ve almost given up that fight, hehe...

[Zionist Conspirator]

One of my pet peeves is people who know better calling aseres hadibros ‘ten commandments’ instead of the more-accurate ‘ten things’ or ‘ten words’.

There are actually more than ten commandments there.

But i’ve almost given up that fight, hehe...

You want to see a losing battle, try explaining to non-Jews that the Ten "Commandments" don't apply to them and they're bound by the Seven Noachide Laws instead! ;-)

But certainly `Aseret HaDevarim (as Moses called them) or HaDibberot (as most people call them today) are the veritable symbols of Torah and of Judaism. How ironic that they are assumed by almost everyone today--both Jew and non-Jew--to be symbols of chr*stianity!