For Shavuot: The One God And The Fire Of Desire
I love the Ten Commandments, which are first found in Torah Portion Yitro and are read on the first day of Shavuot. They resound with the pathos and passion of the commanding God of the universe Who is the source of ethical values demanding that we behave with goodness. They also insist that that there is more to being human than being ethical. Among the Ten Commandments, those that tell us about recognizing God’s sovereignty, not taking God’s name in vain, and observing Shabbat remind us that to live fully, we must invest our lives with a dimension of holiness, the knowledge of and response to God’s constant presence. We do this through ritual and worship as well as through ethical behavior.
Almost all the ten commandments are action oriented. They tell us what to do, not what to feel or to believe, because it’s impossible to legislate these things. Thus, it seems strange that the first and the last of the commandments – affirming that the Lord is our God and the prohibition against coveting- are found here. In fact, this first commandment seems not be a commandment at all, but, as many scholars emphasize, a preamble to God’s covenant with the Israelites. God sets the stage for imposing the commandments upon us by reminding us that God is their source. The great scholar Maimonides develops this idea in his code of Jewish law, Mishneh Torah, Laws of The Foundations of the Torah, 1. He explains that the foundation of all knowledge and existence is the recognition that there is one God who created everything. He cites this first commandment to make his point that belief in one supreme Ruler and Creator is in fact a religious obligation. One way to understand what Maimonides has done here is to see this commandment as a “meta-commandment” without which the other commandments would make no compelling religious sense. Certainly, belief can’t be legislated, yet without this most basic belief in the commanding God, the laws of the Torah lose their authority.
Coveting, the tenth commandment, seems equally problematic. Telling people not to feel covetous desire for other people, objects, and circumstances is a pious ideal, but it certainly isn’t a realistic expectation. What then is the Torah trying to tell us? Again, Maimonides points us in the right direction. He teaches that if a person’s covetous desire leads him to harass another person to give him something which doesn’t belong to him, even if he pays that person a great deal of money, he’s violated the prohibition against coveting. Nonetheless, that person can’t be punished for coveting because you can’t punish someone for a feeling or a thought. Maimonides then emphasizes that coveting is essentially, “the root of all evil.” It is, to paraphrase Robert Frost, the “fire of desire” which leads us to harass others, then to possibly steal, commit adultery, lie and murder. (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Robbery and Return Of Lost Property, ch.1:9) Avi Ezer, a super-commentary on the Bible commentary of Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, takes this idea further. (See his comment on Exodus 20:14) He tells us that coveting is at the end of the ten commandments because it’s the general principle from which the other commandments derive. By controlling covetous desires and being satisfied with the blessings that we have, we avoid being led into other acts of wrongdoing.
The first and the last of the ten commandments frame the other eight commandments conceptually. Knowing that the basic rules of civilization are from God prevents us from turning them into relative cultural or societal norms which can be discarded. Recognizing the power of our desires to overwhelm us into violating them makes these rules even more compelling. They are God’s call to us to control our passions and our self-interest so that we can live with decency and with dignity.
Chag Shavuot Sameach.
