The Ten Commandments and Your One Identity

The Ten Commandments, at first glance, are primarily negative. Don’t do this, don’t do that. It all sounds rather limiting. It seems like they might prevent you from defining your true self and realizing your true potential.

Actually, there are seven prohibitions and three affirmative statements. The three: there is one and only one God, you must honor father and mother, and you must observe the Sabbath. Put the prohibitions and affirmations together; what you have is the foundation for an identity – your identity without your family, your people, within humanity, upon this Earth, within this Cosmos. You know who you are, who you are not, where you are, and when you are.

You have a place in the Universe. The first commandment is about its Creator of a physical universe, and within that, all of humanity, everyone is created in God’s image, all descendants of the same Adam and Eve.

The Ten Commandments recall the Exodus. You are part of an extended family, the Israelites. It began with Abraham, from generation to generation, and it was brought out of Egypt. It has its own unique history and destiny.

You are part of a core family. Your very own, with all of its love and tensions. You must honor your father and mother, and your children must honor you. You must receive the Tradition from your parents and pass it on to your children. There is the family of your upbringing and the family you add through marriage, and you must be faithful to them both.

You must honor the Sabbath. You have time for yourself. You are not just part of the flux of events in the material world, with all of its demands. On the Sabbath, you are a free individual. Free to be who you are, not just to do what you must do.

All of the commandments are addressed to every individual soul at Sinai. A midrash says that every Jewish soul, now and then, was at Sinai. In the Wilderness, God spoke to the people of Israel, but he awaited them to answer whether they accepted his law.

In the Jewish prayer service, we still speak to God. The Tradition holds that God wishes to hear our prayers. I have often wondered how my shtetl ancestors survived their poverty and persecution. How? Each of them had the dignity and self-confidence of knowing that they spoke to a supreme and eternal power every day and that their prayers somehow mattered to the Eternal One.

One interpretation of the Exodus story is that only a fragment, a fifth, of the Israelites joined in the Exodus. Many chose not to join in the journey. The Tanakh itself, on the other hand, also says that some non-Israelites did join in the Exodus. You can be born into the Jewish people and choose to stay, or you can be like Ruth and choose to join. Either way, you are part of a long and unfolding story with its own language, style, characters, and themes.

One view of the world is that you have no limits as an individual. You can do anything you want, be anything you want. But if you were infinitely plastic, you would still be that: plastic; our Tradition instead is that each person is made out of the clay of the earth. Our Tradition gives each of us a grounding, a place in time and space. There are especially sacred places in Israel- and times – like Shabbat. The clay we are made of is infused with a divine spark, and it is up to us to determine how to kindle the fire. We are each different and capable of creativity, but we are gifted a starting point in a specific context, a timeline in the Universe, and human history.

Another view of the world is that there is no outer world you cannot conquer. But under the Ten Commandments, you are content to live among your own people,  yearn from your own little homeland, and be content with what you have and can create, not what you can acquire by force or by deceit.

The revelations at Sinai are to be passed down from generation to generation. You can view that as a weight on your back that that bends you downward or a solid base on which to stand upright and move forward.

Living with Tradition can facilitate your creativity rather than limit it. Judaism is an essentially musical faith. Look at the music of the Tanakh. Over a thousand years ago, the Masoretes, the scribes of Tiberias, edited the Tanakh text that we still use; they put in those musical markings called the trope signs. In doing so, the Masoretes honored the Tradition  – and they also creatively elaborated upon it. They had an overall musical system, but it permitted many choices. With the logic of the system, within the strict adherence to the words, they bring out many subtleties of meaning and emotion. There are different trope systems for various parts of the Tanakh. Lamentations is distinctly somber; Ruth is cheerful – and yet in Ruth, there are passages about potential destruction that switch into the Lamentations mode. The Tradition allows, at last, one distinct way to chant the Ten Commandments.

When you sing using the Torah trope, you feel the dignity and meaning of being part of an ancient and ongoing tradition. Yet every bar mitzvah boy or girl, congregation, and cantor who sings from the Tanakh uses their unique voice.

Now, let me recall a story. It is from Martin Buber’s book about Hassidic tales. Before his death, the ordinarily cheerful Rabbi Zusha said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: Why were you, not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusha?”

Zusha could not be Moses – and even Moses could not be anyone else in the chain,  The dynamic Abraham, the stoic Isaac, the wrestling Jacob, and the wise Zusha were each in their own way immersed in the Tradition. Each had his own distinct talents and flaws. All of them, from Abraham to Zusha and beyond, had choices to make as individuals with the Tradition. Without the Tradition, they could not have been who they were. Within the Tradition, they could strive to be their best version.

Another story. It is a children’s story by David Mamet, the playwright and Hollywood screenwriter. An old man is speaking with a Bar Mitzvah boy. The story ends as follows:

“Are you working with a Rabbi?”

“Yes, says the boy.

“What does he tell you?”

“To strive to understand how to be a good man.”

“The Rabbi is wrong said [the old man]….no one call tell if he himself is a good man. Be a good Jew.”

We can understand what the old man is saying. Being a good Jew provides the boy with a starting point, a horizon, a path. The old man is a survivor of the Shoah and is wary of what the rest of humanity is or what it is capable of doing.

Still, let us ask: does being a good Jew make you a good person?

Look again at the Ten Commandments. Set aside the parts aimed explicitly at the Israelites, like the Sabbath. Look at the remaining Commandments: Not lying, being faithful to your family, respecting the lives of others – yes, that sounds like at least the makings of a good person. And if you choose to be Jewish, you respect yourself and your people – and perhaps then you are likelier to have the self-respect, self-confidence, and grounding to respect the identity of others. Judaism is forever shaped by the experience of exile and the sympathetic understanding of what it means to be a foreigner. How much evil in the world is the product of those who are desperately anxious about finding an identity – and then join an ideological, religious cult that is fraught with intolerance? How many of those cults on the left and the right demonize others – often with a special penchant for demonizing us, the Jews, but each with a hit list of others who are considered worthy of their contempt?

In an article published a few days ago in the Canadian newspaper The National Post, Gil Troy and Richard Marceau speak of a revival of Jewish feeling among the young in the face of the rampant antisemitism that has poisoned Canada in the last few years. They write:

“Through the lens of Identity Zionism, they see the power of being an “us” not just an “I,” a lonely, isolated, often alienated island. They appreciate adding chapters to a 3,500-year-old story that is more meaningful than the me-centric, instant gratification of our shop-till-you-drop, throwaway culture. And they root themselves not just in their people, not just in their story, but in eternal Jewish values that can guide us all to live better lives and build a better world.