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Culture Clash and the Commandments It's amazing how much has always

been at stake in the interpretation of these 10 terse phrases.

By David Klinghoffer A pair of Supreme Court rulings dealing with the

display of the Ten Commandments on public property are only the most

recent illustration of the power of the Decalogue (from the Greek,

meaning “ten words”) to illuminate philosophical, religious, and

cultural fault lines. For two thousand years, it has served as a

potent symbol of the clash between moral cultures. The identity of

the cultures has changed, but this most familiar of all biblical law

codes has remained the ultimate token of victory: He who controls the

meaning of the Ten Commandments and the purpose to which they may be

put, has won the culture war. Ancient Christians and Jews,

20th-century fascists, and 21st-century political liberals and

conservatives have all understood the stakes in the tug-of-war over

the Decalogue. That this would prove to be the case wasn’t

necessarily obvious to the first people to hear the Ten Commandments.

The Bible’s Book of Exodus relates how the Jews were liberated by

their God from Egyptian slavery, fled into the desert, and, at the

foot of Mt. Sinai, heard the Lord’s voice speaking the commandments

that would become the heart of Jewish faith, as well as of the

Christian religion. After the Hebrew tribes had spent 40 years in the

wilderness, immediately before entering the promised land of Israel,

Moses reviewed for them the whole Teaching (or “Torah,” as the Five

Books of Moses are called in Hebrew) that God had revealed at Sinai.

As given in the written text of the Torah, this Teaching actually

comprises 613 commandments (according to Jewish tradition)–including

rules for everything from distinguishing between kosher and forbidden

foods to circumcising baby boys–of which the Ten Commandments add up

to less than one-sixtieth.Yet neither in Exodus, nor in a slightly

different version given in Deuteronomy, is there any explicit

indication that the Decalogue stands out for

special regard among all the other commandments in the Torah.

Distinctions that later religious thinkers would make between the Ten

Commandments and all the rest, or between “moral” and “ritual”

commandments, are nowhere evident in the Torah itself, which recounts

the giving of the whole body of the commandments in the form of a

narrative of those 40 years in the desert. The commandments are

simply recorded in the order in which God chose to reveal them. Thus,

in the Exodus narrative, the Decalogue is followed almost immediately

by instructions on a matter that some much later biblical

interpreters would anachronistically regard as being of “merely”

ritual significance--how to build an altar for animal sacrifice. The

latter subject is treated in the Bible with no hint of a suggestion

that we’re making a transition from commandments of ultimate,

permanent importance to others of lesser or transient value. The fact

that God makes no distiction of the kind that these later

Bible readers would make should suggest to us that either in his eyes,

or (if you prefer the conventional academic viewpoint) in the eyes of

the Pentateuch’s editors, there was no such distinction to be made.

In any event, from the Bible’s own perspective, the Decalogue is

simply 10 out of 613.So where, then, did there arise the idea that

these ten are The Ten–the vaunted Ten Commandments, as if the other

603 were little more than chopped liver?

That idea didn’t arise in Judaism, though the ancient rabbis did grant

a certain elevated status, of purely symbolic significance, to the

Decalogue. The rabbis taught--as an oral tradition which they said

went back to a body of teaching given by God to Moses at Sinai,

called the Oral Torah, as an accompaniment to or explanation of the

Written Torah and finally written down for the first time about 200

C.E. in the Mishnah–that the Ten Commandments were different from

other commandments in one respect. That was, besides being

commandments in their own right, they functioned as a sort of a table

of contents for the rest of the commandments. The 10 items of the

Decalogue are like chapter headings to a book, with the other

commandments each falling under one of these 10 headings. Just as a

book’s table of contents is only that–the table of contents, not the

full text–so the Decalogue is not the whole account of what God told

Moses to command the Jewish people. In this sense, as a summary of

the 613 commandments, the Ten Commandments still held a special place

in Jewish eyes. That is why, according to the Mishnah, when the

Jerusalem Temple still stood, before its destruction by Roman forces

in 70 C.E., the reading of the Ten Commandments was a central fixture

of the Temple liturgy. In the order of prayers, it came immediately

before recitation of the Sh’mah, the central statement of Jewish

belief in God’s indivisible oneness. When Jesus attended worship

services in the

Temple, as historians assume, he undoubtedly witnessed this liturgy.

The experience of hearing how the Decalogue was venerated in the

priestly liturgy conveyed to Jesus that the Ten Commandments were

special laws. Perhaps this is what he had in mind when he said,

“Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and

teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but

he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the

kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19). After Jesus died, the status of

Jewish law became a point of contention among his followers. Some

insisted on the continuing obligation to observe all the Mosaic

legislation without differentiating between the Ten Commandments and

the other laws. St. Paul seemed to take a dim view of “the Law” (his

term for the Torah) altogether, calling it a “captor” and a “curse”

(Romans 7:6, Galatians 3:13) to those who believed that observing

Jewish law was what God wanted from them. For, he

wrote in his letter to the Romans, “now the law has come to an end

with Christ” (10:4). The church had to decide how to adjudicate the

dispute between the legalists and the antinomians–that is, between

those believers in Jesus who argued against Paul’s jettisoning of

Jewish law, on one hand, and Paul’s own disciples on the other. The

heretic Marcion repudiated the entire Torah explicitly, including the

Ten Commandments, which Paul hadn’t done. The church fathers, however,

recognized the continuing validity of the Ten Commandments while

rejecting all the other laws Moses had received at Sinai. This was

the position of Justin Martyr, who wrote a Christian polemic against

Judaism, the “Dialogue with Trypho.” Other early Christian

theologians saw in the Ten Commandments a symbol of God’s having

rejected the other 603 commandments. In the Torah itself, the story

is told of how Moses, descending from Mt. Sinai with the two tablets

of the Decalogue in his hands, observed

the Jews engaged in worshiping the notorious Golden Calf. In his anger

at this shocking reversion to idolatry, Moses smashed the tablets upon

the ground. God later made him another, identical pair. According to

the church fathers Barnabas and Origen, the breaking of the first set

of tablets shows the low opinion Moses had of the commandments–that

is, apart from the Decalogue.

In other words, in the conception of these early Christians, the Ten

Commandments alone were worth salvaging, for practical observance,

from the otherwise derelict body of Mosaic legislation.For

traditional Jews, Jewish Christians, and Gentile Christians alike,

the Ten Commandments had become the symbol of a most divisive

question: Had the Torah been rendered “obsolete,” as the New

Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews frankly put it (8:13), or not?

Because a significant number of early Christians had been born

Jews–how many remains unclear, though the figure diminished with the

passing centuries as these Jews inevitably assimilated into the wider

gentile Christian world–Jewish religious authorities felt bound to

respond to what they regarded as the serious error of singling out

the Decalogue as if only it remained in force. This is why, according

to the Talmud’s Tractate Berachot (12a), the rabbis made an important

decision. The timing is unclear, but it was around the time the

Temple was destroyed and replaced as the locus of Jewish spiritual

life by the local synagogues. The rabbis ruled that it was no longer

acceptable in worship to recite the Ten Commandments as a central

feature of the liturgy. The Talmud renders this in typically

telegraphic fashion: “Rav Yehudah said in the name of Shmuel: They

[i.e., the rabbinic sages] wished to institute the recitation [of the

Ten Commandments] in the provinces but soon abolished them [the

recitation] because of the arguments of the sectarians.”Reading and

studying the Decalogue remained vitally important, but giving it the

same special place in prayer that it had when the Temple stood only

served to encourage the confusion which the rabbis associated with

what they called the minim, or “sectarians,” namely Jewish

Christians. But for this

clash of cultures–traditional Jews against Jewish-born Christians–the

Ten Commandments would likely still be included in synagogue liturgy

to this day. Of course, we can’t be sure about that, but the Sh’mah

was retained in its central place in prayer, so there seems no reason

to doubt that its liturgical companion piece, the Decalogue, would

also have been kept.The clash was reflected not only in the way Jews

pray, but also in the writings of later Christian theologians. The

question of how to regard Torah law, and its relationship to the

Decalogue, continued to bother these thinkers, who came up with

different resolutions of the problem. Thus, the Roman Catholic Church

taught that the Ten Commandments summarized natural law–the universal

law evident to all peoples even before Moses met God at Sinai–as

distinct from now obsolete “ritual” legislation found elsewhere in

the Torah. Among Protestants, Martin Luther argued that when Jesus

declared the eternality of the

law, he had in mind only the Ten Commandments–of which, however, there

was one exception: the Fourth Commandment, Sabbath observance on the

seventh day (Saturday), which was a Jewish institution and therefore

could be discarded. John Calvin, by contrast, took a much more

“Jewish” view of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, granting high regard to

the legal observance of Old Testament precepts even apart from the Ten

Commandments. Calvinism stands out from other branches of the

Christian faith in recognizing the importance of acts of

righteousness much as the Hebrew Bible does, an importance that Jews

could join Calvin in defending as being far from “obsolete.”Calvin’s

religious and political thinking resulted, writes Jewish historian

Salo W. Baron, in a “rapprochement between Protestantism and

Judaism”–perhaps even, going a step further, between Christianity and

Judaism. For it was Calvinist Protestants, the Puritans, who gave the

initial religious inspiration to what became the

founding of the United States, the most philo-Semitic country the

world has ever known. That rapprochement found its most remarkable

expression in American law, which from the 17th century on drew

inspiration not only from the Ten Commandments but from the entire

Hebrew Bible. The earliest legal codes of colonial Massachusetts and

Connecticut were based explicitly on the Pentateuch’s legislative

system, with Connecticut enshrining in its 1672 “Fundamental Orders”

the statement that the “laws and constitutions suiting our state”

should best be derived from “the Great Lawgiver, who hath been

pleased to set down a divine platform not only of the moral but also

of the judicial laws suitable for the people of Israel.”

With the flowering of the American legal system, the Ten Commandments

as a symbol of Jewish-Christian culture clash had largely faded, at

least outside Europe. On the bloody old continent, however, there

arose in the 1930s a new and demonic culture. That culture, Nazism,

would turn out to be no less fixated on the Ten Commandments than had

been the Christian faith that Hitler’s minions sought to depose.

Nazism, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observed, “in its very roots

was a rebellion against the Bible, against the God of Abraham.

Realizing it was Christianity that implanted attachment to the God of

Abraham and involvement with the Hebrew Bible in the hearts of Western

man, Nazism resolved that it must both exterminate the Jews and

eliminate Christianity, and bring about instead a revival of Teutonic

paganism.” Toward this end, Hitler decided that extirpating the Ten

Commandments from the consciousness of his fellow Germans must be a

primary goal. In comments to a fellow Nazi, Hermann Rauschning, he

confided his thoughts: that the “life-denying Ten Commandments”

symbolized the “tyrannical God” of the Jews, and that the Nazi regime

must, consequently, make war on the Decalogue.Hitler was thwarted, but

his hostility to the Bible survived, as Heschel, a theological liberal

who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., plainly recognized: “Nazism

has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from

the consciousness of the Western world goes on. It is on the issue of

saving the radiance of the Hebrew Bible in the minds of man that Jews

and Christians are called upon to work together.” Those prophetic

words were published in 1966. The current culture war pits

traditionally minded Christians and Jews against those liberals and

secularists who would diminish public

awareness of the Bible. I don’t mean to draw an obviously unfair

analogy between Hitlerian fascists and civil libertarians. The

latter, we may assume, are motivated not by hostility to the Bible,

or the Ten Commandments, per se, but by the worry that religion, if

not reined in, will break out of bounds and dominate the culture in

such a way as to intimidate unbelievers and other minorities. Even

those of us who don’t share this concern should nevertheless respect

it. That having been said, the fact remains that modern secularism

has as one of its goals to reduce the public visibility of biblical

religion, and the Ten Commandments in particular, which must

inevitably mean reducing its influence.Today’s struggle over the Ten

Commandments–posing the question of whether and under what conditions

they can be posted on or in publicly owned land and buildings–is

simply the form that the ongoing war over the Decalogue has mostly

recently taken. Perhaps this is because the

ancient Jewish oral tradition is right in saying that the Decalogue is

a shorthand summary of the whole law of God–the crystallization of

what He asks of us. What we think of the Ten Commandments is, in

turn, shorthand for what we think of God.When the Supreme Court

unveiled its twin rulings at the end of the 2005 session–allowing the

Decalogue to be displayed under some circumstances, forbidding it

under other conditions, the combination of the two decisions

seemingly calculated to the keep the issue in litigation for decades

to come–the Court appeared to accept that conflicting beliefs about

the place of the commandments in American life will remain a

permanent feature of the cultural landscape. That is, in a sense,

only appropriate. People have been fighting about the Decalogue for

almost two millennia, reflecting something essential in the great

legal declaration itself. For all that the Torah itself doesn’t draw

attention to the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue’s

significance seems almost to be coded into the words themselves.

Readers of every religious and poltical persuasion recognize this.

Something about these ten brief statements communicates to us that we

are not dealing with just any ancient moral and judicial constitution,

but with a timeless challenge to humanity. Years from now, men and

women will probably still be arguing about the nature of that

challenge, and over what, in light of the urgency communicated in its

bare, terse language, should be our response.

David Klinghoffer, a columnist of the Jewish Forward, is the author

most recently of 'Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in

Western History' (Doubleday).

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