The Ten Commandments for our Time

The First Commandment: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.Interpretation: The essential question that this commandment asks is “What do you believe in?” “What do you place your faith in?” In every human life, a decision is made, either deliberately or tacitly, about what are the most important things in that life. With regard to what do we spend our money, devote our conversations to; expend our energy and time upon? The First Commandment challenges each person to reflect on whether they are living up to their potential, whether they are focused on and prepared to commit to the highest and noblest life that they could be living.The Second Commandment: You will have no other gods before me. You will not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above, or the earth beneath or the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.Interpretation: This commandment has particular resonance for contemporary life, as it asks whether we are involved in things that are real, or just “images” of the real thing. In an age where “the image” is all powerful, where social media creates myths around human beings and celebrity has become its own form of worship, the second Commandment asks us to consider whether we are living a life that is connected to what is not just a pale reflection of what is genuine, a “shadow” of the real, but invested in the things that are permanent and meaningful.Do we distract ourselves too much with entertainment and a desire not to really inhabit our lives? Can we create a life where we consciously choose to be in relation with people we love, with the family and community of which we are a part, and of the earth which we have inherited and which we have a mission to protect forever?The Third Commandment: You shall not carry the name of God in vain.Interpretation: For many years, I have told my students that “you must risk taking yourself seriously.” The Third Commandment talks about whether we use language in a careless and vulgar fashion, and whether our overall attitude towards life is one of inattentiveness or even triviality.“To carry the name of God in vain” suggests that we have a sacred task to uphold what is meaningful and not be prone to mockery or sarcasm about what life can offer. It beckons us to become emotionally vulnerable and never to take lightly the blessings which life has bestowed upon us. This commandment asks us: Do we take our lives seriously? Do we recognize the implications of our mortality, that time is fleeting, and that the question of what our lives mean is ever before us?The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you will labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to God.Interpretation: It is possible that for many people, for whom the work-life balance is all out of synch, and where their jobs have become an imperative that moves to the side many other life goals and experiences, the Fourth Commandment may be the most important of all. For it asks perhaps one of the central questions of modern Western life: are you able to stop and step off the treadmill of work, of schedule, of endless devotion to the material world? Is stopping something you do almost by accident, or is it a deliberate mindful choice?The Sabbath is a call for justice, in which we are asked to stop defining ourselves strictly by what we create or produce, and to return to what is fundamental: our sense of self; our intellectual and emotional and spiritual capacities; our loved ones. This commandment offers the most precious gift of all, which is to be able to reclaim our time, through a weekly zone of deep rest and reflection that is non-negotiable.The Fifth Commandment: Honor your father and your mother.Interpretation: One should first note what we are not commanded to do here, which is to love our parents. We may in fact love them, but it is not a mitzvah, but a deeply personal emotional feeling. What we are asked to do in this commandment is to attempt to maintain a standard of honour, never to shame or demean those who brought us into the world and raised us.People will have deep seated feelings about how they were parented, and Judaism does not ask us to honour parents if they, tragically, abused us. Rather it refers to parents who may not have been perfect, made mistakes, but still are worthy of consideration in all of their attempts to help us in our lives.Honouring those who came before is a pillar of the Jewish worldview, a recognition that we are not self-created, and we owe a debt to previous generations upon whom our lives are grounded.The Sixth Commandment: You shall not murder.Interpretation: For many people, this will seem almost like an extraneous message, as we all have been raised on the minimal ethical standard that it is utterly wrong to take an innocent life. But although we do not carry out any killings ourselves, one of the central ethical challenges of our day and age is whether we do we stand by in situations of injustice and oppression and watch as others are killed without doing anything to help in any way. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once noted: in a free society, some are guilty, but everyone is responsible.”The Seventh Commandment: You shall not commit adultery.Interpretation: Studies suggest sexual infidelity is fairly common today and the top cause of divorce in the USA. The commandment against adultery asks us what we truly want out of our marriages or long term, partnerships. Do we expect our partner to supply us with “everything” - stability, safety, dependability, comfort, but also erotic excitement, mystery, adventure, and spontaneity?What does it mean for a love to grow, and grow in different directions as we get older? Do we believe that the grass is greener with the adulterous relationship? Is adultery a search for anew human being to be in relation with, or an unwitting search for a missing part of the self we think we left behind?The Eighth Commandment: You shall not steal.Interpretation: This commandment ranges far beyond the usual scenario that we have taken someone else’s stuff without permission. There are so many ways we can steal from others in the course of a life. This mitzvah asks: Do we induce false hopes in romantic partners that we have no intention of fulfilling, stealing their heart and their dreams? Do we carelessly use other people’s money or their objects, and not treat them as though they were our own? Do we steal other people’s ideas without giving them credit, in order to prop up our own reputation? Do we waste our own time, stealing years from our ability to invest in a meaningful existence?The Ninth Commandment: You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.Interpretation: Do we think casually about the value of truth, about being honest, and not creating false pictures of others in our conversations and messages? Do we spend a lot of time gossiping about people as opposed to focusing on building our own character? This commandment asks us to think long and hard with the care we devote to the reputation and reality of those around us, and to be faithful witnesses to their virtues and humanity.The Tenth Commandment: You shall not covet.Interpretation: This commandment can be seen as the culmination of all of the others, a climactic teaching that is perfect for our age. On some level, the entire Ten Commandments are an attempt to instill, deep within us, the message that happiness lies in being able to “stay within” your own life, and not to covet or appropriate what does not belong to you (not to take someone else’s life, or their partner; or their property; or their time; or their honour).We are commanded to feel the blessing that comes with each moment; to live without envy and with constant gratitude for what we have as opposed to resenting what we do not; to be mindful of each moment and each opportunity. These are ideals that the Ten Commandments lays before us, not to be achieved in a moment, but to be worked on for a lifetime.