Feb 10/07 — Parashat Yitro

Commentary by Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker

How strange—he said—
to realize suddenly that no one is to blame.

– Yannis Ritsos, Scripture of the Blind

The most curious of the so-called Ten Commandments is the tenth: “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbour’s.” (Exodus 20:14)

Our Etz Hayim Humash notes, “... the general pattern of the Torah is to command behaviour, not thought. Can we control our feelings or are we responsible only for our actions?” I understand what You Shall Not Kill or You Shall Not Steal means, and I can accept a punishment that corresponds to the crime. How, though, can one be policed for feelings or thoughts, and if the Torah cannot impose a societal control over feelings then why even legislate this commandment?

The Torah is teaching the obvious: Each of us is responsible for our actions and deeds. We possess an inner strength to resist (some with more difficulty than others) temptations put before us. If we are unable to resist, it is our fault and our responsibility to deal with it. Know, up front, that covetous thoughts can lead to immoral and illegal results. The Tenth Commandment clearly warns that this can happen. One has to be on guard against responding to these thoughts, and not merely thinking them.

Several decades ago, Jimmy Carter, the then-President of the United States did an interview with Playboy magazine in which he revealed that at times he had “lusted in his heart.” He consciously chose not to act on his thoughts, but in terms of the Baptist Christianity he practiced, he condemned himself as a “sinner in my heart.” This is not the way we Jews look upon such thoughts: for Jews, a “sin” occurs in actions motivated by the impulse to sin—not the thought of sinning itself.

The Tenth Commandment also comes to remind us that when thoughts of immorality become actions, we had better be prepared to accept the responsibility. On the surface, this appears, as the Hebrew phrase says, mu’van mey’alav—simply and understandably obvious. However, Western culture in the 21st century insists that at times we cannot be responsible for our actions. A mother murders her children because she was depressed. A person is emotionally abusive because he was abused in childhood. Our culture of explanation seems to suggest that immoral and unethical actions are often beyond our ability to control. It’s not our fault that we behaved this way—someone or something else made us do this.

The Tenth Commandment says “no” to this way of thinking. There is a code of morality. We are in charge of our behaviour. We can be taught to reject acting on covetous thoughts because they are wrong, hurtful, and/or immoral.

This is not to say that there are not conditions that lead to harmful actions. People do become depressed or psychologically wounded. The argument posed by Judaism is that societies must avoid justifying lapses in behaviour for shortcomings and faults as the result of forces that are “beyond our control”.

As creations of God, and created in the image of God, there is a certain omnipotence within each of us. Being able to come to terms with the moral requirements for dealing with our actions and thoughts is, in fact, an exercise in discovering the image of God within us—our capacity for restraining our own inclination to do wrong.

Moses Maimonides taught that

Free will is granted to all of us. If we desire to incline towards the good way and be righteous, we have the power to do so; and if we desire to incline towards the unrighteous way and be wicked, we also have the power to do so. Since the power of doing good or evil is in our own hands, and since all the wicked deeds which we have committed have been committed with full consciousness, it befits us to turn in penitence and to forsake our evil deeds.

Our tradition does not place the Ten Commandments in a place of honour because they are about some abstract ideal. In the First Book of Kings, we read that “There is no one who does not sin.” Rather than being a condemnation of human beings, it is a remark intended to elevate our awareness that we do have the power to restrict our impulse to do harm. Saying that it is impossible to be human and not err asks us to be forgiving that we often misjudge in favour of our hungers and drives; we are vulnerable. But that does not license us to behave as though we are helpless to resist our impulses.

In “The One Who Was Different,” the poet Randall Jarrell describes the convenient human escape from responsibility this way:

You give me the feeling that the universe
Was made by something more than human
For something less than human.
But I identify myself, as always,
With something that there’s something wrong with,
With something human.

The Ten Commandments—better understood as Ten “Statements”—suggest that we have another option: to identify with Something transcending the perpetual human apology for doing wrong. You know the apology: “What do you expect of me? I’m only human!” For Jews, God is ever-present and proclaiming a Divine faith in our ability to rise above the “merely human” in order to live up to the spark of divinity implanted within us.

Yes, it is a tremendous challenge. It’s good to know that sometimes we succeed at living up to it.

Shabbat Shalom.