[Reflections in connection with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, January 27, 1945-2005.]
Give Us Two
One of the intriguing things about the Ten Commandments, recorded in last week's Torah portion,(1) is that they were engraved on two separate tablets. Was G-d short of granite that He needed to use two tablets? Why could He not carve the commandments onto a single stone?
There is the stereotypical Jew-bashing joke about this. Before coming to the Jews, G-d approached all the nations and asked if they would like to accept the Torah. Each of them refused because of some commandment in the Bible to which they could not possibly adhere. When G-d presented the offer to the Jews, their sole question was: How much do you want for it?
To which G-d responded: "It's for free."
So the Jews replied: "Give us two."
Yet, the issue demands sincere reflection. Why indeed was there a need for two tablets?
Two Versions
The rabbis in the Midrash proposed a novel answer. The Ten Commandments, they suggested, were engraved on two tablets, five on each stone, so that they would be read in two directions - from top to bottom, and from side to side.(2)
The simplest way of reading the Ten Commandments is, of course, from top to bottom:
On the first stone:
1) I am the Lord your G-d who has taken you out of Egypt...
2) You shall have no other gods...
3) You shall not swear in G-d's name in vain...
4) Remember the Sabbath...
5) Honor your father and your mother...
And the five commandments engraved on the second tablet:
6) You shall not murder.
7) You shall not commit adultery.
8) You shall not steal.
9) You shall not bear false witness against your fellow.
10) You shall not covet your fellow's house; you shall not covet your fellow's wife? nor anything that belongs to your fellow.
This was the way of reading the Ten Commandments vertically. Yet, due to the fact that the first five commandments were engraved on one stone and the second five on a separate stone, there was another way of reading the commandments - horizontally instead of vertically, from commandment No. 1 directly to No. 6; from No. 2 to No. 7; 3 - 8; 4 - 9; 5 - 10.
This version of the Ten Commandments would read like this: 1) I am the Lord your G-d/You shall not murder; 2) You shall have no other gods/You shall not commit adultery; and so forth with the rest of the commandments.
Yet, this explanation begs the question. Why is it necessary to read the Ten Commandments horizontally? What insight can we gain from this alternative reading of the commandments?
In this essay we will discuss the juxtaposition of the first and sixth commandments: "I am the Lord your G-d/You shall not murder." The significance of this "horizontal" reading from a historical, political and religious standpoint cannot be overstated. It embodies one of the most stunning aspects of Judaism. What is at stake in this juxtaposition is nothing less than the future of human civilization.
The Two Attempts
Throughout history there have been two major attempts to divorce commandment No. 1 from commandment No. 6, to sever the idea of a Creator who conceived the world for a moral purpose from the imperative to honor the life of another human. The first attempt was introduced by the philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment during the 18th and 19th centuries; the second was embraced by religious establishments of many and diverse ages. The result of both attempts was a planet plunged into a bottomless pit of horrific bloodshed and indescribable cruelty perpetrated by humans against fellow humans.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment ushered in the Age of Reason and the modern secular era, founded on the belief that the great ideal of "You shall not murder" did not require the prerequisite of "I am the Lord Your G-d" in order to be validated and sustained. Religion was not necessary to ensure moral behavior; reason alone, without G-d, would guide humanity into an age of liberty and to the achievement of moral greatness. The sixth commandment could operate successfully independent of the first.
While religion embodied the vision of man standing in a continuous relationship with G-d, the essence of the Enlightenment represented the vision of man without G-d. It was a vision already introduced during the first days of creation near the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, by the most sophisticated animal of the time, the serpent. "You shall be like G-d," it promised Eve.(3) Man could, and ought to, replace G-d. Left to his own devices, the thinking went, the human being will reach greatness.
The Uniqueness of the Nazi Evil
This "truth", however, was reduced to ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz together with the 1.25 million people who were exterminated there.
For it was precisely the nation that had excelled in science, music, literature, culture, philosophy and ethics that turned out to be the most depraved nation of the world, sending 1.5 million children to their deaths during World War II solely because they had Jewish blood flowing in their veins.
In Schindler's List, there is a scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto where a little girl hiding in a piano is shot dead by an SS guard. As her little angelic body is covered in a river of blood, another guard sits down to play the piano.
First SS guard: Was ist das? Ist das Bach?
Second SS guard: Nein. Mozart.
First SS guard: Mozart?
Second SS guard: Ja.
And they both marvel at the exquisite music.
This was Nazi Germany at its best! Not a nation of illiterate peasants, falling prey to barbaric instinct. No! This was a nation professing great intellect and culture, and a sensitivity to aesthetics. Their genocide of a nation in the most systematic and organized fashion was done in the name of ethics and morality. The world needed to be cleansed from the vermin of the Jew. Many SS guards would spend a day in Auschwitz gassing 12,000 Jews, and then return home in the evening to pet their dogs and laugh with their wives. As the smoke of Jewish children ascended from the crematoriums, these charming romantics would enjoy the taste of good wine, women and music. The "Super Race" murdered millions of innocents all in the name of a developed ethic.
Elie Wiesel, who gripped the world's imagination with his book Night, a personal testimony of life and death in Auschwitz, once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who himself lost many members of his family in the Holocaust, how he could believe in G-d after Auschwitz. If G-d existed, Wiesel asked, posing the single greatest challenge to faith, how could He ignore six million of His children de-humanized and murdered in the cruelest of fashions?
The Rebbe shed a tear and then replied, "In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?"
This must remain one of the lasting legacies of Auschwitz. If there is any faith at all left after the extermination of six million people, it must glean its vitality from something transcending the human rationale and its properties. If morality is left to be determined exclusively by the human mind, it can become a morality that justifies genocide. In Auschwitz, the empathy that we once believed modern man felt for others was ruined forever.
Nazi Germany demonstrated for all time that if "I am the Lord your G-d" is deleted from the equation of life, "You shall not murder" will soon be erased as well. As Dostoevsky famously put it in The Brothers Karamazov, "Where there is no G-d, all is permitted." Without G-d, the path is paved to the creation of a hell on earth, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber.
The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: "I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values [resulting from atheism], but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it."
Russell's point is critical. Without G-d, we cannot objectively define any behavior as good or evil. As difficult as it is to entertain, no one can objectively claim that gassing a mother and her children is any more evil than eating cheesecake. It is all a matter of taste and opinion. The validity and effectiveness of "You shall not murder" can be sustained only if it is preceded by the foundation of faith in a universal moral creator who gave humanity an absolute and unwavering definition of what constitutes good vs. evil.
Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, who escaped Warsaw a few weeks before it was invaded and who lost most of his family in the Nazi Holocaust, captured this sentiment succinctly: "If man is not more than human, then he is less then human."
Either we climb to a place beyond ourselves, or we are likely to fall to a place below ourselves. When the vision of the sacred dies in the soul of a person, he or she is capable of becoming a servant of the devil.
[Part 1 of 2]
Footnotes:
1) Exodus chapter 20.
2) Mechilta to Exodus ibid.
3) Genesis 3:5.
[My gratitude to Shmuel Levin, a writer and editor in Pittsburgh, for his editorial assistance. All contents copyright © 2005 Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson]
Give Us Two
One of the intriguing things about the Ten Commandments, recorded in last week's Torah portion,(1) is that they were engraved on two separate tablets. Was G-d short of granite that He needed to use two tablets? Why could He not carve the commandments onto a single stone?
There is the stereotypical Jew-bashing joke about this. Before coming to the Jews, G-d approached all the nations and asked if they would like to accept the Torah. Each of them refused because of some commandment in the Bible to which they could not possibly adhere. When G-d presented the offer to the Jews, their sole question was: How much do you want for it?
To which G-d responded: "It's for free."
So the Jews replied: "Give us two."
Yet, the issue demands sincere reflection. Why indeed was there a need for two tablets?
Two Versions
The rabbis in the Midrash proposed a novel answer. The Ten Commandments, they suggested, were engraved on two tablets, five on each stone, so that they would be read in two directions - from top to bottom, and from side to side.(2)
The simplest way of reading the Ten Commandments is, of course, from top to bottom:
On the first stone:
1) I am the Lord your G-d who has taken you out of Egypt...
2) You shall have no other gods...
3) You shall not swear in G-d's name in vain...
4) Remember the Sabbath...
5) Honor your father and your mother...
And the five commandments engraved on the second tablet:
6) You shall not murder.
7) You shall not commit adultery.
8) You shall not steal.
9) You shall not bear false witness against your fellow.
10) You shall not covet your fellow's house; you shall not covet your fellow's wife? nor anything that belongs to your fellow.
This was the way of reading the Ten Commandments vertically. Yet, due to the fact that the first five commandments were engraved on one stone and the second five on a separate stone, there was another way of reading the commandments - horizontally instead of vertically, from commandment No. 1 directly to No. 6; from No. 2 to No. 7; 3 - 8; 4 - 9; 5 - 10.
This version of the Ten Commandments would read like this: 1) I am the Lord your G-d/You shall not murder; 2) You shall have no other gods/You shall not commit adultery; and so forth with the rest of the commandments.
Yet, this explanation begs the question. Why is it necessary to read the Ten Commandments horizontally? What insight can we gain from this alternative reading of the commandments?
In this essay we will discuss the juxtaposition of the first and sixth commandments: "I am the Lord your G-d/You shall not murder." The significance of this "horizontal" reading from a historical, political and religious standpoint cannot be overstated. It embodies one of the most stunning aspects of Judaism. What is at stake in this juxtaposition is nothing less than the future of human civilization.
The Two Attempts
Throughout history there have been two major attempts to divorce commandment No. 1 from commandment No. 6, to sever the idea of a Creator who conceived the world for a moral purpose from the imperative to honor the life of another human. The first attempt was introduced by the philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment during the 18th and 19th centuries; the second was embraced by religious establishments of many and diverse ages. The result of both attempts was a planet plunged into a bottomless pit of horrific bloodshed and indescribable cruelty perpetrated by humans against fellow humans.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment ushered in the Age of Reason and the modern secular era, founded on the belief that the great ideal of "You shall not murder" did not require the prerequisite of "I am the Lord Your G-d" in order to be validated and sustained. Religion was not necessary to ensure moral behavior; reason alone, without G-d, would guide humanity into an age of liberty and to the achievement of moral greatness. The sixth commandment could operate successfully independent of the first.
While religion embodied the vision of man standing in a continuous relationship with G-d, the essence of the Enlightenment represented the vision of man without G-d. It was a vision already introduced during the first days of creation near the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, by the most sophisticated animal of the time, the serpent. "You shall be like G-d," it promised Eve.(3) Man could, and ought to, replace G-d. Left to his own devices, the thinking went, the human being will reach greatness.
The Uniqueness of the Nazi Evil
This "truth", however, was reduced to ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz together with the 1.25 million people who were exterminated there.
For it was precisely the nation that had excelled in science, music, literature, culture, philosophy and ethics that turned out to be the most depraved nation of the world, sending 1.5 million children to their deaths during World War II solely because they had Jewish blood flowing in their veins.
In Schindler's List, there is a scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto where a little girl hiding in a piano is shot dead by an SS guard. As her little angelic body is covered in a river of blood, another guard sits down to play the piano.
First SS guard: Was ist das? Ist das Bach?
Second SS guard: Nein. Mozart.
First SS guard: Mozart?
Second SS guard: Ja.
And they both marvel at the exquisite music.
This was Nazi Germany at its best! Not a nation of illiterate peasants, falling prey to barbaric instinct. No! This was a nation professing great intellect and culture, and a sensitivity to aesthetics. Their genocide of a nation in the most systematic and organized fashion was done in the name of ethics and morality. The world needed to be cleansed from the vermin of the Jew. Many SS guards would spend a day in Auschwitz gassing 12,000 Jews, and then return home in the evening to pet their dogs and laugh with their wives. As the smoke of Jewish children ascended from the crematoriums, these charming romantics would enjoy the taste of good wine, women and music. The "Super Race" murdered millions of innocents all in the name of a developed ethic.
Elie Wiesel, who gripped the world's imagination with his book Night, a personal testimony of life and death in Auschwitz, once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who himself lost many members of his family in the Holocaust, how he could believe in G-d after Auschwitz. If G-d existed, Wiesel asked, posing the single greatest challenge to faith, how could He ignore six million of His children de-humanized and murdered in the cruelest of fashions?
The Rebbe shed a tear and then replied, "In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?"
This must remain one of the lasting legacies of Auschwitz. If there is any faith at all left after the extermination of six million people, it must glean its vitality from something transcending the human rationale and its properties. If morality is left to be determined exclusively by the human mind, it can become a morality that justifies genocide. In Auschwitz, the empathy that we once believed modern man felt for others was ruined forever.
Nazi Germany demonstrated for all time that if "I am the Lord your G-d" is deleted from the equation of life, "You shall not murder" will soon be erased as well. As Dostoevsky famously put it in The Brothers Karamazov, "Where there is no G-d, all is permitted." Without G-d, the path is paved to the creation of a hell on earth, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber.
The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: "I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values [resulting from atheism], but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it."
Russell's point is critical. Without G-d, we cannot objectively define any behavior as good or evil. As difficult as it is to entertain, no one can objectively claim that gassing a mother and her children is any more evil than eating cheesecake. It is all a matter of taste and opinion. The validity and effectiveness of "You shall not murder" can be sustained only if it is preceded by the foundation of faith in a universal moral creator who gave humanity an absolute and unwavering definition of what constitutes good vs. evil.
Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, who escaped Warsaw a few weeks before it was invaded and who lost most of his family in the Nazi Holocaust, captured this sentiment succinctly: "If man is not more than human, then he is less then human."
Either we climb to a place beyond ourselves, or we are likely to fall to a place below ourselves. When the vision of the sacred dies in the soul of a person, he or she is capable of becoming a servant of the devil.
[Part 1 of 2]
Footnotes:
1) Exodus chapter 20.
2) Mechilta to Exodus ibid.
3) Genesis 3:5.
[My gratitude to Shmuel Levin, a writer and editor in Pittsburgh, for his editorial assistance. All contents copyright © 2005 Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson]