The Ten Commandments

Via Andrew Sullivan, a great article about the Ten Commandments and their political significance:

Yet what of the third commandment, the one about not taking the Lord's name in vain? Today, we take this to mean something like "thou shalt not swear when a hammer has whacked thine thumb." But that is a much later Calvinist-style distortion: there's plenty of obscenity and swearing in the Bible. Rather, think back to the highland refugees. Any miscreant who "swore" on the authority of the commandments about something he in fact had no intention of doing—such as helping in the next year's harvest—would undermine the trust everyone depended on. It seems a small matter, but this principle had immense consequences later on. When descendants of the original settlers were taken into captivity in Babylon in the 6th century BC, the habit of co-operation that the third commandment fostered helped to create the meeting house—the blueprint of the later Christian church and Muslim mosque. This was unprecedented. Ordinary people weren't supposed to join together, but the third commandment encouraged people to trust each other enough to do so. It is also about humility, a rejection of the hubris involved in presuming to speak on a god's behalf. In this sense, it has performed a function quite opposite to what Hitchens presumes. Many leaders (including Abraham Lincoln) have used it to block anyone invoking God's name to justify their political proposals—a humility one retiring US president would have been wise to consider.

One of the difficult parts about being Jewish in a Judeo-Christian culture is that it's sometimes hard to separate Christian meanings from Jewish meanings. Sometimes that's a good thing; Maimonedes pretty clearly managed to sneak in parts of other philosophies and religions into Judaism, and, well, there's something peculiarly Jewish about being okay with that sort of thing happening. 

But knowing how to do that requires have a sense of what structure there is to push against. And, let's be frank, the vast majority of Jews in America, myself included, have no idea what the melody we're supposed to riff off of is in the first place.  Since Judaism isn't a religion based off of faith alone - in fact, faith is almost entirely irrelevant to the shared communal experience - text and interpretation matters, but a lot of us go around pretty unarmed. But we have a community nonetheless, a robust, beautiful one.

I think I'm going to draw a line across the page at this point, since I'm not sure where I'd take the thought after that.