Ten
Commandments: To understand the
importance of the Ten Commandments one has to
consider the 1950s movie Forbidden Planet.
There a US space expedition came across a planet
inhabited by a super species of pure genius. They
were a people known as the Krell and their knowledge
was so advanced that they were able to devise a
machine which gave them everything and anything they
wanted: education, material things, power, lust, art,
beauty – every need was satisfied. However, soon
thereafter, the entire race of the Krell were
extinguished and only their device remained.
The story relays the problem
with unbridled success and power. The device
satisfied every want and need. Since man has a hidden
evil inclination[1], the device satisfied every
evil thought, no matter how repressed by the Krell,
resulting in an awful death for every target of deep
jealousy and hate between the Krell. The movie thus
neatly touches on the true overriding purpose of the
Ten Commandments: something which escaped the Krell: boundaries.
Man must live within boundaries of his conduct, his
endeavors and even his successes.
Jewish history adeptly touches
on the historical problem of too much success. Here
we need only revisit the time of the First Temple in
Jerusalem. The Jews after being cleansed via 40 years
of wandering in the desert, where they honed and
polished their devotion to Hashem, first were
permitted into the Land of Israel.
G-d thereafter was with the Jews
in Israel in driving out many different barbaric
peoples. Not only were the Jews victorious warriors
but G-d was with them in everything they did: they
were a Holy people and all Nations duly recognized
the Jews’ relationship with Hashem.
Thus, by the time of the First
Temple, G-d’s every promise was fulfilled: the
Jews multiplied, they were in the land of milk and
honey, they had no enemies, and they were very
prosperous. They were much like the Krell.
However, the Jews had their part
of the covenant to honor: there were boundaries to
their success and behavior. This required not only
knowledge of the Ten Commandments but focus and
attention on what the message of these laws meant and
were intended to accomplish. Thus while no doubt
every Jew knew of the Ten Commandments, it is a far
different thing to see whether the commandments in
substance and spirit were being given due homage,
focus and attention: the latter the lesson of the
Shema Yisroel, requiring repetition day and night,
day after day, of these essential Judaic precepts.
Consequently without homage to
the Shema, familiarly breeds indifference, and the
Jewish people got to a point where they forgot
their special relationship with Hashem, Who no longer
openly acted to protect them since they needed little
or no protection. Thus, since the Jewish people in
the Land of the Israel were the envy of strange
peoples, they were entreated into relationships,
business and personal, by them. In these
relationships they found pleasures and forgetfulness
for their sworn covenant with Hashem. They started
moving beyond the pale, beyond the boundaries of
conduct and behavior encompassed by the Ten
Commandments and the Torah.
Over some two centuries, this
deterioration resulted in a situation where the Ten
Commandments became a distant memory. The Jews thus
found great pleasures, like the Krell, in living
without boundaries. They had lust. They had riches.
They had the fruits of assimilation. They had the
pleasures of forgotten responsibilities. They forgot
their own bondage, and now joined those who were
taskmasters in failing to remember or protect the
weak, the poor, the sick, the elderly and the infirm.
They became a Roman nobility and crossed the final
line when they commenced the worship of idols on the
steps of the Temple invoking the final defamation to
Hashem, to their ancestors, and the covenant between
them and Hashem.
Corruption breeds contempt and
the Jews could now never find their way back to the
correct course: the entire purpose of the Ten
Commandments to recognize boundaries to success, to
any endeavor, to any pleasure. Thus, Hashem in His
anger, ultimately expunged the Jews from the Land of
Israel and cast them into a Diaspora lasting two
millenniums. During this period, similar to the forty
years of wandering, the Jews, as a persecuted people,
were frowned upon by their host countries, keeping
them in ghettos and stettles, where work and
prosperity were a remote remembrance. They
consequently found themselves with ample time to
reflect and concentrate on what happened to them,
what the Torah meant, for their past and their
future. Regrettably, for reasons discussed in segment
2, they never seemed to pick up the true message of
the Torah, rather finding themselves a victimized
people who were brutalized by barbarians, a people
who inherently represented justice and spoke for the
oppressed, as a people remembering their bondage with
G-d after He freed them from slavery in Egypt.
Regrettably, they missed the
simple thought G-d seemed to intend from the
punishment occasioned by the Diaspora: to review
their failings during the time of the First Temple,
to make sure they didn’t make the same mistake
again (under the Torah proviso that we would be given
a second chance). G-d destroyed ten of the
original twelve tribes of Israel. He also highlighted
His point by specifically having the Jewish nobility
who obviated everything the Jew was supposed to be,
cast into a nameless slavery where they and their
families perished at the hands of peoples who
put them into an enslavement far worse than suffered
in Egypt.
However, Judaic studies and
values refused to focus on the errors and ways of the
Jewish people which engendered G-d’s wrath and
punishment, and instead concluded that it was best to
instill into Jewish studies the irrefutable premise
that the Jew, as a descendant of generations of
slaves, genetically was suited to only represent
justice and speak for the oppressed, a concept which
appeared operable during the Diaspora when the Jews
themselves were victimized and oppressed.
However, the Torah provided that
the Diaspora would come to an end when the Jews were
thinned out due to persecutions and assimilation
during the Diaspora, capped off by the wholesale
deaths of the Holocaust.[2] Thereafter,
the Torah provides that the Jewish people would be
given back the State of Israel as a second chance
after spending two millenniums studying, yearning and
pleading for G-d’s intervention, pledging their
enduring and unabated dedication to what they had
learned[3].
During these times, the Jewish
people swore a renewed bond to G-d and no doubt an
allegiance that if better times lay ahead for them,
especially for their children, they would never
forget G-d and teach their children as provided by
the Torah, the mandate of the Ten Commandments, under
the precept of continued repetition as expressed by
the Shema[4].
State
of Israel 1999: During my extended stay
this past summer in Israel I was simply stunned at
the changes between this visit and my first visit
there in 1964. The Jews were afraid and intimidated
by the Arabs, building access roads to circumvent
their fear of traveling through Arab areas, and
further building fences around settlements,
essentially creating Jewish ghettos within their own
land. On introspection, the dynamics seemed in place
for the Jews to be cast out of their own land once
again.
It seemed to me that the first
indication of the biblical reason therefor was my
asking a group of Sabras whether they believed in
G-d. They said "No," they didn’t. This
depressing reality was further buttressed by the new
politics in Israel where the Jewish people are
divided among themselves like never before. The Jew
wearing the yamulke, the Jew holding belief in G-d,
is called the religious Jew, the fanatic who is
making trouble for the secular majority.
This was very much like a bad
dream to me. In 1999 one calls a devoted Jew a
"religious" Jew...all Jews by definition
are supposed to be devoted Jews. A Jew who is not
devoted is a non-religious Jew. So why don’t we
call non-religious Jews, "non-religious
Jews,” and keep the word Jew for those devoted
to Hashem and to the covenant? Furthermore, it is an
admitted reality that most Jews in Israel today are
non-religious Jews.
Most of the non-religious Jews
supported Shimon Peres in the 1996 elections, a man
who was devoted to Israel being part and parcel of
the global community, a concept contrary to biblical
mandate. Thus, when I had the pleasure of having
dinner in the home of a family with strong direct
ties to Shimon Peres, my singular question,
predicated on Peres’ commitment to allowing
Arabs full citizenship, was what they would think of
the State of Israel, when it was occupied by a
majority of Arab people voting in Arab leadership and
where over time Jews would become a passive minority
within their own country? No doubt the designation
State of Israel would become an operative misnomer.
While this question and dynamic
forges the issue to a non-religious Jew, the
overriding dynamic is the consequence of the majority
of Jews becoming non-religious Jews. At the time of
the First Temple was built, all Jews in Israel, and I
mean all Jews, were (religious) Jews. By the time the
Jews lost the Temple, the Jewish majority were
non-religious Jews. They lost their connection to
Hashem, which lead to their assimilation and moving
to the diametric extreme of idol worship; they were a
people who wanted to be accepted and participate in
the business and personal pleasures of the then
global community.
Consequently, the non-religious
Jews domination of the Land of Israel today, speaks
for such a yearning; to be part and parcel of the
global community, to against seek and obtain the
pleasures of such associations; to further distance
themselves from G-d; to intermarry, intermingle, to
grab the economic successes of such alliances and
thus ultimately and quickly reach the same levels of
forgetfulness and abandonment displayed by the Jewish
people in Israel 2 millenniums earlier.
It hasn’t taken but a
drop over fifty years to see that two millenniums of
isolation, persecution, studies, prayers, yearning,
pleas, were all being lost to a new generation of
Jews ready willing and able to parallel another time
and generation which disgusted Hashem. This
generation of Jews obviously did not receive the
proper commitment from their parents or the Jewish
leadership, governmental or rabbinical.
The prosperity of First Temple
period rests in the hands of the Jews in America, who
collectively hold the global power held by Israel at
the time of the First Temple. Their attitudes toward
Hashem, Torah, the Ten Commandments, the Shema are
slipping again as well. The zeal and spirit of
Judaism, memorialized over two millenniums of the
Diaspora, has been lost in only fifty years of
renewed confidence and success by the Jewish
community. Today’s superficial commitments to
the remnants of Diaspora will be easily diluted in
one generation, two generations at most.
Consequently, it is no wonder there will never be
another true Temple built in Jerusalem for Jews,
albeit the devotion of the small segment of Orthodox
Jews, since they have shown no success in rendering
even Jerusalem a city truly Covout Hashem.
Does the Torah tell of the
future? Yes, as relayed by the prior segments,
and it also spends most of its pages telling Jews
what they must do to change it (and how to go about
it). Say you had a personal Torah telling you that on
such a date and place, you would face death and
destruction. Wouldn’t you do everything possible
to escape the described destiny, to make sure you
didn’t take the wrong road?
The Jewish people have made it a
very bad practice during good times to do everything
not to escape their destiny, to avoid death and
destruction. However, once good times become bad
times, no doubt the Jewish people again will quickly
assess and interpret their wrongs when they lose
Israel again and face devastating consequences
covered in the prior segment. However, their
devotion, zeal, prayers, cries for Hashem,
accordingly will fall on deaf ears; for Hashem, and
all those Jews who made commitments to Hashem during
the Diaspora and during the Inquisition and
Holocaust, praying and beseeching Hashem for His
intervention, will have been defamed by the rapidity
of the contemporary Jewish forgetfulness. G-d will
have given us a second chance, and we will have
quickly proven to Him that it was all (The Diaspora)
a waste of time.
Thus, it has been my personal
endeavor to put these dynamics before every living
Jew for every Jew should be charged with the
knowledge of what has been and what will be and what
their role will be in the final solution for the
Jewish people, not by the hands of Hitler or the
like, regardless of name, but in fulfillment of a
Torah expressed destiny, due to the Jewish disdain
and disregard for the lessons of history, the
messages of the Torah, and commitments made by those
in their own families who now find a generation
without a true commitment to history or honor, not to
say Hashem and their own people (to pledges made by
them to Hashem). G-d requires substance over form!
What needs to be done? There is
a desperate need for the Jewish leadership to make
sure the true message of the Torah reaches and is
considered by the Jewish people. There is a need to
start, preferably via the City of Jerusalem, the only
point on earth where Jews know G-d to have been
present, to make it a city Covout Hashem. This is a
beginning to showing honor to the prayers,
pledges, pleas of those in our families who so
entreated Hashem. Third, there is a need to put
leadership in the revolving hands of righteous Jews
devoted to Hashem and Torah. By this I mean Jewish
groups should all submit names of righteous members
and every year 1/3 of the Jewish leadership should be
randomly selected from those names submitted. Thus,
every three years it a totally different leadership.
The one thing history makes clear is that abusive
power and leadership is always a function of time. An
ever changing leadership randomly chosen from a
list of righteous names should dramatically help the
Jewish leadership stay the correct course.
It just must be understood the
Jewish people need new leadership, redirection, and
focus, to where the Jewish people’s attention
need always have been: to Torah. This effort and
result will effectuate G-d’s continued
intervention for us from a fate which awaited us long
ago, and one which surely again awaits us, for so
quickly, again, returning to the road of death of
destruction from the time of the First Temple when
Jews forgot Hashem steeped in their secular successes
and admiration of self..[5]