Weakening Our Most Protective Wall

I haven’t much used this space to comment on news from other states, but I seem to be in that mode precisely now: last week I wrote about the new law in North Dakota restricting the rights of voters to elect federal officials who will turn 81 before the end of the year before their terms expires. And now I’m going to write about a different new law, the one passed in Louisiana earlier this month that is going to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom in the state. And not displayed casually either: the law requires that the text be presented on “a poster or a framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches” in size. Furthermore, it must be “printed in a large, easily readable font.” Also, the act doesn’t leave anything to chance and actually enshrines in law the specific translation that must be used, one that is clearly derived from Protestant (as opposed to Catholic, let alone Jewish) tradition. To read the act itself, click here.

You might expect a rabbi-author such as myself to be delighted. The Torah teaches that the Ten Commandments were spoken aloud by God to the Israelites camped at the foot of Sinai, after all, and they are widely understood to constitute the core of the covenant that binds the God of Israel and the people Israel. So why should I object to such a text being disseminated widely, and perhaps especially to children? There are actually lots of reasons.

First and foremost, I am convinced that nothing good will come from degrading the barrier that our country used to pride itself on maintaining between church and state. I have made that argument many times in this space and it’s very much still what I think. The White House Christmas tree irritates me. The White House seder hosted by the Obamas from 2009 to 2016, times ten. (And the fact that it was unkosher is specifically not what I found so wrong with it. But that too.) And then there’s the White House Chanukah Party, initiated by President Bush in 2001 just a few months after 9/11, and carried forward by every President since. All those lighted menorahs look pretty enough on display in the West Wing, but the whole thing feels wrong to me, wrong and deeply counterproductive to our wish to maintain and, if possible, even to strengthen the wall between church and state in our country, that wall that permits all citizens to conduct their spiritual lives without interference from the government and without having to vet their religious practices with the government before engaging in them. I’m an equal-opportunity curmudgeon though, not solely a Jewish one: I find the plastic Christmas tree in the post office in December every bit as annoying as the plastic menorah on display annually in what should be a government facility free of all religious influence.

But this new law in Louisiana is bizarre for other reasons as well.

First of all, if the assumption is that being exposed as children to the Ten Commandments is going to achieve the kind of American society Justice Alito had in mind in his secretly recorded comment the other week to the effect that America should return “to a place of godliness,” then it’s hard to know how that is going to work since so much of the text of the Ten Commandments is out of sync with practices that are standard in our nation and our nation’s churches. Every serious biblical scholar knows, for example, that the Sabbath mentioned in the fourth commandment is Shabbat, i.e., Saturday, not Sunday. (For a simple explanation of why the Church moved its weekly day of worship to Sunday as opposed to holding it on Shabbat, click here.)  The Second Commandment forbids the use of plastic imagery in worship, but America’s churches are filled with artwork and statuary. Nor does this new law make sense on a partisan level, even: Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, has formally endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy for President, but the seventh commandment prohibits adulterous relationships as contrary to God’s law. I suppose there are ways to explain away all of these issues, but it still seems strange for Louisiana’s governor to wish that these laws be presented to school children as the essence of God’s revelation and then leave it to the children’s teachers to explain to the boys and girls why Michelangelo was not behaving wickedly in depicting God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, let alone who exactly Stormy Daniels is.

But the real reason I’m opposed to the Louisiana law has to do with the concept of textual integrity, which is to say, with the notion that you cannot read a text out of context and then insist that you understand it.

The story is beyond riveting. The Israelites cross the Sea of Reeds, then head south into the wilderness. They have no idea what they are going to eat or where they should camp. There is no obvious source of drinking water, at least not at first. They must know that Canaan, the Promised Land, lies to the north, not the south. And yet their leader, “that man Moses,” insists that they head in the opposite direction, but without saying clearly—or really even at all—why they should or what they can or should expect once they arrive wherever it is that they are going.  This goes on for seven weeks, the forty-nine days later enshrined in Jewish tradition as the s’firah, the “counting.” And then the Israelites arrive at Sinai. They have been told that they are coming “to God,” but without having had it explained to them even vaguely what that could possibly mean. They are told what to do: to wash their clothing and to refrain from intimate relations for a period of three days, but without being told precisely what is about to happen.

And then the scene commences that we all know. The mountain is covered by cloud and smoke. Deafening shofar blasts can be heard, but without it being clear where the shofars are or who is blowing air into them. Bolts of lightning illumine the sky. Claps of thunder are fully audible, combining with the shofar blasts  and the lightning to create an atmosphere that is both blinding and deafening. And then, all at once, a deep silence. The shofarot  fall silent. The lightning stops. And God speaks to the people.

What follows is the Ten Commandments, the text we all know by heart or almost by heart. But the story continues in a way that would probably surprise the Governor of Louisiana if he were to open up his Bible and continue reading. After just ten commandments, the people feel enervated to the point of exhaustion by the experience of audible, sensory communion with God. They break into what was presumably meant to be an ongoing revelation of divine law and beg Moses to go up personally to the top of the mountain “where God was” and himself to retrieve the rest of the rules and laws that are to serve as the meat of the covenant intended forever to bind Israel and God. What Moses thought is not recorded, but his actual response is: he kindly tells them that they’ve passed the test God has imposed upon them (but without saying what exactly was being tested or even what precisely the test was), then heads up the mountain. God, in our day so taciturn, is positively talkative: Moses has barely begun to ascend the mountain and God is already continuing the revelation. And then, presumably once Moses is settled in atop Sinai, God really gets going and continues to detail the rules and laws that will constitute the covenant.

All these Moses records in a document called “the Book of the Covenant,” sefer ha-b’rit. And then he returns to the people, reads the book aloud to them—since they cannot reasonably be expected to enter into the covenant blindly, i.e., without knowing what is to be expected of them as the human parties to it—and only then, after the people formally agrees to follow the rules of the covenant, is the weird and wonderful sacrificial ceremony described in detail in Exodus 24 undertaken. The people agree to stand still while the blood of a slaughtered bull is splattered all over them. And God, amazingly, deigns to be seen…but only by the elders of the nation and only from below so that all they really see are the soles of the divine feet.

And that is the real story of the Ten Commandments, that they are merely the first ten of the sixty-odd laws that constitute the terms of the covenant between the Jewish people and the God of Israel. Later on, God will issue many more laws and statutes that will henceforth govern Jewish life. But the terms of covenant itself—the terms included in the sefer ha-b’rit—are presented in Scripture in Exodus, chapters 20 through 23. So singling out the Ten Commandments and suggesting that they are somehow different in kind or nature from the rest of the commandments that constitute the covenant is either naively or willfully to misread the text of Scripture.

Yes, it is true that Moses later breaks the tablets of the law emblazoned with the first ten of the commandments, then refashions the tablets atop the mountain and redelivers them to the people. But there is no reasonable way to read the scriptural narrative to yield the conclusion that God’s covenant with Israel only “really” includes the first ten commandments, let alone that these are intended to serve all of humankind as the basis of decent and ethical behavior.

The new law requiring that schools display the Ten Commandment in every classroom in Louisiana is an egregious breach of the wall between church and state. And it imputes a meaning to the text that has no basis in the actual scriptural narrative. For both those reasons, I hope that the courts strike down this law and re-affirm the barrier between the government and the religious lives of the citizenry.