 I've often wondered which of these familiar symbols is more widely recognized. On the one hand we have this symbol, and on the other hand we have this symbol. I feel like at a doctor's office. On the one hand we have this symbol, and which one is more widely recognized, this or this. Okay. So after wondering about this for a long time, I should point out by the way before we continue that the ten commandments in the form of two rounded tablets is really unfortunately not an accurate representation of what they look like. This is basically something that crept into Jewish art from Christian sources. Even though Michelangelo's Moses gets it correct and he shows rectangular tablets, and that's basically what the Jewish sages teach, that they were either rectangular, square on top, or even according to some they were cubes. But there are no Jewish sources which say that they had rounded tops, like we see them in almost every synagogue on the planet. So I was thinking about these two symbols, the double arches of McDonald's and the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. Again wondering which has greater product recognition. And I found a survey that was done by the Kelton Research people about a decade ago that revealed just how familiar Americans were with the Ten Commandments versus the McDonald's Big Mac hamburger. Now I don't have stats for the entire world, but I'm going to assume that whatever we find about the United States will apply equally to Canada. And probably the results will even be worse in other parts of the world. So here are the results of this survey. They found that only 14% of respondents could recall all ten of the Ten Commandments. Only 14% of the people that were surveyed were able to identify all Ten Commandments. And 71%, 71% were only able to name one of the ten. They could only come up with one of the ten. Whereas 25% could name all seven ingredients in the Big Mac. And 80% were able to name the Big Mac's main ingredient, which was, as most of you know, two all-beef patties. So 80% of the people were able to recognize the main ingredient in a Big Mac, which was two all-beef patties. But 71% of respondents were only able to name one of the ten commandments. Further findings of this survey were that less than 60%, less than 60% of the respondents knew that thou shall not kill was on the two tablets. They didn't know it. Only 45% could recall the commandment to honor your father and mother. Only 45% of people surveyed were familiar with the fact that honor your father and mother makes it into the Ten Commandments. But 62% of the people surveyed knew that the Big Mac has a pickle. So what we find in this survey was, unfortunately, that the McDonald's Big Mac people are much more familiar with than the Ten Commandments. Now, I could offer you a very simple reason for this, which is that the Big Mac has, I don't know if they have it anymore, but when I was growing up, they had a very snappy jingle. So because of that snappy jingle, it was very easy to memorize all the ingredients in the Big Mac. I don't know if they have it anymore. Who cares? And I think also for many people, lunch may be more important than the Bible. So that could account for why there's such discrepancy between the Big Mac and the Ten Commandments. But I want to go a little bit deeper tonight. The fact is that part of the problem might be that the Ten Commandments are not such a simple matter. They're not so simple. And there is much about them that is not clear. And it's not very easy to resolve all the ambiguities about the Ten Commandments. Let's begin with their name. For starters, the Ten Commandments, there aren't only Ten Commandments. So the number Ten is just wrong. And secondly, not all of these Ten might be commandments. According to many commentaries, the very first one, I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery, isn't a commandment. That doesn't say it's not put into that kind of language. Thou shalt, thou shalt not. It's just a statement of fact. I am God who took you out of Egypt. Is that a commandment? Not clear. And some commentaries say it's not a commandment. So to speak about the Ten Commandments is really getting off to the wrong start because they may not all be commandments. And according to many of our sages, there aren't ten. Why is that? Because if you go through the primary text of the Ten Commandments, which is the book of Exodus chapter 20, verses 2 to 14, you'll be able to see for yourself there are more than ten commandments. Don Isaac Abarbanel, who was a great Spanish Bible commentator in the 15th century, counted thirteen commandments in the so-called Ten Commandments. And my monities, writing in the 12th century, found fifteen commandments, not just ten. So the whole idea, the whole concept of the Ten Commandments just really doesn't work from the get-go. And the truth is that the Torah itself, the Bible itself, never refers to them as the Ten Commandments. The word in Hebrew for commandments is mitzvot. So there's never anything in the Bible about the Ten mitzvot, the Ten Commandments, instead in all three places where they are spoken about in the Bible, which is Exodus chapter 34, verse 28, and Deuteronomy chapter 4, verse 13, and Deuteronomy chapter 10, verse 4. In all three of these places they're spoken about as the Aseret Hadivarim. The Aseret Hadivarim. Literally, which means the ten words. They're spoken about as the ten words. Now, that's also obviously a big problem because you can count for yourself in those verses there are many more than ten words. So you could equally translate the Aseret Hadivarim not as words, but as statements or utterances. I like the term Dekalog, which comes from the Greek Dekalogoi, which means the ten sayings. So really the most accurate way of speaking about these so-called Ten Commandments, because there aren't ten, are the ten statements or the ten utterances or the ten sayings. They all work. And even though there are more than ten commandments packed into these utterances, what's interesting is that if you find a Torah scroll or if you get a Hebrew edition of the Torah, so you'll see that the Torah itself breaks these into ten separate paragraphs. Or if not paragraphs, they are separated by blank empty space in the Bible, what you'll find is that different parts of the Bible are separated from each other. We might think about them as chapters, are separated by empty space on the parchment. There might be a lot of empty space. There might be nine empty spaces. But basically what you'll find when you go through these, what we call ten utterances, even though they include thirteen to fifteen commandments, you'll see they're broken up into ten separate pieces. And that's why the number ten is actually accurate. Just for example, the paragraph dealing with the Sabbath has two different commandments, according to Maimonides. So for example, Exodus chapter twenty, verses eight through nine, those are two verses. It says that the commandment to remember the Sabbath day, that's what those two verses are about, it speaks about the commandment to remember the Sabbath day by proclaiming it as a holy day, both Maimonides says at the commencement of the Sabbath and at the conclusion of the Sabbath. So the verse in the Bible, two verses actually. Exodus chapter twenty, verses eight to nine, are two verses that contain one commandment about the need to proclaim the Sabbath as a holy day. But the next verse, Exodus chapter twenty, verse ten, is the prohibition against doing any kind of melacha or creative work on the Sabbath. It's a separate commandment. One commandment is to proclaim the day as holy and there's another commandment to avoid doing any kind of creative work on the Sabbath. And you find those two commandments in three verses. And those three verses are set aside from the verses that come before and the verses that come after by blank empty space. And that paragraph, if you will, which is verses eight through ten, that's a paragraph that contains two commandments. So we actually will find ten paragraphs, but depending on who you ask, thirteen to fifteen separate commandments. Another problem with the focus on the idea of the ten commandments, the idea of ten commandments, is that in the context of the Torah itself there are far more than ten commandments. Traditionally the number is considered to be six hundred and thirteen. So when people speak about how religious they are, I hear this all the time. I'm very religious. I keep the ten commandments. What are you talking about keeping the ten commandments? The Torah has six hundred and thirteen commandments. So the idea of ten commandments really does violence to the Torah writ large. Now at one point in Jewish history, this discrepancy led to a serious problem. According to the Mishnah in Masecha Tamid, chapter five Mishnah one, the priests in the temple in Jerusalem would recite the ten commandments. We'll use that term for tonight even though it's not accurate because it's one we all know. So the priests in the temple would recite the Aseret Adib wrote the ten utterances or the ten commandments before the reading of the Shema. We all know that the declaration of faith in Judaism is from Deuteronomy chapter six verse four. Here in Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheno Adonai Ahad. And that was recited in the temple every day by the priests. But before they would recite it, they would recite the ten commandments. That was historically done. And we're told that after the destruction of the temple, the second temple in the year 70, so the Talmud teaches in Traktate Brachot that the sages continued, even though there was no temple where priests recited anything, but the sages continued the practice of publicly reciting the Aseret Adib wrote the ten commandments each day as part of the formal prayer service. However the Talmud says that they eventually abolished this, that the rabbis themselves abolished the public recitation of the ten commandments. Why? Because of the claims being made by various heretics and sectarian groups. And we're told in the Talmud that even later on, in Babylon where many Jews were living, there were efforts to institute this public reading of the Aseret Adib wrote, but it was abandoned for similar reasons because various heretics and sectarian groups were claiming that what? They were claiming that yes, these are the ten commandments because these were given by God to Moses and Mount Sinai. They were put on two tablets and they're kept in the ark, the holy ark in the temple. And these are the real commandments that God gave and everything else was not really from God. Everything else was made up by Moses, but they're not really God's commandments. And because people began believing this, that there are only ten commandments, the rabbis were very concerned that emphasizing this and sort of highlighting it by making a special reading of specifically these ten was giving credence to these heretical ideas. And the truth is that what the rabbis were worried about 2,000 years ago, we see that it was a real concern because if you ask people in the world today how many commandments are there in the Bible, most people will say there are ten commandments and most people will be quite surprised to find out, no, there aren't just ten commandments. This is also something that was taught by many in the development of early Christianity. The early Christians were not so keen on observing all the commandments of the Bible and they again were promulgating this idea that no, there are only ten commandments. Now in a similar vein, mymonides issued a ruling about the public reading of the Aseret ad-Dibro that we read in the synagogue. So we know that every week we read basically a 50th of the five books of Moses, right? We have the five books of Moses and every Shabbat we read about a 50 of it. So in the course of a year we finish the entire five books of Moses. And mymonides was concerned that when they came to this portion, Exodus chapter 20, it contains the ten commandments, there was a practice that people would stand. So when that passage was being read, people would get up and stand. And mymonides says, no, that should not be done. People should not stand because he was concerned again that people would overemphasize the unique nature of these ten commandments to the detriment and to the neglect of everything else. That was the ruling of mymonides. The common practice today, by the way, is that most synagogues we do stand when the ten commandments are read. Why? Because we're not really standing because we're trying to indicate how many commandments there are. We actually stand at other places in the Bible to commemorate the historical event, meaning that we stand to relive a historical event. So when the crossing of the Red Sea, the Kriad Yamsuf is read, the splitting of the sea where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea on dry ground before the sea came back and drowned the Egyptians, so we stand for that. And we stand for the ten commandments as well because we want to relive the experience of all the Jewish people standing at Mount Sinai. We stood at Mount Sinai. When the Torah was given, we weren't sitting down on the desert floor. So to reenact that event, we stand not as a way of testifying to the fact that, no, there's something very unique and special about these specific commandments. No. The practice is we stand, not like mymonides says, but because we're testifying to the historical event. Yet, in spite of all these fears and concerns, in spite of the concerns of the Talmud, and in spite of the concerns of mymonides, it's very clear that the revelation of these ten statements was and is very special and unique. There is obviously something very special and unique about the Aseretat Dibroit. No. 1. They are the beginning of God's revelation to the children of Israel. When you think about it, we came out of Egypt, we wandered around for seven weeks in the desert, and we came to Mount Sinai, and this was a pivotal event in history. This moment in history was the beginning of God revealing His laws to the Jewish people. Obviously, the revelation of the laws continued past the giving of these ten statements because, as I mentioned, the Torah has hundreds of commandments, but this was the kickoff. This was basically what you can see as the prologue or the preamble to the rest of the Torah. Now, it's important to remember that this moment in history, when we stood at Mount Sinai and God revealed these ten statements, there was tremendous love and unity among the people of Israel during this dramatic event. It was an incredibly dramatic event, but it only happened because among the Jewish people themselves, we had a unique kind of love and unity between ourselves. The Torah says that when we came to Mount Sinai, the Torah says, literally, He encamped under the mountain. It doesn't use the plural that they encamped, right? Speaking about three million people. The Bible describes three million people as one human being, and our sages say, they were like one person with one heart. So that unity was a special moment, and that was what allowed the revelation to happen. The event, as I mentioned, was extremely dramatic. There was smoke, there was fire, there was lightning, the mountain was going crazy, it was erupting, and this event was so incredible that the Torah tells us that the Israelites were able to see the sounds. Not only did they hear the sounds of the revelation, not only did we hear God speak at Mount Sinai, the Torah says we saw the sounds. That's pretty unusual. We were actually able to see the sounds. So this event was a very unique and amazing event. We're told that each of the three million people who were standing there reached a level of prophecy. It wasn't just Moses was a prophet. Every Israelite reached a level of prophecy, and really we were supposed to hear all ten of the utterances. We were supposed to hear all ten of them. But what we're told in the Torah is that because the experience was so incredible and awesome, we became quickly overwhelmed by it. We were overwhelmed by this experience, and we requested that after the second of the statements, we said, look enough, we can't take it. This is going to wipe us out. It's going to blow us away. We can't live. How can we live and experience this? So we requested that God just relate them to Moses, and that Moses, you'll tell it over to us. But the plan was originally that we would hear each of the ten. All that happened according to most of our commentaries is that we only heard the first two of the utterances. The Midrash actually says that before the ten themselves were revealed, God uttered them all in one shot. If you can just imagine me giving this whole hour lecture to you in one pulse of words. We can't do that as human beings. We can only say one word at a time. So the sages in the Midrash say that actually God did express everything in one blast, and Israel heard that. So we actually did hear the ten utterances, but we weren't able to understand it obviously. It was a bit of a mishmash. So they came after this initial blast. God went back and began repeating them one after the other, but after the second one, we basically couldn't take it anymore. And we see this sequence of events in the wording in the Torah itself. Because in the wording of the Torah, you'll find the first two of the Dibros, the first two of God's utterances, are God speaking directly to Israel in the first person. So for example, the first of the Dibros is Anochai Hashem al-Okecha. Hashem al-Okecha. Hashem al-Okecha. Hashem al-Okecha. Hashem al-Okecha. You out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery. And the second of the Dibros is You shall not have any other gods before me. So that's what they heard. But then they freak out, and we see that the third of the statements that God utters switches to an indirect second person. It says, don't take the name of the Lord your God in vain. It doesn't say here, don't take my name in vain. To not hearing it with that kind of direct revelation at this point. They hear, don't take the name of the Lord your God in vain. What's interesting is that this reality is noted in a very famous Talmudic passage at the end of Tractate Makot. The Talmud quotes Deuteronomy chapter 33 verse 4, which says, Torah siva lanu moshe. That Moses commanded to us the Torah. And the sages want to prove the idea that there are 613 commandments in the Torah based upon this verse. So how do they do it? So again the Torah verse says, Torah siva lanu moshe. Moses commanded us the Torah. And the sages take this word Torah and they look at every letter in this word. And we know that in the Hebrew alphabet the Torah has a numerical equivalent. So the tuf in Torah is 400 and the vav is 6 and the reish is 200 and the hey at the end is 5 for a total of 611. And so they say, yes. Torah siva lanu moshe. Moses commanded us Torah or 611. We heard 611 from Moses. But the rabbis say, but the first two we heard directly from God. I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other gods before me. We heard that directly from God. So 611 plus 2 is 613. Now if there are actually 613 commandments why are the 10 utterances special? Meaning if there are 613 so why are these statements so special and why are they specifically written on these two tablets? Why are they separated from the rest of the Bible? So our sages teach that these 10 are the concentrated essence of the entire Torah. What's special about these 10 is that they are an outline of the entire Torah and are the spiritual and conceptual categories that include all the 613 commandments. So what is special about these 10 is if you have these 10 you really can understand all 613. Rabasajagong was a great Talmudist lived about a thousand years ago. He actually showed the connection between each of the 613 commandments and its root, its source in the Aseret ad-Dibrod, in these 10 utterances. And the sages point out interestingly that there are 620 letters in the 10 commandments. If you go through the entire text in Exodus chapter 20 of the 10 commandments you'll count 620 letters. So they say that this corresponds to the 613 Biblical commandments and what is the extra 7? So they say that corresponds to either the 7 rabbinical commandments or the 7 Noahide laws or the 7 days of the creation of the world. But you see from the number of letters in the 10 commandments you see you've gotten basically the entire corpus of the 613 commandments of the Bible. Now these 10 utterances were told were inscribed on what is called the luchot haedut. So they were inscribed on two tablets that are called the tablets of testimony. And these were a testimony, a physical symbol to that explosive moment in history when God spoke to an entire nation. The Bible later tells us this is a unique event in world history. The Bible says it will never again happen that God will speak to an entire people when God spoke to us at Mount Sinai. So these tablets are referred to as the luchot haedut because they were set aside and put away in the temple in a special place to preserve as a testimony to this incredible event in human history. Which means that they're not so much a body of law. They're not so much a body of law because we know that there's much more law and many more commandments than these 10 utterances. But they become these 10 which form the nucleus of everything else. They became a physical symbol of that moment in history when God spoke at Mount Sinai. The tablets containing the 10 statements are also called the luchot haedut, the tablets of the covenant. They're referred to this in the epitome of the monomy chapter 9 verse 15. Which means that, again, these 10 utterances are not primarily a repository of laws. The truth is that every single one of the commandments listed on these tablets are repeated at least once somewhere else in the Bible. We don't need this set of tablets to teach us these laws because every single one of the laws in the two tablets are found at least once elsewhere in the Bible. So what are these two tablets? They're the tablets of the covenant. They were like a marriage document between a man and a woman. That marriage document symbolizes the unity of that couple. It symbolizes the marriage of God to Israel. It sounds like a pretty mystical idea but that's what we speak about in our Bible. The book of Song of Songs, Sheerah Sheerim, is basically a beautiful song, a poem that speaks about a love relationship between a man and a woman. What is that doing in the Bible? Do we need to hear about a romantic encounter in the Bible? So our sages say, no, it's not a romance poem. The Song of Songs is a symbol of the love between God and Israel. And we express this every time we perform a commandment. When we do a commandment, there's a blessing that we say and every blessing begins, Baruch Atah Adonai, blessed are you, HaShem, Melech HaOlam, King of the Universe, Asher Kiddishanu. What does it mean, Asher Kiddishanu? So it's usually translated that you sanctified us. What in the world does that mean? So maybe you want to say holy. What does that mean to make someone holy? So probably a more pointed translation in Hebrew, the word for marriage is Kiddushan. So Asher Kiddishanu, that you sanctified us, meaning you married us. That when we do a commandment, we're basically saying, God, you married us with these mitzvot. Now, you could translate mitzvot as commandments, but we know that the word mitzvah etymologically is related to the word in Hebrew for binder or connector, meaning what we're saying at each commandment is, God, you wedded us. You wedded us. You married us with these practices by which we get close to you, that we bind ourselves to you. So the tablets were placed in the Arun HaKodesh, the holy ark, these tablets of the covenant. The holy ark was said in the innermost sanctum, the innermost part of the sanctuary in the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary in the desert, and later in the permanent temple in Jerusalem. We placed these two tablets of the covenant in this holy of holies, and on top of the holy ark was what? They were two cruvim, two cherubs, and they were looking into each other's eyes. Because again, the Ten Commandments, these two tablets are not simply a collection of laws. They represent the core of a relationship, and that relationship is symbolized by these two cherubs looking intently into each other's eyes. According to our sages, the decalogue is so central in Judaism that each of the Ten commandments are related to in the recitation of the three paragraphs of Kriah Shema. We're not going to do that tonight, but the commentaries to our prayer books show how if you go through the three paragraphs of Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohim, and Adonai Ahad, and the Lord of God, the Lord is one. There are three paragraphs that are recited. You can find a hint, something that alludes to, that the Ten statements at Sinai are connected to, they correspond to the Ten statements through which God created the world. Our rabbis teach that the world was created through Ten statements. God says, let there be, let there be, let there be, let there be. And so the Ten statements of creation correspond to the Ten utterances in Mount Sinai, and it's interesting that if you go to Exodus chapter 20, I mentioned that the actual Ten utterances begin with chapter 20 verse 2. But chapter 20 verse 1 is a preamble. And the preamble says, Before God gives the Ten commandments, the text of the Bible says, God spoke all of these statements saying. By the way, that's the hint. That's where the sages got the idea that everything was said at once. When it says here that God spoke all of these statements saying, that's why our sages say that really the initial thing that came out from God was a blast of all Ten. But our sages point out that this phrase, this preamble to the Ten commandments, it uses the name of God Elohim. It says, and that term for God Elohim is the term for God that's used in Genesis chapter 1 in the creation story. More interesting is that if you look at this verse, the preamble to the Ten statements, it has seven words that are made up of 28 letters. And if you go to Genesis chapter 1 verse 1, also seven words with 28 letters. So our sages find this connection between the Aseret ad-Dibro, the Ten utterances at Mount Sinai, and the creation of the world. Of course, there's an obvious question about the Ten utterances, about these Ten statements from Mount Sinai. Why do we have them on two tablets? Just put them on one tablet. What is the point of dividing them up into two separate tablets? So there are several patterns. If you study the Ten utterances that are written on these two tablets, you'll notice several patterns. The most obvious pattern is dividing the first tablet from the second tablet as Ben Adhamla Makom, the first tablet are commandments that deal with our relationship to God and the second tablet on the left-hand side which we refer to as Ben Adhamla Kaveiro, between a person and their other human beings in their life. So we have commandments, rules that deal with our relationship with God and we have rules which deal with our relationship to other human beings. It's interesting if you look at the first five, first set of five statements on the right-hand side of these two tablets, each one of the five statements mentions the name of God. Because again, these five deal with our relationship to God. But if you go to the second side, the last of the five statements, none of them mention the name of God because they, again, are focusing on our relationship to other people. Of course, the obvious question about this arrangement, this classification is, why do we include the commandment to honor our father and mother in the first of the five commandments? If the first five are supposed to be dealing with our relationship to God, so you would imagine that honoring your father and mother would better be placed on the second side with the commandments dealing with our relationship between us and other people. So the biblical commentator, the Bechorshaw, points out that this question is especially pointed because, don't forget, we're putting the commandment to honor our parents here on the very side of the tablets where God went to great lengths in the second of the statements to say don't honor anything else in the world. Only honor me. Don't serve. Don't worship anything else. The thrust of that second statement is only have fealty, loyalty and honor really to God, to nothing else. So the Bechorshaw points out so even more strange that honoring your parents is not just on the wrong side because it seems to belong with all the other interpersonal relationships but it's on the first side where God has been saying no, you only have loyalty to me. So the Bechorshaw and everyone else points out that basically the reason is as the Talmud explains there are three parties to the creation of every human being there are three partners in the creation of every human being there's the mother there's the father and there's God and if you look at the structure of the Hebrew word for Adam, the first human being that was created so Adam is made up of the letter alif and alif in Jewish mystical interpretations of the alphabet alif represents God so the word for human being is composed of alif which is the godly part of who we are and then it has the word dumb blood which is the physical part of who we are so the word dumb the letters doled and mem add up to 44 doled is 4, mem is 40 44 if you take the words av and aim av is alif bet 1 and 2 is 3 aim is alif and mem 1 and 40, 41 so 41 and 3 is 44 that corresponds to the dumb part of who we are and God is in the partnership as well so the Bible is telling us that just as we have to have gratitude to God for creating us and giving us life just like we have gratitude to God for giving us life, of course we have to have gratitude to our parents as well for giving us life now another pattern that our sages uncovered was that between the right side and the left side of the tablets the commandments correspond to each other so as an example we are not going to go through all of them the first of the 10 statements is I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery it's the declaration of God's existence and opposite that the first of the second 5 is don't murder what is the connection between the belief in God and not murdering not taking a life so basically what is special about human life is that we were as human beings created in the image of God and that's why we are especially careful not to take human life unless it's for very very special circumstances that's why by the way the Bible does not say don't kill the Bible says don't murder you're allowed to kill for example in self-defense but that's not called murder you're allowed to kill if you are a court that's executing a criminal for a capital crime but when they do that it's not murder murder is an illegal taking of life that's murder so the Bible prohibits murder doesn't prohibit killing and the reason that murder is because it diminishes the image of God in the world if every human being is created in the image of God so when we lose a human life God's image is diminished that's why by the way mourners say Kaddish what is Kaddish Kaddish is not a prayer for the dead the words of Kaddish say Yiskadal v Yiskadash may God's great name be magnified why are we praying for God's name to be magnified because in the face of death God's name is diminished so the Bible says that the commandment to believe in God is connected to the commandment not to murder and then the second commandment is the prohibition against idolatry the second of the first side and that corresponds to the second on the second side which is adultery obviously not only do idolatry and adultery sound alike they're very similar idolatry is a betrayal of the relationship with God and adultery is a betrayal of your relationship with your spouse so our sages found if you take the two sides you can actually connect each one as you go across one of my teachers when I was studying in Israel in 1979 was an amazing teacher of Bible her name was Nechama Lebevich Nechama Lebevich found an amazing pattern in the ten statements if you go through the first five the first one speaks about believing in God and the second one speaks about not having any other gods not having any loyalty to other gods and she says these are basically mitzvot that focus on our thoughts and our emotions acknowledging something intellectually and having loyalty to that the third of the commandments says don't take God's name in vain which is not emotion and thought that's speech the fourth of the commandments is to observe the Sabbath that's obviously through action and then the fifth is to honor your father and mother but that's not through emotion the way our sages define honoring your father is emotional it's defined by treating them with respect you'll notice that there's no commandment to love your parents in the Bible the Bible says you have to honor them which means treat them with respect treat them with honor so we go from the first five commandments from the first two being commandments dealing with thought and emotion the third dealing with speech the second side dealing with action observing the Sabbath and honoring parents but then when you move over to the second side the second five statements by God the first one is don't murder obviously something dealing with action and then don't commit adultery again, action and then don't steal by the way, don't steal in the 10 commandments refers to kidnapping it's not referring to picking someone's pocket the Bible prohibits that elsewhere and our sages say that basically most of these 10 commandments they're capital offenses and so the not stealing it's got to be a kind of stealing where there's a capital punishment so the first three on the second side are not to murder, not to commit adultery not to steal which are again in the realm of action and then the fourth one is don't bear false witness that's obviously again speech and the last one is not to covet not to covet your neighbor's possessions so again if you think about the pattern the first side goes from commandments the first two of action and then speech the first two are commandments dealing with thought and emotions and the third deals with speech and the fourth and the fifth speak about action you move over to the second side they start with action and they go to speech and they end up with emotion and thought if you want to think about it these two sides go from I believe easy to hard and hard to easy for example it's pretty easy to proclaim your belief in God it's pretty easy not to worship other gods it's a little bit more difficult not to take God's name in vain it's actually very difficult to properly observe the Sabbath and properly honor your parents our sages say that the most difficult commandment in the bible is to properly honor your parents so the first side you're going from easier commandments to more difficult ones and I believe the same pattern is on the second side it's relatively easy not to kill not to steal not to commit adultery it's a bit more difficult not to bear false witness people lie all the time and finally it's extremely difficult not to be jealous not to be coveting your neighbor's possessions so I think that's another pattern that emerges when you study the 10 statements now there are two difficult features of this topic that I want to mention that we're not going to be able to explore deeply tonight two problematic features are number one that there's actually a second recounting of the Aseret ad-Dibrod they don't appear only in Exodus chapter 20 they appear again later in the book of Deuteronomy, Devarium chapter 5 and the difficulty is that if you look at them they don't have the same text so there are differences in the two different versions of the Aseret ad-Dibrod why is that? now our commentaries point out that most of these differences are very very minor and insignificant but some of them are significant for example, between the first version of the Sabbath and the second version of the Sabbath so in Exodus it says Zachor at Yom HaShabbat you should remember the Sabbath day but in Deuteronomy it says Shamor at Yom HaShabbat you have to keep the Sabbath day and more significantly the whole reason for observing the Sabbath is different between Exodus and Deuteronomy in Exodus it basically says that the Sabbath is a testimony to the fact that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh but you go to Deuteronomy and the Sabbath seems to be in commemoration of the fact that we were slaves in Egypt and God freed us so this is a serious difference between the first tablets the first version of the 10 statements and the second version later on in Deuteronomy a second problem is that we know that after seeing Israel dancing around the golden calf Moses broke the first tablets the first tablets were written by God and Moses himself wrote the second set of tablets now are these tablets the same different what's written on them this is part of what's not clear about the Aseret Adib wrote there were two main views there are others but two main views regarding the differences in the texts of the Aseret Adib wrote the Midrash teaches and actually this is a mind-blowing idea the Midrash teaches Shamor v'zachor ab'dibor echad neemru the sages teach that actually both versions of the Aseret Adib wrote were uttered by God at the same time God uttered both Exodus chapter 20 and Deuteronomy chapter 5 at the same time everything was set together and what we have is Exodus 20 is one version that we have in Deuteronomy 5 as a second edition but everything was actually set by God many modern commentaries say that the differences are explained in the idea that the Book of Exodus contains the actual words that God spoke at Mount Sinai and the Book of Deuteronomy is Moses' expansion and editorializing on the Exodus version for various reasons and the sages give many reasons why there would be differences of the audience. For example in Exodus chapter 20 they just came out of Egypt seven weeks before in Deuteronomy chapter 5 it's 40 years later before they're coming into the Promised Land the first generation has died out already in the desert so because the audiences are different and they're about to go into a different land they're not in the desert anymore the sages propose different versions of the Aseret Adib because Moses had to expand on some of the ideas from Exodus. Now what did the two tablets actually say? So one view is that the first set of tablets that were broken contained the 10 statements from the Book of Exodus but the second set of tablets that was written by Moses that contains what was later written in Deuteronomy chapter 5 others say that both versions of the tablets both the ones that God wrote and the ones that Moses wrote both contained the original revelation of God in Exodus chapter 20 now I want to just point out a few things about two of the 10 commandments and then we'll wrap up for tonight first of all I mentioned before that the first of the 10 is a bit problematic because it doesn't seem to be a commandment just as God stating that he took us out of Egypt now our sages differ as to whether it's actually a commandment Maimonides insists that there is here a commandment to believe in God and he sources the commandment to believe in God in the first of the 10 statements I am the Lord your God who took you out of the line of Egypt from the house of slavery just worth noting that when God introduces himself to us in this first of the commandments he doesn't give on his calling card a more impressive accomplishment meaning that if you wanted to have God list on his resume what have you done lately so really if you were going to compare the exodus from Egypt to the creation of every molecule in existence so what would be a more amazing thing to do so most people would say well creation of the entire world seems to be a bigger accomplishment than taking 3 million people out of Egypt so why does God introduce himself to us by saying I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery very simple our sages point out that we experienced the exodus from Egypt no one experienced the creation of the world now the Baha the safer Baha claims and others commentaries claim that no there is not a commandment here in the first of the Aseret HaDib wrote to believe in God he says actually it's not a commandment because he says that the belief in God is really the foundation for all the other commandments he says that without a creator and without a commander the whole idea of commandments makes no sense so it's really a prerequisite for having commandments in the first place without a creator without a commander you can't have commandments so according to many commentaries it's not a commandment it's a statement of fact and it's an introduction to all the other commandments now one of the questions that's asked about the view of my mononies and the view of others like him is that the idea of commanding belief in God seems to be problematic how do you command people to believe in God it doesn't seem to make any sense because either a person already believes in God in which case there's no point in commanding them or a person does not believe in God in which case how do you command them just to turn it on like you turn on a water spigot you can't just turn it on you can't just say if you don't believe in God oh okay I believe because you're telling me to what kind of belief is that so there are many people who say that the idea of commanding belief doesn't make any sense so there are many approaches to this problem I'll share just one of them with you which is the approach of the Son of Morebe who passed away about 15, 10, 15 years ago and he says that the commandment to believe in God is not a commandment to say I believe he says it's a commandment to try it's a commandment to seek God it's a commandment to search for God it's a commandment to yearn to believe to say I want to believe in God I want to seek God I want to find God and that's the commandment that God can command us to do God can command us to try to find him the sages tell us in the Talmud that after we go to the next world after 120 years of living in this world we're going to go upstairs for a final exam and there are going to be four or five questions on that final exam and they tell us that the first question is going to be which is usually translated did you deal honestly and faithfully in your business transactions that's the first question we're going to be asked but the Tzanzer Rebbe one of the great Rebbe said no, you can translate this in another way he translates it as did you do business with your faith not that you deal faithfully in business did you deal with your faith in a business like way which means what in business if you have a hundred dollars you don't want to just stick it under your mattress if you have a hundred dollars you want it to grow you want it to become more than a hundred dollars so people that want to do business what they're going to try and do is figure out how to grow their money and so the Tzanzer Rebbe says that the question we're going to be asked after a hundred and twenty years is did you try to grow your faith did you seek to develop more faith and that's the idea of Anochie that God is asking us to seek him to try Abel Chan and Wasserman who was moderate during the Holocaust said that the truth is it's not that difficult to believe in God he said if we were only thinking clearly God's reality would be obvious he quotes a story from the Talmud where a heretic came to Rabbi Akiva and said who created the world Rabbi Akiva said God did and the heretic said prove it to me so Rabbi Akiva said to him what are you wearing I'm wearing a cloak and Rabbi Akiva said who made it and the guy said Taylor made it Rabbi Akiva said prove it and the heretic said what do you improve it it's obvious that the cloak was made by a Taylor it didn't just pop into existence by itself so Rabbi Akiva said don't you hear what you're saying that if you think that it's clear and obvious that a garment had to have had a maker and creator so obviously the world didn't just pop into existence by itself so Abel Chan and Wasserman says that if we just see clearly with open eyes it's obvious that the world has a creator but he says there's a problem the Torah tells us do not accept a bribe judges are told do not accept a bribe because a bribe will blind the eyes of the wise that's what the Torah says a judge cannot accept a bribe and the question is how much of a bribe is forbidden how much of a bribe is a judge not allowed to take so you would think it can't take a thousand dollars so actually Jewish law says it can't take even a penny because the reality is anything that you do for someone the smallest gesture inclines them to you there was one of the great sages in the Talmud he was going to court one day and one of the litigants said good morning to him and he recused himself from the case because he said I can't be objective anymore this guy said hello and now I have a feeling of favoritism to him so even receiving a penny from someone would prejudice a judge and he says we see from here that it's impossible to see clearly if you have a bribe and he says the problem we face as human beings is that having a God bless you having a God in our life presents us with repercussions if there's a God in my life it means I cannot do whatever I want in life it means there's someone above me it means that there are rules I have to follow and Elkhana Vaserman says you know what many people don't want to have their style cramped they don't want to have a boss over them so the big bribe is I want to be free from God I don't need him in my life it's just a pain so he says that that is the commandment here the commandment is just take away the things that get in the way of your believing in God he says all things being equal you would see God why can't you see God? because you have blocks and you have things that are just getting in the way of seeing it's interesting that the Radzina Rebbe points out that the first of these is and he says it's interesting that the Bible doesn't use the more normal word for I the normal word in Hebrew for I is God could have said I am the Lord your God what is this business Anokhi we say in Hebrew with the it's the word for I and the letter in Hebrew means like or a similar to we say in modern Hebrew it's like so the Radzina Rebbe says something interesting he says God is saying to us at Mount Sinai Anokhi Hashem Elokecha he's not saying Ani and the message is don't think for one moment that we as human beings can fully understand so easily that when God reveals himself to us at Mount Sinai we shouldn't think it's similar to you know leaving the synagogue tonight and an old friend popping out from behind the trees at your car right you know exactly who it is we are not able to grasp God ultimately the Kabbalists speak about God as the aim so God is way beyond our ability to fully grasp Isaiah says in Chapter 55 of his prophecies right my thoughts are not like your thoughts God says and the medieval philosopher said if you knew God you would be God so we can never fully know God and that's why God doesn't introduce himself by saying Ani like yeah this is me here I am he's saying Anokhi this is like K'ilu this is sort of like you're getting a bit of a glance you're getting a bit of a glance and he says that's why the next commandment says don't make graven images what does it mean to make a graven image it means that you're basically saying I can put God in a box I can circumscribe exactly God's dimensions God looks like this and has these dimensions and he says that's what we're being told don't think that you can fully grasp God don't think you can put God into a box God is way beyond any box that you're able to construct I want to just mention one more of the commandments which is for many people very difficult it's the commandment not to covet not to covet your neighbor's property and their wife etc the commentary is struggled with how do you command people to control this emotion it's very difficult to tell people you can't wish that you had other things in life the truth is our commentaries point out that the prohibition is not engaged by just admiring someone's house to walk down the street and see a beautiful house to feel inside wow I would like a house like that that's not a violation of the commandment the commandment only gets violated when you do something to formulate a plan to get what you desire if you start to formulate a plan that's step one which is problematic if you begin to implement the plan then you've gone full hog past this prohibition so how do we control this so the truth is the amneser says that anything in the world that you really believe is not admirable you're not going to seek he says that if a peasant is thinking about who to marry so he might think about the girl down the block or the girl in the next town but he says that the peasant is never going to really think he can marry the king's daughter it's just like so absurd he's not going to start planning how I can go ask her out on a date it's just irrelevant it's just absurd so when you begin to really understand that there are certain things in this world that are just not yours they don't belong to you you can begin to develop a sense that I don't have to start thinking about those things and the truth is that if people really connected to the idea of God what does it mean to believe in God so the truth is in Judaism it's not just an ascent it's a God that exists the idea of believing in God means that emotionally you relate to the idea that God created the world and that everything you have comes from God and ultimately if you don't need it God would not give it to you and if you needed it somehow God would make sure that you had it there are people who have this kind of attitude where they understand that I have in life what I need and therefore they don't think about other things that's an incredibly difficult level to reach I want to share with you an amazing story the story about a woman that most of you have heard about Rithika Holtzberg who was a Chabad emissary in India she was butchered along with her husband and other people that were guests at the Chabad House in Mumbai India back in 2008 were told in this story that there was a woman who visited the house of mourning when her mother was mourning for Rithika and she gave Rithika's mother a beautiful dress and Rithika's diamond ring so a woman came into the house of mourning and gave Rithika Holtzberg's mother a beautiful dress and Rithika's diamond ring when the woman was asked how she had come into possession of Rithika's valuables this story this woman had a troubled past and had served time in prison in India due to the primitive corrective system and corrupt officials she had managed to escape she somehow landed at the Holtzberg's home where she was warmly welcomed they fed her and treated her with kindness they advised her to leave India immediately but the woman feared being caught at passport control because she had been in prison and she got out of prison prematurely she was afraid of getting caught at the passport control so Rithika Holtzberg told her that if she dressed elegantly like a married woman the Indian authorities wouldn't give her any trouble so Rithika then removed her diamond ring and found one of her Shabas dresses and handed them both to the woman for these items and left the country effortlessly she had now come to the house of mourning to pay her condolences and to return Rithika's precious possessions when Rithika's mother accepted these items she reminisced emotionally about her last visit with Rithika she had noticed that Rithika wasn't wearing her ring when asked about it Rithika replied Zabeshlichut it's on a special mission so Rithika Holtzberg we see from this story internalized the idea that our possessions are from God and that we were meant to use our possessions in the service of God now the truth is that this diamond ring and this dress obviously had sentimental value to her nevertheless she realized that they were only temporary things in her possession to use in the most important way possible and as soon as God presented her with an opportunity to use it in a higher way she gave them away freely that's the goal that we have when trying to fulfill the Aseret Hadib wrote it's not as easy as they look now I want to conclude with one final thought when we think about these 10 and why they're special and why they're on these two tablets one of the things that I think we can learn from this and this is an idea that I saw from Rabbi Yisrael Miller who's the rabbi in Calgary he points out that if you read chapter 19 of Exodus right before chapter 20 right before the Aseret Hadib wrote her given what appears right before the Aseret Hadib right before God gives the Jewish people these 10 special utterances he tells us that we are to be a Mamlechet Kohanim the Goi Kadoche it's the end of chapter 19 of Exodus God tells us that we are in this world God says to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation what does that mean so within Yisrael the priests the Kohanim the priests we're not just here to serve in the temple because even when we have a temple the average priest was not serving in the temple more than one day a year so what did the priest do for the rest of the year the bible tells us that the priests were teachers and so just as our Kohanim our priests are here to teach us God says that we as the Jewish people are to be a nation of priests which means we are here to be teachers of the rest of the world and that's what it means to be a holy nation our sages teach us that when God gave the 10 utterances at Mount Sinai the Midrash says that they were given in 70 languages each one was actually heard in 70 languages because the world is composed we're told of 70 nations the Midrash teaches us that actually before God gave the Aseret HaDibro to the Jewish people he took them around to every other nation in the world the Talmud says that God offered them to everyone they weren't initially supposed to be only for the Jews the Talmud says that everybody turned God down and only Israel said whatever you tell us we will do and we will accept but we see there's a universal element to the Aseret HaDibro our sages say that they were offered in the desert for this reason why didn't God wait until we came into our own land, the land of Israel because the desert is a place that's open to everyone it's Hefger, no one owns it and so in the same way the Torah is not only meant for the people of Israel the chapter in which the Ten Commandments are given is called Parshad Yitro it was Moses' father-in-law and he was the first convert to Judaism and then we celebrate this week we're going to celebrate Shavuot the festival of the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai the festival that commemorates God giving us the Torah at Mount Sinai and the star of this holiday if you want to find a star because we read one of the five scrolls on the holiday of Shavuot we read the book of Ruth also an incredibly famous convert and if you look at the names Yitro and Ruth they share three letters three letters of those names are the same and it's interesting that the name Ruth for example adds up to 606 it's as if she had the seven Noahite commandments already and she was accepting upon herself an additional 606 to come up to 613 so the possibility here is that the way we can think about these special utterances at Mount Sinai that are put on two tablets is there to remind us that we have principles that we are here to teach the rest of the world every single one of these ten utterances are principles that we are supposed to export to the rest of the world honoring God, respecting God respecting our parents getting along with other people these are all the basic core of the way God wants the entire world to live the one commandment that doesn't seem to be in place is the Sabbath because we are told in the Bible that the Sabbath is a special covenant a special sign only between God and Israel but the truth is that the Sabbath contains a universal element as well the Sabbath is mentioned in the beginning of Genesis in the beginning of the creation story long before there is a Jewish people and that element of the Sabbath is the idea that the Sabbath testifies to the idea that God created the world that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh so even this idea of the Sabbath is one that we as Jews are to export to the whole world has a God we're supposed to relate to God have a relationship with God honor God, respect God honor and respect our parents and strive to get along with other human beings that's one of the reasons why these ten utterances are so central to us as Jews