Society’s Rise and Fall |
The Aseret Hadibrot, literally, the Ten Utterances, known to the world as the Ten Commandments, play an outsized religious role in the Western world, particularly in America. They have been unwittingly adopted as the Bible’s most basic religious obligations by a substantial portion of the population, even though most people are unaware that this role is in reality no more than a subtle polemic against Judaism’s faith commitment to all that is commanded in the Torah. What is even more ironic is that this wholesale acceptance comes, for most, without any real sense of what these obligations actually entail. This ignorance is shared by Jew and non-Jew alike.
The last of the Ten Commandments is a case in point:
You shall not covet (lo takhmod) your fellow man’s house. You shall not covet your fellow man’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that your fellow man has........