Ah, Certainty!

There he was. Moses stood, now, barefoot. The lamb he had followed to the Place had wandered off, yet again. And there he stood before flames that did not consume. He might have said: “Oh my God!” but that would have been trite, and we, thousands of years later, would titter. So, he stood there, silent, waiting. In time, he heard himself called. Called to return to his suffering people. And then, he wondered, who was he, Moses, that he should do this task and how could he tell others how it had come to be that they should listen to him. Moses stood there, alone on a mountain in the desert before flames that did not consume & and received one of the most authoritative answers of all time. The kind of answer that allows each of us to sleep peacefully at night, knowing that all is well with the world.

I will be what I will be.
[Exodus 3:14]

We live in a world desperate for easy solutions and authoritative answers. On a simple level, our popular culture believes that murders must be committed, solved and the culprit put away within 52 minutes. But this belief in simplicity and authority poses threats to our life as Jews in America (an America that I celebrated as we reached the 350th year of our arrival on this continent only last year at this time). Many claim that our legal system must be absolute and carved in solid rock. Others (some of these are the same people), argue that potential life trumps existing life. And still others believe that our schools must teach that the origins of life are to be explained, not by any process that has room for testing and re-evaluation, but by recourse to a Designer of Supreme Intelligence. In each instance a religious group wants to enforce its religious beliefs on the rest of America.

Many of us remember that it was barely two years ago that Judge Roy Moore figuratively stood at his courthouse door to protect the 5,280 pounds of Barre granite from Vermont. He had the rock carved with a version of the Ten Commandments and he stood there to protect them from being removed from the Alabama State Courthouse. What loomed as a Constitutional crisis then, seems to have passed. However, Judge Moore travels around the country with his monument and continues to speak to believers in his mission in more than half the states of the Union, last year alone.

Why should we Jews care if the Ten Commandments appear in a United States Courthouse? After all, did not we give these commandments to the world? Are they not part of our heritage? Should we not be proud to have them enshrined in the courts of law of the United States of America?

But there is no “The Ten Commandments”!

Many of you have heard me ask if you know where the “original” Ten Commandments are. And I brag that I knew (they may have been moved since). They used to be in the library of the Jewish community building in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard.

However, all kidding aside, even if we do not know where they are and what they look like, we do know what they say, don't we? Can we all agree on the text of the Ten Commandments? Well, this may surprise you, but, no. Even (what do I mean “even”, of course!) we Jews disagree as to what they are. Or, we agree that there is more than one version of them. We've had at least two versions of them since ancient times. One set is in the Book of Exodus and the other set is in the Book of Deuteronomy.

What? Two versions?

Well, there's only a slight difference between those two. There may actually have been three (or more)! The first time we learn about Ten Commandments is in Chapter 20 of Exodus. God speaks, tells them, directly to us. And we stand there... "All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking ..." A few chapters later Moses is up on Mt. Sinai where God tells him "I will give you the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments which I have inscribed to instruct" And Moses remains there forty days and forty nights.

Uh, if we all stood there and heard God say the commandments directly to us, why did it take Moses forty days and forty nights to go get them written (by the finger of God no less)?

And then it gets really dramatic. You remember the story: Even then we had a hard time with uncertainty. Moses had been up on Mt. Sinai forty days and forty nights. In his absence we asked Aaron to help us make a visible image we could worship. We finish our statue idol just as Moses returns. He sees us reveling around the golden calf and violently hurls the tablets on the ground, destroying them.

A short time later, Moses goes back up the mountain and God gives him another set of tablets. The text says "I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered." But, then God states "I hereby make a covenant" and goes on to list a significantly different collection of ten commandments. Then this story (in Chapter 34) ends with: "and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments"

So, confused? Right here in fifteen chapters of Exodus we have (with significant time between each):

1. God speaking the Ten Commandments directly to us.
2. Moses getting a set of tablets with something written on them.
3. Moses going back up to Sinai to get a second set of tablets that, while they are said to have the same contents appear (based on the text presented when they are written) different from the first set of tablets.

You have a right to be confused. And I've not even mentioned the different set of ten we know of from Deuteronomy. And you're aware of this set, even though you don't know it. We sing about it often when we gather on Shabbat eve.

Come out my Beloved, the Bride to meet;
The inner light of Shabbat, let us greet.

"Observe" and "Remember" in a single word,
God caused us to hear, the One and Only.
God is One and God's Name is One,
For renown, for glory and in song.

Yes, that's it “shamor v'zachor” spoken simultaneously!

Because the author of Lecha Dodi could not imagine that there were actually two texts with different verbs related to how we are to “do” Shabbat. In Exodus it says zachor “remember”. In Deuteronomy it says shamor “observe”.

OK, which of all those versions do you think that Judge (oops, ex-Judge) Moore has chosen: the Exodus or the Deuteronomy version, to engrave in his granite? Ah, that's an interesting question, and the answer is probably “neither”! And why is that you may ask?

Because the Christians have versions that are different from even these! What? Did I say “versions” plural? Yes, you heard me correctly. We Jews have done our best to reconcile the idea that God may have expressed both our versions simultaneously “in a single word”. But the Christians: Catholics and Protestants disagree about which are the actual ten commandments. And, they differ from ours, the Jewish versions as well.

How many “The Ten Commandments” are there?

One, two, many The Ten Commandments...!

A quick glance will convince you that there is no “The Ten Commandments”.

I'm not opposed to putting an engraving of “The Two Tablets Of The Law”, along with a statue of Hammurabi and a few other law-givers, on a wall of any courthouse in the land. But, to put “The Text” of “The Ten Commandments” in the courthouse is, because it chooses one religious tradition's interpretation over another, an infringement of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Ex-Judge Roy Moore offers an easy solution: his version of the Ten Commandments & but in America we have been taught that no one single religious tradition has the word on the origins of law & that is a task for us, individual citizens to work out in our very complicated way.

We Jews have a concept that we call pikuah nefesh.

For the saving of a life any other Jewish rule can be broken. We believe that existing life trumps nearly everything & even potential life. You know where this is leading. To put it in general terms (while we may differ among ourselves in the various movements or parties in Jewish life), Jews believe that abortions should be safe, legal and rare. In fact it is a Jewish religious obligation (based on the concept of pikuah nefesh) to abort a fetus that might cause, even near, lethal harm to the mother. I phrase it in that manner because some in America want to limit our ability to practice our religion by imposing their religious perspective on us. Outlawing abortion under all circumstances, enshrining that as the law of the land is an infringement of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Various religious traditions in American life have differing views on when human life begins. No one religion can impose its understanding on all the others. Life is not that simple, we each need to be able to make choices based on the teachings of our own religion.

That was brief (but, to the point)!

Last night I told you a bit about how intelligently I think the creation is designed.

You'll note that last night I used some logic, but no science to explain how exquisitely central God is to the cosmos. But, logic is different from science. Science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. The important part here is “through observation and experiment”. Stated in slightly different words: “Science is the name we give to the practice of finding physical explanations about the universe. Anything spiritual you bring to the table is extraneous, a matter of personal belief.”1

Science is a process, religion is a belief. Very few people have ever tried to run an experiment on a religious subject. One such person is Aaron Adelman, an Orthodox Jew, who has a section of his Web site devoted to theological experiments where he reports:

Many religious propositions, such as the classic “God exists”, cannot be tested by any known means. However, some do make predictions of effects that take place in our universe, and thus, in principle at least, they should be testable. The problem in this class Aaron really wants to test is the “just-world” hypothesis, that is, the proposition that performing mitzvot (commandments) causes good things to happen to the doer and that doing aveirot (transgressions) causes bad things to happen to the doer. Unfortunately, this problem is extremely difficult to test (7 independent mitzvot for non-Jews to take into account, 613 for Jews, great difficulty in obtaining accurate data on certain aspects of observance, difficulty in separating natural from supernatural effects), so Aaron has no plans of tackling this problem in the near future (though he prays for inspiration).

What sort of problems does Aaron hope to tackle in the next few years?

• Attempting to detect daemons. This involves sprinkling sifted ashes on the floor by one's bed. Daemons are supposed to leave footprints like those of chickens.
• Clinical testing of amulets, which are alleged to have curative value.
• The evil eye effect, that is, saying good things is supposed to cause bad things to happen to whoever or whatever is spoken about, and vice versa.

You get the idea. So far, Aaron has published no reports.

Aaron's efforts are a bit tongue in cheek.

Absolutely, however, serious is Rabbi Nosson Slifkin, an Orthodox rabbi and zoologist who has gotten himself in trouble by writing about evolution. Some in the Orthodox world have even banned his books from being read. Amazingly, you'll find them on Amazon for as much as $99.00 (five times to original price!). I mention Rabbi Slifkin here, for two reasons. The struggle against free inquiry and in favor of blind belief is not a uniquely Christian phenomenon in our day (we see it in other aspects of life among Muslims as well, of course), but also, you should know that it is possible to be a religious (even Orthodox) Jew and believe in the reality of Darwinian evolution.

Let's Test Intelligent Design!

Remember, nobody has ever run an experiment in the field of “Intelligent Design”. And, that being the case, it cannot be considered science and should not be taught in the science classes of our schools. I believe it could be taught in philosophy classes, or possibly even social studies. In that setting “Intelligent Design” can be taught as a “competing idea”. This morning I'd like us to take a close look at the first creation story in the Bible and see how intelligently it is designed. In doing so, I hope you will get a deeper appreciation of the text itself, understand that it does not purport to be science, and, you might get additional tools to use in explaining to others why the teaching of Intelligent Design (based on this story) in high school biology and/or science classes is yet a third instance, an attempt to impose the religious beliefs of a certain segment of our population on the rest of us and is an infringement of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Please open your Machzorim (Gates of Repentence) to page 192 (the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh haShannah is the story of creation). We're going to do a little Bible study. This is a lesson taught to me by my beloved teacher Dr. Stanley Gevirtz.

Please pay attention to the:

number of days

number of times the word "Create" is used (in its various forms)

number of times the word "Good" is used

what gets created on which day

Of course, we all know the number of days.

Here's a table of the creates and goods.

Create	Good
1:1	1:4
1:21	1:10
1:27	1:12
1:27	1:18
1:27	1:21
2:3	1:26
2:4	1:31

And here's a table of what was created on each day:

(stationery)	(mobile)
light	sun, moon stars
sky waters above and below	birds fish
earth [vegetation]	land animals, humans
shabbat

Now, turn to page 298 (of your Machzor). There is a concept in the study of Biblical and related literatures called “parallelism”. You can see this for yourself there in Psalm 145.

So, what do we learn from this? Well, first, let's look at what it is not. Genesis is not a meaningful sequence of creation & chronologically speaking. We can't have vegetation before the creation of the sun.

What does it tell us? Seven is a “magic number”. The created world is “good”. Most of the “creating” happens around the creation of humans & we are the capstone. But think for a moment about what we just now learned about “biblical parallelism”. And, take a good look at what got created on which day. There's a parallel structure here. There's almost a platonic relationship here. There's the ideal and those that function in it. Or think of the column of the first three days as those that are stationery and those in the column of the second three days as those that move within what was created earlier. Vegetation is an odd transition form of created matter. This is a poetic expression of how the priestly author views the world in its relationships. This is not a timeline of how the world came to be.

How often do we stand, barefoot, following something...

Perhaps a lost lamb, perhaps a thought that keeps getting away from us. And there we stand in awe and wonderment. We want an answer, but know deep inside that the answer will not be simple. There will be no “Yes” or “No”. As we begin this new year, we know only that we will continue to struggle. We will wrestle to gain a better understanding of God's rules. We will struggle to appreciate the conflict that can pit present against potential life. We will grapple with our understandings of how our world is put together. And we will contend with those who see the world in simple terms and want to enforce their view of the world on us.

Even so, we will sleep peacefully at night, knowing that all is well with the world, because we know that as God has told Moses so long ago:
“I will be what I will be.”

©Mark Hurvitz
2005