Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [62]
Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. Maintain the ability to cease your labors, even those you consider the most holy. Stop the train; get off the treadmill, even if you think your treadmill is a “righteous” one. The ability to breathe deeply, reflect, and even be inspired to change course may be more important than anything else you have to say. For this we were given the great gift of sharing in God's own Sabbath. Use it well. “Remember” the Sabbath means to have it in mind always, even on Monday and Tuesday. Do not become so involved in your work, whatever it is, that you do not also long for the possibility of letting it go, of “being” rather than “doing.”
Honor your father and your mother. You are not the font of all wisdom. Recognize the gifts of prior generations, the evolution of their thinking that has helped to shape your own. This may have begun with your childhood education, shaped on your parents’ knee, but it includes much more. Both intellectually and spiritually, we are the products of all that came before us. Be humbled by this, and grateful.
The five commandments on the second tablet need some further words of introduction. They are all about interpersonal relations, the ways one human being acts and feels in the course of interacting with others. I pause before these because there is a misreading of mystical religion that sees it as wanting to sweep over the distinction between self and other, sinking it in the depths of the oneness that underlies us all. Nothing could be farther from the truth about mysticism, as taught and practiced by the enlightened of our tradition and others. This misperception derives from a spiritual impatience in taking on mystical teachings, one that confuses levels of reality with one another. Granted, there is a level on which nothing but the One exists, Y-H-W-H that underlies and animates all of being. But we come to know that One, and to manifest our devotion to it, only by embracing its manifestation in the infinite variety and diversity of beings, those into which it continues to pour its Presence. Insight into Y-H-W-H comes through appreciating the fullness of this Presence (shekhinah), not through a premature attempt to dissolve it into Nothingness. We live is this world, one in which the distinction between self and other, and the need to respect the other, is bedrock. Yes, hovering over (or buried within) this world is ‘olam ha-ba’, the “World to Come,” at the deepest level of which there is only One. But Moses is not giving us a Torah to be lived there, a “place” where there is no need for Torah. Torah is for this world, where self and other meet with all their differences revealed and yet have to find a way to live in peace. The subsequent five commandments are all about our grounding in the real world of humanity.
Do not murder. Each human being has a right to live. Every human life is sacred. The shedding of blood is always tragic, always a diminishing of God's image. There may be circumstances in which taking a life is justified or necessary, but there are no circumstances in which the taking of life is less than tragic. Make sure your teachings do nothing that encourages the tragic taking of human life. Our fate as Jews has forced us to learn how to defend ourselves, even by taking life. But we may never let our Jewish teaching be used in a way that lessens the humanity of others, making it easier to kill them. This transgression has already occurred in our day and we need to be especially vigilant and courageous in standing up to it. The same applies to teaching that diminishes any person's right to live a full, productive, and self-respecting life. To lessen another human being in his or her own eyes can also be a form of murder.
Do not commit adultery. Would-be spiritual teachers, “priests” of Sinai and its powerful message, always need to be aware of human weakness, their own before that of all others. Sexual energies are always there when we flesh-and-blood humans interact with