Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [63]
Do not steal. Do not use your teachings or your cleverness to diminish another or to take away what belongs to another. This may be something as subtle as a person's pride or self-definition, or as concrete as relationship, home, land, or property. Even if you think you are right, think again before you take, claim, or demand. The more you are in a position of power, the more you need to question yourself. This applies to nations as it does to individuals.
Do not bear false witness against your neighbor. Here we return to the question of honesty. It is not only God whose name we may take in vain. Do not betray others by bearing false witness, by not acknowledging what they have to offer. Do not define others in ways that are comfortable to you but may not fit who they really are. Do not caricature the views of others, avoiding confrontation with the real truth they may speak.
You shall not covet. How much beauty and wisdom there is in other peoples’ teachings and traditions! “If only we had the Christians’ ability to speak of God's love! The silence and patience of the Buddhists! The body-soul integration of the yogis!” Learn from others, appreciate what they have to give, but do not covet. Be satisfied with your lot, content with your own heritage and its message. We have plenty to offer. So does each of the great traditions.
The ten commandments need to stand as the basis of a reinvigorated Judaism.54 Ritual life, observances, the sacred calendar, are all part of our response to the first commandment, Sinai's restatement of the original “Where are you?” As such they are no longer absolutes but rather our tradition's means toward the end of becoming and remaining aware. “Between man and God” the only absolutes are the great call to be aware and our need to respond. In the “between person and person” realm there indeed are moral absolutes. The last six of the commandments are a good starting point for such a list. These too, of course, need to be redefined in each age, but their essential claim on our conduct is constant. The metzavveh (I prefer “the one who brings us together” as a translation, rather than “commander,” but there is an imperative here) of both categories of mitzvot lies deep within the single Self of the cosmos, manifest within each of us, calling upon us ever to stretch and to know, to open the heart and to act accordingly. These are the basis of all mitzvot.
Reflecting on Our Journey
Does such an approach suffice? To recapitulate our discussion in Kabbalistic language, we have made the journey from malkhut or oral Torah, where teaching was to be found everywhere, back to the single aleph of keter, the realm of inner divine silence. We gave rather short shrift to tif'eret, the written Torah, which stands at the midpoint between them. How would we know what Torah is, after all, were it not for the very concrete and defined text that we read each week, the specific aggregate of words and letters, narratives and laws, that fills the parchment held between those two poles that we call the Trees of Life? This is the text about which Rabbi Ishmael (or perhaps Akiva) said to the scribe: “Take care, for if you add or detract a single letter, you may destroy the entire world!”55 But that text is not without its problems, and there is good reason why we flee it in both directions (toward the utterly expansive and toward the totally reduced) at once. We understand the Torah text's complex historical origins, the process of editing that gave it this form. We rejoice in this knowledge that allows us the relief of admitting its fallibility, or at least the need for drastic reshaping through exegesis. Some parts of that reshaping are already ancient; others, too long neglected,