13/5/94

God's Top Ten

Thou shalt beg, borrow or steal this book, for thou shalt see that it is good.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, by God. Mount Sinai Publishers and Stonecutters, Egypt, 1 pp, hardcover, no price stated.

****1/2

    This critically-acclaimed blockbuster is an interesting little work, not much more than a series of statements which are by now rather cliched, though at the time they were quite original. It was the first Top Ten list compiled by a god.
    This book has not been reviewed since the 11th century. It has been reprinted numerous times since the first two-tablet edition, and translated into a hatful of languages, including Hebrew. A sequel later increased the 10 to 613.
    The Ten Commandments is as controversial today as when it first hit the stands. Some of the authorship is rather quaint, but the philosophical thrust is something of a revelation in this post-Cold War era.
       The book starts off nicely. It is a spring morning, not far from Nuweiba. Moses and his staff wake up, the birds are twittering, the coffee percolating, the sun beats down gently, there's not a cloud in the sky. Yet. Something possesses the protagonist to put on his sandals, take a stroll, stretch his legs. He climbs a mountain. Here, the plot thickens. He senses he is not alone. He is thinking, "What in Heaven's name am I doing up here?" Then, a voice from above says (sounds like the oldest joke in the book, right?): "Moses."  He is startled. God, eh? He starts to stammer, but the voice cuts him off and launches into the monologue that is the crux of the story.
    "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." This commandment was ranked Number One. Smart move. It was an election year, and He needed support from the masses. Other deities of the day were content to form coalitions and win support from the public by spreading the power base. Who could resist a list that included the highly-respected gods of fertility, war, wind and moon? The concept of Almightiness was a gamble.
    Then there was the matter of ineffableness. The people liked gods they could stroke and behold and form into little olivewood incarnations. A Feared One that was out there: nobody had ever tried that before. But He was a little-known Lord at the time, ministering to an obscure minority out of the mainstream, and with this strategy He improved His portfolio from god to God. (It was apparently His idea to spell His Name in all Its forms with a capital letter.)
    This Oneness hit the rocks when Elvis hit the charts, and thoroughly lost its appeal during the height of the Me Generation. Fortunately, that was followed by the Him Generation, and God bounced back. True, there are lots of heroes to worship these days, but He is still the Preferred One, thanks to an everlastingness that has endured since day one. The Rabbi Schachs come and go, but God is forever. At least until some smartypants American lawyer challenges His monopoly. (If David Koresh were smart he'd have simply sued Him for violation of civil rights.)
    "Thou shalt not make of Me any graven image." This doesn't figure. So marketable, yet so modest. But this commandment must be taken in the context of the times. The Omnipotent One was also omnibusy. He just didn't have the time to sit. With Kodachrome still several thousand years away, He'd have had to pose for hours for every artiste in the phone book.
    So why did this one make the Top Ten? Is this more important than a directive like "Thou shalt pray three times a day" or "Wear tzitzes"? Sages have suggested this commandment may have been a typo (the haredi dress code is based on the reading of this as "raven image") or a misquote (Onklous postulated it was really "The cholent Mike Kaufman  gave in a midge," but this was disputed by the great Mameluke tobacconist Doobie ibn Tabatchnik). Hillel developed a mid-life crisis studying this passage, but it wasn't until the 17th century kabbalists that the mystery was solved. Reb Shmiel of Safed, known to his disciples as Mr. Gematria, scrambled the letters of the commandment and reassembled them to read "I love the tough anagrams taken of My name," which, he said, proves that the All Knowing One was commanding us to play word games. But this was quickly discredited by Haim Yankel The Shmendrik of Delphia, who pointed out that the letters also spell "Make no anagrams even out of the Almighty."
    "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." Really, now, who doesn't? And how many people are struck by lightning?
    Thus far in the book, the author is rather self-absorbed. Egocentric, even. But then, a sudden change of scenery. It is Friday. Erev Shabbos. The happy little Jewish family is at home. And then, as the sun sets, the devout old mother decides to shave her legs. She does, and dies, but not before whispering her last words: "Oy, I thought it was Thursday."
    The fifth commandment is interesting in that it characterizes God as British, with its archaic spelling of "Honour." At least, that's how it appears in my autographed, unabridged copy. This commandment, which, significantly, is the last one on the first tablet, spawned the Generation Gap.
    It also proved to be to feminists what ‘Satanic Verses’ is to Arabs. Perhaps you recall the angry demonstrations in San Francisco when The Ten Commandments first came out. A group of hard-core Deuteronomists responded by publishing the California Sanctification (also known as the Californication), with its revisionist fifth, "Honor thy parental unit."
    "Thou shalt not kill." Aw, gimme a break. This commandment ought to be taken out and shot. Or at least subtitled: "Thou shalt doeth as I sayeth, not as I doeth." I mean, who killed Pharaoh's soldiers? God. The Philistines? God. The ram? God. The Sodomites and Gomorraites? God. For that matter, who gave every living thing built-in obsolescence? God, God, God.
    He has some nerve.
    The writer, or rather Writer, becomes rather economical with the details here. Not kill what? And to what consequences? If I drive over an ant on the Ayalon will I be spanked, jailed, electrocuted?
    "Thou shalt not commit adultery." This one would be redundant had He created every woman in the image of my wife.
    "Thou shalt not steal." This is my favorite part. The book's credibility really improves at this point, as its moral message reaches a heart-thumping crescendo. The paucity of verbiage, the bold, simplistic style, give this commandment a subtle eloquence that leaps out as the vital element of the book's credo. What reader would not fling a fist in the air and yawp kudos to this literary gem who has not had a pencil stolen, or a wallet, or a hubcap? It was this tempestuous passage that vaulted Charleton Heston to stardom.
    What follows is a bit of comic relief, an airy little chapter about bearing false witness, something else not to be done at risk of getting the Almighty's Irish up. I grinned reading it the first time, and verily chuckled the second time. Aesop based his funniest parable on this, The Cockroach and the Shoe, in which a chocolate rogolach starts a rumor that the cockroach has been at the brown shoe-polish. A wry little interlude, this, and it sets up the denouement perfectly.
    The ending preys upon our most basic instincts, to want. To have a Subaru, to covet thy neighbor's Pontiac: that is what life is all about. The rest of the commandments, by comparison, are mere commentary.
    Mankind never got this far in the book, consigning the sin of coveting to a peccadillo of the last degree. Our courts are busy enough with stealers, killers, adulterers, Shabbos-breakers and suchlike, so that coveters are let off scot-free. Imagine this scene on ‘L.A. Law’: "The court finds you guilty of aggravated jealousy: Death by hanging."
    The writer indulges in sabre-toothed irony by listing the "want nots" that were relevant to a nomadic manna-eating desert tribe of former slaves from a quinquemillennium ago, and applying them to us savages of the twenty-first century. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" (as in, "boy, can she cook!") "...his house" (the proverbial Joneses, of course) "... his field" ("what does he need such a big garden for?") "...his manservant or his maidservant" ("He can afford an ozeret twice a week?") "... his ox" (as in the one you work like, and the one he's as dumb as, but yet he can afford to eat like one, while you're as poor as) "... or his ass" ("your ass is mine, buster"). It was this commandment that won over the Jewish People, for it encouraged them to go out and get rich rather than stay home and sulk.
    Take my advice: beg, borrow or steal this book. And that's a commandment.