Those Pious Protectors of America’s soul who worked to keep the Ten Commandments so prominently displayed at the Alabama courthouse don’t understand that the commandments are not exclusively their own.  Jews and Christians, you see, read the Ten Commandments quite differently.  And were the Pious Protectors to understand how we Jews read them, my guess is that even they might hesitate in their crusade to disseminate the Decalogue so widely.

To us, the Ten Commandments teach specifically Jewish values. And although we celebrate the fact Christians embrace them too, it is horribly disrespectful to lump these two great religious traditions together into a “Judeo-Christian” blob that ignores the distinctive richness each faith brings to the world.

The differences between the Jewish and Christian readings of the Ten Commandments are many; allow me to mention but a few:

First, we count them differently.  For Jews, the first of the Ten Commandments is, “I am the Lord your God who led you out of the land of Egypt, the house of slaves.”  What many Christians count as the first commandment,  –“You shall have no other gods beside me” – is #2 for us.  To keep the count at ten, we Jews lump the prohibitions against coveting our neighbor’s wife and property into a single commandment –  #10 – rather than counting them as two separate ones as is done in most Christian citations.

The difference is significant.  For Jews, the Ten Commandments are the product of a very specific historical experience.  While Creation and the other things God did in Genesis were very nice, it was specifically because of what God did for the Israelites in Egypt that we are bound to keep the commandments.  For Christians, they tend to be more timeless in nature – applicable, perhaps, to all people at all times.  Furthermore,  by counting two commandments about “coveting” Christianity puts a greater emphasis on the internal world of thoughts and feelings, while Judaism tends to look more at the external, behavioral world, instead.

Second, Christianity often sees these commandments as applying to everyone, while Judaism sees them binding only upon Jews.  No, it’s not that we want you non-Jews to go around murdering and committing adultery, of course.  But such bloodshed and promiscuity were prohibited to Noah and his descendants, i.e., to all humanity.  However, the Ten Commandments –  these particular injunctions mandated in Exodus and Deuteronomy – were among those Biblical laws that were given to the Jews only.  As a result, we Jews don’t insist that you observe the Sabbath on Saturday, it’s OK with us if you make graven images, and as far as we’re concerned, you can worship any God you’d like.  Yes, we do have a fundamental sense of human decency to which we hold everyone accountable, and sticking to that is work enough.  But Judaism also teaches that the laws that God gave to the Jewish people are binding upon Jewish people only.

Finally, the Ten Commandments play a very different role Judaism than they do in Christianity.  Jews count a total of 613 commandments in the Bible.  To us, the Ten Commandments are simply a sampling, a cross-section, a distillation of some of the overarching principles underlying the other 603. 

Christianity, on the other hand, founded itself in part on a rejection of what it saw as Judaism’s excessive concern with the law.  As a result, early Christianity emphasized the Ten Commandments more than Judaism ever had.  We can put ourselves into God’s good graces, many Christians have felt, by simply focusing our efforts on these ten great biblical precepts.

In other words, for Jews, the Ten Commandments are a way toward the other 603; for Christians, the Ten Commandments have served more as a way to dispense with them.

As you can see, then, although the words of the Ten Commandments are indeed written in stone, their meanings are definitely not.   For through the ages, these words have found the passionate embrace of millions – an embrace that allowed the engravings to jump off the tablets and into the hearts of people.  In the process, the words found countless new meanings and new understandings for Jews and Christians and countless others, each new meaning adding richness to the role the Ten Commandments have played in the ongoing history of humanity.

So the Righteous Ramparts of the Religious Right should indeed remember that they are not the sole proprietors of these commandments.  In fact, given that there are many of us who read them as I do, they might want to think twice about displaying them so prominently in America’s Public Square.