Vaetchanan — Feelings on Command

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    • Tzvi Chulsky 1 year ago

      This week’s parashah, among many things that could be topics for a post, contains a second “version” of the ten commandments. While there are some well-known differences between the version here and that in Shmot, we feel that too little attention is generally given to the last of the ten commandments—the one toward which everything seems to move. Initially, each commandment is almost paragraph-like, but the process “gathers momentum” and moves through them faster and faster, eventually going through several two-word commandments (the first word in each being לא), and finally slows down a bit (the slightly longer commandment of not bearing false witness) and reaches its culmination in a longer, “last” commandment in this chain, telling us that it is a mitzvah not to feel a certain emotion.

      Like with many of the other commandments, the first difference is the addition of a ו at the beginning: in some sense, there is more flow this time, more connection between the commandments. “[T]he repetition of the Decalogue,” writes Rav S.R. Hirsch,

      joins…all the sins between man and his neighbor, thereby combining in one idea the prohibitions of sinning against another’s life, marriage, property, happiness, and honor, as well as the prohibition against lusting after what is forbidden. And [this] points emphatically to the last prohibition.

      This time the first thing we are not to covet is the neighbor’s wife, and only second his house (swapped from the version in Shmot); the version in Shmot uses the same verb for coveting each, but here, the verb from Shmot (חמד) is used for the wife, and אוה is used for the house. It would be an interesting digression in a different post to examine the meaning of this different type of desire, תאוה, how it relates to the תאוה in the episode with the quails, and how it relates to homosexual activity, which is a תועבה according to Vayikra 18:22.

      The list of things not to covet is longer by one than previously, this time including שדה, an understandable addition for a generation that plans to actually own land. And in the case of the שור, this time, it, unlike the rest of the list and unlike in Shmot, does not have a connecting ו. The livestock end up in a separate list from the rest of the things not to covet.

      But what is this commandment in general? Martin Luther used this very commandment as proof that the Torah (according to him, the Old Testament, i.e. the Tanakh) is not to be “actually followed.” One cannot, Luther claimed, change his emotions on command. Luther’s conclusion was that the Torah is impossible to follow, and not intended to be followed; that the value of one’s life, and his likelihood of ending up in heaven, do not depend at all on what one does, but only on whether he accepts and believes in the tenets of Christianity.

      We, of course, have a different take. We assert that it is precisely what we do in this world that determines the value of our lives in this world. (In Tehillim 90, Moshe describes punishment from God as seeing one’s life slip by without having gotten much done.) And we assert that jealousy is an emotion against which one has the power to guard his mind and his heart, and guard them one must.

      Jealousy is incredibly corrosive both to an individual and to a society. We need look no further than what is happening in the West. It has become clear at this point in history that free countries create much more wealth than non-free ones; and while the rich in free countries become staggeringly rich, the poor, too, become rich compared to the poor in other countries. As this has become impossible to hide, it has become a conundrum for those who want to curtail freedoms in order to arrogate more power to themselves. And their solution has been to shift the focus from poverty (rapidly being alleviated by capitalism) to inequality.

      The question it raises is: why would anybody care about inequality? If one has become significantly wealthier in a free society, is there any reason why he should care that somebody else has become a billion times more wealthy than he has? How does that affect his living conditions[1]? Anytime that we hear the word “inequality,” we should immediately consider this last commandment, and remind ourselves of the one region of life where it is a mitzvah not to allow ourselves to experience a certain emotion.

      Martin Luther could also have cited the times in the Torah that we are commanded, instead, to feel positive emotions. From being happy on holidays (ושמחת בחגך) to loving one’s neighbor as oneself, we are commanded to feel emotions regularly. This week’s parashah includes the first paragraph of the Shema, in which we are commanded to love God. When we read this paragraph, one thought we could have is that we can fulfill the mitzvah of loving God; and similarly, whatever Martin Luther may have said, whatever our politicians and news media may tell us, we can fulfill the mitzvah of not coveting what belongs to our neighbors—and our lives and the world will be better for that.

      [1] In fact, having super-rich people around in a free society does affect one—it provides him with a client pool that is happy to pay big money and purchase lots of services. Having rich people around makes it much easier to make money and gain further wealth.

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