new syndicated feed

"The Hasidic Rebel" is a well-written weblog written by someone who appears to be trying to live in two worlds, Chassidic and secular. I'm sure there are many points on which we'll disagree, but that's part of the experience. (How boring the world would be if we all agreed on everything!) He's articulate and the few posts I've read so far have been quite interesting, so I syndicated it at hasidicrebel. Thanks to peacheater77 for the find.

some commandments

Alabama isn't the only place with controversies over judicial monuments to the 10 commandments; there's a local case of this too. But ours doesn't weigh 2.5 tons; it's just a plaque and thus easy to miss in the political and media circus.

An article in yesterday's paper described what happened when a reporter stood near the courthouse and asked random people to list the commandments. The average hit rate was three. I do wonder, and the article didn't discuss this, how they handled different interpretations of this list. We don't all draw the lines in the same places. Jews and I think some Protestants say there's one commandment against coveting, for example, not two like the Roman Catholics say.

Quite aside from the legal and social issues surrounding these public displays, I find myself wondering where all the emphasis on these ten commandments really comes from. It's my impression that Christians focus on this a lot more than Jews do. Jews focus on the revelation at Sinai, of which this list is a part, but we have 613 commandments (and all the derivatives), so these ten aren't anything like a complete list. Yes, there are talmudic arguments that say that the 613 reduce to these ten, but some of the contortions are, um, challenging.

But Christians have more commandments than just these ten, too. After all, the ten commandments don't include anything that Jesus added, and at least "do unto others..." and "love your neighbor" are every bit as important as honoring parents.

So do we all just like neat, tidy lists with nice round numbers, or what? Why have these few verses been pulled out of scripture and given elevated importance?

Aside: At Shavuot we read the revelation at Sinai. In some congregations it's customary to stand for the ten commandments. In others, it is custom specifically not to stand for them, because that elevates them above the rest of the Torah.