Rabbinical student Anne Strauss writes that she just finished David Hazony's new book on the Ten Commandments — "The Ten Commandments: How Our Most Ancient Moral Text Can Renew Modern Life" (Scribner) — and recommends it:
I wasn't at all sure how I'd like the book, but I was pretty sold on it by the end. Unlike most Jewish books that I read, I'd recommend this one not only to all my usual friends and family but also to my "secular" Jewish friends who have very little knowledge and familiarity with Jewish knowledge. I think Hazony's style is perfect for this — easygoing and familiar, articulate without being blunt, and very far from any sort of "preachy" tone. I think his idea and agenda for the book is a great one and it'll engage far more of a regular reader than, say, a book on the parshiot or ritual laws (even if they were written for a more secular type) would.
Avtually, I think most of what he wrote would work very well as sermon. He has a refreshingly direct and modern tone but does not try to be too "hip" or needlessly drop cultural references. It works well.
I was often surprised throughout the book by little sections which were dramatically different from any other interpretation of a commandment that I'd ever seen. A few examples:
On lying and taking God’s name: “Invoking the Lord’s name in an oath means stepping outside the rumbling flow of talk and deception that marks our daily lives and putting not just our words but our existential reality, our very being, behind what we convey to others. It is placing a strict limit on manipulation, showing the world that there will always be room for truth on this earth…Honesty is more than a lofty moral ideal. It is first of all a mental habit, a habit of constantly checking our words against truth and our deeds against our words…”
And I was further impressed by section on not stealing (#8) – a fascinating discussion of property, and ownership (also because I was sort of looking to see whether any political leanings would surface in the book – they didn't , but property rights was about the closest it seemed to get):
“When we purchase something new, we feel a thrill of life; we begin to imagine what we might do with it, explore new possibilities before us…Whereas our bodies are forever limited in their extent, the idea of property means that our borders can change…when we violate the property of another we are not just committing an act of violence against his extended self; we are denying his fundamental right to expand and thus assaulting his very humanity.”
I also had to share a thought regarding his chapter on commandment #10, not coveting, and how he explains that this is based on the moral problem of insecurity. I read this chapter the same week that everyone was talking about the new Facebook movie. Among my demographic, Facebook insecurity is a hot topic – the need to post bragging pictures of one’s fantastic parties or update a status with how busy you are or whatever hot spot you happen to be at. Suffice to say this chapter provides a refreshing discussion about why this type of insecurity is not just hurtful or unhelpful but wrong. “The archetypal sin in the Bible is, as we see, the sin of dispiritedness, of self-deflation that inevitably leads to more horrible sins. Like the spies in the desert, Cain had become a grasshopper in his own eyes. Like the Israelites, he let insecurity destroy him.”
Hazony writes that the Ten Commandments, and the Torah, in general, are optimistic: they provide an opportunity for people to redeem themselves, to try again, and though we are not perfect, to work towards becoming better men and women. Hazony’s book, too, is optimistic. It ends on a wonderfully uplifting and rousing note (that echoes, almost the mnemonic ‘Who Knows One’ from Pesach) that deftly summarizes each of his main concepts about the commandments: “Tackling each insecurity one by one, learning to relax, to believe in ourselves, to identify and overcome fears, to benefit from the Bible’s wisdom, to rise and breathe deeply, to forgive our own mistakes as we move forward, going beyond insecurity and turning toward our higher goals, learning, loving expanding to include others, our spouses and children and parents, our friends and communities, our nations and the whole world – this is the promise that the Tenth Commandment offers us; indeed that the Ten Commandments as a whole offer us: a vision of redemption that each of us, in our own situation, has in hand as we reach our close?
If I got to ask Hazony a question on some sort of panel, I'd like to see how he'd answer this one: Are these commandments things that humanity would have basically figured out for ourselves? Was there a need for revelation? (My answer is, yes, they had to be revealed). It seems that for Hazony's project in this book the question is for the most part irrelevant — but I'd still be very interested in what he says.
Here’s a brief interview with the author about his book: