Katie Fitch became a Bat Mitzvah on Saturday, May 23rd, Shavuot. Below is her D’var on the 10 Commandments.
I have always understood the Ten Commandments as the foundation of our covenant with G*d, a baseline for holiness as well as an aspiration to carry into our lives each day. At first glance, these are easy things. Don’t worship false gods or idols, don’t take G*d’s name in vain, keep the Sabbath, honor your parents and elders, don’t kill, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet. Easy, we think, a no brainer. This covenant asks so little of us that surely no one will ever fall short of it, it is so easy not to do things afterall. But one of these things is not like the others. How can you not want? Rava, in the Babylonian Talmud said “matters of the heart are not matters”. How can they be? How can desire, an instinct intrinsic to us, trained by the world of aspirational consumption around us, be wrong?
You see the cover of a magazine, beautifully photoshopped models, no lumps or bumps, and you think “I want to look like that”. You want to sneak a cookie before it’s time, but you don’t want to get in trouble so you lie and blame your niece. Someone takes the snack you wanted and you curse. You want to get a project done and work through shabbat. It is want that so often and so easily leads us to break the preceding 9 commandments.
Beyond direct transgression, Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoah said “[because there is already a commandment against adultery] this means you should not try to get your neighbor to divorce his wife so you can marry her”. You cannot manufacture the situation in which you get what you want at another’s expense.
So perhaps this final commandment is a warning, not against want itself, but against what want leads us to. What would you do to get what you want? Would you lie, or cheat, or steal, or cause harm in the name of your desire? What if you wanted it really badly?
At the time the commandments were recorded neighbors were the people we relied on for the survival of our community. Each household was essential to the greater whole. One person alone cannot till a field, plant, tend, and harvest a crop, and process it and take it to market, we must have support.
In that sense our neighbors are no longer our community, we are no longer essential to each other’s survival. This loss of community is when the tenth commandment becomes the most difficult to obey. If we fall to coveting survival becomes a zero sum game in which the only way to do better is to take from others so that they do worse. It becomes a gateway for the breaking of all other commandments.
Rabbi Barry H. Block posits that the antidote to coveting is “to redirect that inclination to do only good”. To turn our desires into action not against our neighbors but for them. (I’ll take this moment to thank everyone who brought a donation today for the food bank). In Rabbi Block’s interpretation “do not covet” becomes a call to action towards the elimination of need. When we recognize that covetous feeling within ourselves he tells us to turn it outward as generosity, not greed, for those who may covet what we have as we covet what we have not.
I return to the idea that the commandments are the foundation of our covenant. That community is the foundation of our lives as Jews. Foundations and communities both require maintenance from time to time, or risk becoming unstable and unable to support us. When we are actors for the covenant we strengthen that foundation and we strengthen our community and are strengthened in return.
It is this community that strengthens me and this foundation that I hope to strengthen in turn. Thank you all so much for being here with me today, I truly would not be here without each and every one of you.