Christian readings exclude Jewish readings. It’s not government’s business to decide.
Philosopher Rene Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am.” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said: “I am commanded, therefore I am.”
“Commandment” is the essential Jewish teaching and experience.
That said, the additional names given in the Torah for “commandments” impart additional teachings. One critical example is “The Ten Commandments,” which, while they are commandments from G-d, are never referred to by this name in the Torah.
This theological lesson becomes political when states such as Oklahoma push to post “The Ten Commandments” in classrooms and other public places. On one level the urge is meritorious, as it attempts to restore a sense of spirituality to a radically secularized public life. The founders, while protecting religious freedoms for all, did not envision a secular society. Contrary to conventional wisdom, G-d is mentioned in the Constitution — look at the signatures.
But this well intentioned effort fails many tests, the least of which is the reframing of The Ten Commandments as a critical historical document, rather than a religious one, in order to get around the prohibition of government sponsorship of religion.
But there is an additional and even more critical point. As Rabbi Benjamin Blech has pointed out, there are no “Ten Commandments” in the Hebrew Bible. For an important reason, they are referred to differently, a Jewish and Hebrew point that highlights the problem in a public posting of the “Ten Commandments.”
A “commandment” in the Hebrew Bible and throughout Jewish sacred literature is predominantly a mitzvah. The Hebrew Bible does not delineate “The Ten Mitzvot” (Commandments). In Oklahoma or anywhere else, the public posting in English of “The Ten Commandments” is not just a mistranslation.
Think it through, and you’ll see much more than a semantic difference. You’ll see a derogation of Judaism as represented in its primary sacred text, the Torah, i.e., the Hebrew Bible.
The Torah lays down not “The Ten Commandments” but Aseret Hadevarim, “The Ten Declarations” (Deuteronomy 4:13). It is not a semantic difference, it is a substantive difference. As Saadia Gaon illustrated 1,200 years ago, the Torah’s “Ten Declarations” lay down 10 principles. Each of the “Ten Declarations” conveys not only a specific commandments but more. Each of the “Ten Declarations” is a principle, a paradigm.
For example, the fourth “Declaration,’ which requires the observance of the holy Sabbath, also encompasses all of the other holy days — a paradigm for Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret. The Sabbath, as the fourth of the 10 “Declarations,” is “first among equals,” or, as the Hebrew text puts it, “the first of the holy convocations.”
The bottom line is this: “The Ten Declarations” embrace the totality of the Torah, rather than limited instances therein; but the public posting of “The Ten Commandments” radically contacts and distorts their origin point in the Torah, which records not “Ten Commandments” — the term is not in the Torah — but 10 paradigms encompassing 613 commandments.
Why should Jews object to a well intentioned effort to instill a bit of spirituality into public life? Because Judaism is not a religion of 10 commandments, of 10 mitzvot. As a religion of 613 commandments, Judaism is so much fuller. It includes many observances that other religions prefer to exclude. Apolitical focus on “The Ten Commandments” — which, again, is not a term in the Hebrew Bible — reflects the non-Jewish view that the rest of biblical commandments — the mitzvot — need not be numbered.
Also of non-Jewish provenance is the way other religions do number the “Ten Commandments.” It is not the way Judaism numbers them. This, too, is not a technical point. It is a critical theological point. Catholic and Lutherans, for example, do not count as an independent commandment the very first one: “I am the L-rd your G-d Who took you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”
Whichever version of “The Ten Commandments” is publicly posted, it must favor one religion over another — a violation of the First Amendment. Catholics, Lutherans, Anglican, Greek Orthodox and Reformed churches disagree on how at least some of the commandments are to be counted.
So whose theology is to be reflected in a publicly posted English translation of “The Ten Commandments?” This is not a question that public officials should be addressing. This inevitably favors one religion over another. This is not what the First Amendment envisioned by banning the government establishment of religion.
Still more ironies:
If “The Ten Commandments” are to be transmogrified into a religiously neutral text of historical significance, whose history? Jewish history? Anglican history?
The Christian churches disagree; the Jewish tradition is united on the history of “The Ten Declarations.”
It is not up to public officials to write — or rewrite — religious history in order to conform to the theological presuppositions of any religion.
For all these reasons, the public posting of “The Ten Commandments,” while not the most pressing of governmental moves to object to, should be objected to by people of the Jewish faith, for whom the Hebrew Bible (what others call “the Old Testament”) is a reservoir of 613 commandments, not a limited focus on 10.
As Abraham J. Heschel said, “I am commanded, therefore I am.”
© IJN 2026
