In 2003, Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore attained brief fame when he placed and refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments in the State Supreme Court building. Moore’s actions and his subsequent removal from office by a unanimous decision of Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary were just another part of the American debate about the role of religion in the United States.
The Alabama court’s decision unfortunately was not unique, as there have been many other decisions by American courts ordering the removal of monuments of the Ten Commandments on state property. Such decisions exemplify how secularists view religion generally, and Judaism especially – with its many intricate rules, among which are the Ten Commandments – as no more than mindless and superstitious rituals. But as the U.S. Supreme Court has found in other decisions regarding freedom of religion and speech, it is not so easy to label anything as “mere worship.”
In reality, the Torah, like any great work of literature recognized as a classic by the secular world, whether fiction (like Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Odyssey or the possibly fictional Iliad) or non-fiction (like Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War), presents a worldview with profound implications for society.
For example, the Torah establishes the Jewish people’s nationhood and their rightful ownership of Eretz Yisrael, while the Nevi’im present a vision of world peace, in which the nations live in harmony.
The world has taken both these lessons seriously with the creation of the State of Israel (the Palestine Mandate states, “Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine”) and the United Nations (across from which is the Isaiah Wall, which bears the inscription of Isaiah 2:4, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare”).
The Ten Commandments found in Parshat Yitro are more than a unique presentation of a set of basic laws. They are a prime example of the Torah’s presentation of a philosophy on civilization, which the Western secular world has adopted.
Many Western political philosophers have theorized about the “state of nature” – what things looked like before civilization – in an effort to discern the proper form of government. In this thought experiment, they could propose the reasons people entered into civilized society, and by implication, the form that society and its government should take.
Hobbs thought the state of nature was a “war of all against all.” In order to escape “such a miserable condition of war,” people consented to governmental force to keep everyone in line. The implication of such a theory is that it is important to have an immensely powerful “leviathan” in the form of an all-powerful government, like the King of England, to keep the peace.
The Mishna in Pirkevi Avot similarly states that people should pray for the government because without it, people would swallow each other whole (3:2), even though at that time the government was oppressive Rome, which destroyed the Second Beit Hamikdash.
Locke, on the other hand, thought that because in the state of nature all people were equal, the government had an obligation to treat people equally and allow them to retain their liberty.
The Torah is not a mere set of cold laws. It includes events and stories, with lessons about the spirit of its laws and how we should live our lives. The settings in Bereishit – such as Gan Eden, the generation of the Flood, even Creation itself – also represent such theoretical states of nature. Locke himself referred to Adam in his Second Treatise. Indeed, everything that occurs in the Torah is a presentation of Judaism’s primary contribution to the theory of civilization: the idea that there is one God in heaven and on earth.
Monotheism implies several interrelated ideas relevant to civilization. The first is that there is a Being who will judge people for their actions. Like Hobbs’ leviathan – God is the ultimate power that keeps people in check. The second is that there is a single ultimate morality; it does not depend on which god on the pantheon is being looked to. Nor does it depend on different people’s conceptions of what is right. It’s not relativistic and cannot therefore be rationalized or interpreted away. So, for instance, Locke thought that people couldn’t “quit their own station” or “harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent.”