Far be it from me, as an Orthodox Jew, to deny the religious significance of the two passages — one from Exodus (20:2-14) and the other from Deuteronomy (5:6-18) — which go by the somewhat misleading name “The Ten Commandments” in the general culture.
In the Hebrew original, they are sublime statements of Torah, to be studied and contemplated and commented on in inexhaustible variety.
It is equally silly to deny that, in English dress (whichever version one selects), they have played a profound role in shaping the ideas underlying the United States of America, its Constitution (as well as the constitutions of the constituent states) and its culture and mores.
As such, it is only reasonable that they find a place in various venues where historical documents are displayed and the rule of law honored.
Fundamentally, those people who would ban the display of such documents as the Ten Commandments — and argued for doing so in front of the U.S. Supreme Court last week — do so out of a misguided and misunderstood sense of what the country’s Founding Fathers meant by the “separation of church and state.”
There are three possible positions that have historically been taken in the civilized world concerning the establishment of religion:
• The oldest and most common (one which is still prevalent in many places that we would regard as free and democratic, e.g. the U.K.) is the establishment of a state religion.
The principle was known in the Middle Ages as “cujus regio, hujus religio” — i.e., whoever sat on the throne had the right to determine the religion of his or her subjects. It was this that our Founding Fathers were reacting to.
Anyone with the least interest in understanding the thought of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams or most of the other participants in the Continental Congress will find in their recorded writings countless references to the positive effect of religion in general. What they objected to was religion in the specific, supported at public expense.
Culturally Christian
• That principled opposition led to the position established in the United States.
This requires no specifically recognized state religion funded by tax dollars, such that the clergy are employees of the state, the properties are maintained at state expense, or the adherents to some particular sect will enjoy rights or privileges or a prestige denied adherents of any other (or none at all).
• However, subsequent to the American Revolution, there occurred a cataclysmic upheaval in France, out of which was born a tradition of radicalism, which has been in the world ever since. (The very terms “left” and “right,” used in the political sense of liberal and conservative, date from the French Revolution.)
This radical tradition sees religion, or the lack thereof, as so intensely private a matter that it should find no expression whatsoever in the public sphere.
This tradition still obtains in France and countries profoundly influenced by the French Revolution, as evidenced by the recent and controversial passing of a law in France banning the wearing of any religious symbols — a crucifix, a kippa, or the hijab equally — in a public school or university.
This latter spirit of militant secularism is foreign to the United States. For better or for worse, the United States is a culturally Christian country. To the extent that this implies a shared heritage with us as Jews, it should serve to make us much more comfortable here, not less.
This cultural Christianity finds expression in many forms. Dec. 25, the Christian holiday of Christmas, is a public holiday, and public money is spent decorating public venues for it.
Our money carries the motto “In God we trust.” Legislative sessions open with invocations. Public officials are sworn in on the Bible; and so on.
So long as public money is not used to support one religious denomination over another, so long as there is no law restricting the clergy who may deliver these invocations to one denomination or another, there is no violation of the principle of “separation of church and state.”
Everyone is free to participate, or not to participate, as he or she sees fit. To deny the majority culture in an effort to make a tiny minority of militant unbelievers “more comfortable” is, ironically, an act of intolerance in the name of tolerance.
More seriously, it also does violence to history. The rule of law — as opposed to the whim of the ruler expressed in the Latin formula quoted earlier — is essential to the establishment of any sort of free and democratic government.
Establishment of that principle is traced by the majority culture, and was acknowledged by the Founding Fathers, to those 10 statements which, our tradition records, were carved so long ago on two stone tablets at Mount Sinai.
Rabbi Avner Zarmi is vice president of the Wisconsin chapter of Agudath Israel of America.
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