Ten Commandments Reflections

  ON CASUISTRY OR STRETCHING THE LAW by DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS by David Arthur Walters Few people can remember even five of the Ten Commandments in right order What sort of person would write down rules then proceed forthwith to break them? Fanatic literalists do their very best to keep their commandments exactly as written, but almost everyone else stretches their own rules as a matter of habit, some beyond the breaking point. Take, for instance, the New Year's resolutions seemingly made by almost everyone to be broken in a matter of days if not hours. Despite all good intentions, such violations are natural to those who legislate against themselves, especially when the habits of the selfish self are stronger than the will of the socialized self split off and divided back against it. A "person" is a working synthesis of individual and society - the distinction between psychology and sociology is formally made for the sake of explanatory convenience. The individual factor o...

  ON THE HORNS OF MOSES BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS The Old Testament features a convenient scapegoat for our natural ambivalence, bigotry and materialism: our spiritual ancestors, the stereotypical Jews. The perennial Jewish Question, “How should we treat the Jews,” should be asked not only of the self-styled Jews but of our thoroughly Judaized Western culture. Josephus might better say of the lot of us today what he said centuries ago of the early Western philosophers: “Our earliest imitators were the Greek philosophers, who, though ostensibly observing the laws of their own countries, yet in their conduct and philosophy were Moses’ disciples.” If we would know ourselves, we should first of all know the Jews, and to know them we have to know their history. The Jewish poets and scribes did a wonderful job of recording our same old story. In their eloquent books we find the best and worst of human nature in the portrayal of the progress of the naturally ambiguous religion of ambivalenc...