of, and the linchpin between, two of the world’s major religions. Both Christians and Jews perceive the sanctity and importance of the Ten Commandments, which, according to scripture, were given to Moses on Mount Sinai. But as doubt began to erode my certainty about God’s existence and his role as stage manager of my life, I began to doubt the Ten Commandments too, because, like God and country, God and the commandments were inextricably linked. To doubt God was bad enough, but to doubt the laws God commanded us to follow was perhaps most dire. How could one doubt commandments such as those that forbade us to steal or kill, commandments that had become essential to Western law and fundamental to ethical precepts? Yet could one not doubt the law if one doubted the lawgiver? Despite absorbing, by high school, a lot of ideas from freethinkers, and despite undergoing a serious diminution of faith, I wasn’t ready to break fully from what I had taken in from my mother, my father, and my religion.
Before doubt set in, I imagined my life as a kind of unfolding drama or opera or what today might pass for reality TV. And who was my audience? Why, God! God was watching over me and watching how I reacted to every incident, person, and event, large or small. And of course, he was judging me, keeping, like Santa in the Christmas song, tallies of the bad and good things I did (“so be good for goodness sake!”). I would sometimes imagine him experimenting with me, providing stimuli as a laboratory scientist does with a small mammal. I thought these thoughts and felt twinges of emotion as I moved beyond adolescence and into young manhood with the sense that God could not possibly be like I had imagined him as a boy.
Reason accounted for doubt. I reasoned that no one could know there was absolutely and incontrovertibly a God, but also that it was impossible to conclude there was not. people got ill, suffered, lost loved ones, and died without heavenly oversight or intervention, but did that mean there was no God? if he was overseeing the human domain, he had a lot to monitor. Was he, for example, watching over all those billions of Chinese commies and godless Russians? What if we tossed in the animal kingdom, down to the level of the phyla I had memorized for high school biology tests — Protozoa, Porifera, and Coelenterata? Or how about ants, spiders, and rodents? His power to be involved in the lives of all creatures seemed impossible. Yet how could we mere mortals hope to divine the divine or, if there was a divine, begin to comprehend it?
As the years went by, it was easier for me to dismiss the idea of God’s direct involvement in human affairs. But it was not so easy to dismiss God from involvement in my life, or to dismiss the possibility of a mystery beyond human reckoning, or to cast off fears and superstitions that crept up alongside my uncertainty, such as my fear of the potential price of denying my God. Whenever my mother accidentally spilled salt, she would toss a few grains of it over her left shoulder. It seemed like superstitious nonsense to me, but I did it too, just as I picked up her habit of at times speaking the word kinahora, a Yiddish term meant to keep the evil eye or bad luck away, just as knocking on wood or spitting is meant to ward off the evil eye. I wondered whether deference to God worked in a similar way for those who had begun to feel unconvinced that the deity existed or to doubt his omnipotence.
Back when I was barely pubescent, I had begun to wonder about the roles that uncertainty, ritual conditioning, and superstition play in belief. What of my feelings of helplessness that made me long for a supreme being, and my need to believe in divine will, a power that would be there for me — wherever there was — and for those I loved? How much of God, my God, was really about me and my childhood needs? And what about the Ten Commandments, on which my faith and morality rested?
If God had some calculus, I reasoned in high school, by which he determined rewards and punishments, it was clearly beyond me. Too many God-deniers had not experienced punishment, and too many lovers of God had suffered, for me to sort it out. As Dostoyevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, in a world without God anything was permissible. Children were beaten to death or starved or raped, or they suffered and died from incurable diseases. Job had suffered. Why? Was it simply to valorize faith, as Abraham was prepared to do when he was on the brink of sacrificing his firstborn? Richard Rubenstein asked in After Auschwitz: where was the God of our Jewish fathers and mothers when Jewish infants in the camps were shoveled into ovens, and Jews, gypsies, dissidents, and homosexuals were slaughtered like rats and chickens? If God cared a fig about the human species, why did he allow the staggering carnage of the death camps? These were the kinds of impossible questions that I, like many others at the time, was grappling with. By college, however, such questions seemed to boil down to my attempts to understand how a God who had handed down moral law on Sinai could allow pointless suffering rather than intervene in our lives. Perhaps if there was a God, God’s ways were simply unknowable. Or perhaps there was no God!
I recall that, when I was a college senior, Time magazine heralded, à la Nietzsche, the death of God. Denying God’s existence outright led me to Aristotle and to the Christian theologian Paul Tillich, both of whom argued the idea of negative affirmation. That is, if you say God does not exist, you are really saying he does, because you can only deny that which exists. By denying, you affirm. Curious reasoning. I remember thinking, if I said Neptune beings did not exist, did that affirm life on Neptune? If I proclaimed the death of God, was I affirming that he once lived, or that he presently was alive; or was it all merely metaphor? To proclaim or accept the death of a presence I had personally felt deeply bound to seemed reckless. If God existed, how could I presume to kill him or claim him dead or nonexistent? How could I simply lose or abandon a presence that had earlier filled my life?
But here was the real rub. How could Nietzsche or Time or anyone proclaim God dead if God’s existence was unverifiable? Of course, the death of God was metaphoric. Nietzsche wanted us to become, in the wake of his proclamation, supermen who were not even vulnerable — like the comic book character — to kryptonite. But the notion of God’s being or God’s presumptive presence remained as far beyond me as the distant stars. If there was a big bang, What was prior to it? What conceived it? What presences were within the absences beyond our senses or consciousness? All such questions, I realized early on, were unanswerable unless you believed you had discovered truth or made the leap to faith.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND GOD’S EXISTENCE
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Thou shalt have no other God before thy God.
2. Thou shalt have no graven images from heaven above or earth below or water under the earth.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of thy Lord God in vain.
4. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.
5. Honor thy father and mother.
6. Thou shalt not kill.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house nor wife nor male servant nor female servant nor his ox, donkey, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.
To what extent, I began to wonder in my college years, was God’s existence at stake when one reckoned with the Ten Commandments? Even secular humanists and nonbelievers vouched that the commandments were the foundation of Western civilization and, as such, deserved our compliance even if there was no God poised to reward or punish us. The commandments were sensible rules, even nonbelievers reasoned, by which to live one’s life. They protected us from ourselves and others and ensured order over chaos, law over anarchy.
Tales in all the holy books that supposedly held God’s word could be dispelled as ancient myths and superstitions, dried-up beliefs and narratives. God parting the Red Sea? A fairy tale no more believable than Jesus walking across wide water. But the Ten Commandments, whether handed down to Moses by God on Sinai or not, were something else. Exodus and Deuteronomy might hold different lists of commandments, the New Testament might offer different translations and enumerations of them, and the