did not seem to believe in hell, really, and I certainly didn’t, so where or how would punishment for theft occur if not on earth? And what of those who, like Jean Valjean, stole out of desperation? Were there exceptions to the commandment? Mitigating circumstances? Get-out-of-violating-the-commandment-free cards? I raised such questions inwardly, and they sounded to me even then a lot like Philosophy 101. They suggested, as I continued to grapple with them in college, that I might need to join what by then were the growing ranks of secular humanists, who were vilified for holding views tantamount to moral relativism. Yet how could one be absolutist about any of the commandments five through ten? I loved my parents and felt the value of the commandment to honor them. But I knew there were abusive and dishonorable parents who deserved no honor. Parents who were cruel to small children deserved punishment. In fact I felt outraged enough about violence against children that in such cases, were I guaranteed immunity, I could possibly have personally violated the commandment not to kill.
If the commandments were listed in order of importance, how could the one obligating us to rest on the Sabbath be more important than those forbidding us to steal or kill or the one commanding us to honor our parents? The holiness attached to the idea of keeping the Sabbath is allied with the belief that creation was completed in six days and, therefore, like the first three commandments, fundamentally tied to belief in God and his filling a short-term work order. This commandment is viewed as absolute by many Orthodox Jews, who, believing they must rest on the day of rest, refuse to drive, answer the telephone, push a button on an elevator, or even flush a toilet.
I knew Jews like that when I was growing up, including some of my neighbors. They refused to do anything other than walk to and from the Orthodox synagogue they could not afford to join. An itinerant freelance rabbi named Katz (my friends and I called him Rabbi Katzintoochas, meaning “Rabbi Katz in the ass”) taught haftarah bar mitzvah preparation to their kids and others whose families couldn’t afford to join a synagogue. Rabbi Katzintoochas would park blocks away on Saturday and slink over to the home of those he was teaching haftarah that day, to avoid being seen driving his car on Shabbat. This was during the days when I would play hooky from Sabbath school on Saturdays. One Saturday my friend Froggy and I got into the rabbi’s unlocked car and stayed crouched down until he furtively made it back to where the car was parked. When he opened the door, we sprang up immediately and shouted in unison: “Good shabbus, Rabbi!” I honestly feared Katzintoochas was going to die of cardiac arrest.
My point is that absolutism leads too often to hypocrisy, but also to rigidity and fanaticism. In many cases, it leads directly to religious fundamentalism, which — as writers like the ex-nun Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, have shown — can breed murderous acts. During humankind’s time on this planet, there has been far too much absolutism, and far too much absolutism remains the global order of the day. But there has also been, believers will argue, too many exemptions from the commandments, too much sliding away from the requirement to follow the will of God as set forth to Moses on Sinai, too much moral relativism.
Can one say that adultery should absolutely never be committed? Poor Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, impelled by desire she could not understand and a maddening search for fulfillment. Or Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Literature had the unsettling effect of expanding my empathy for fallen women, who defied God’s seventh commandment. How could one not empathize with Anton Chekhov’s sweet, tortured, religious Anna, married to a flunky, or with men like her lover, Dmitri Gurov, whose wife was hard and unyielding, the chief characters in the magnificent love story “The Lady with the Dog,” which Vladimir Nabokov called one of the greatest stories ever written?
And what about Theodore Dreiser’s George Hurstwood, in Sister Carrie, who is both an adulterer and a thief? He feels compelled to steal from the safe of the company he works for so he can run away from his stultifying bourgeois life and his cold and materialistic wife, Julia, and find a life of love with the vital, fresh-faced Carrie Meeber. Hurstwood winds up a lost vagrant, but the point is that we feel empathy for him as we do for Willa Cather’s effeminate and foppish Paul in her classic story “Paul’s Case,” the story of a young boy who, like Hurstwood, is driven to steal. Paul wants to escape the dull, severe Calvinism of his boyhood home and the neighborhood with the odd Shakespearean name of Cordelia Street, where all the boys are brought up to be the same. Paul knows he is different. He, too, meets a terrible fate, throwing himself in front of an oncoming train rather than going back to the intolerable psychological oppression of his school and Cordelia Street and his motherless home. The real questions we must ask about transgressions such as adultery and theft are: when should empathy override the absoluteness of the commandments, and when should mercy override justice?
Literary characters helped subvert my sense that the commandments were absolute and provided me with a greater understanding of the wide and complex range of humanity and its frailties. This in turn increased my empathy, which I was obliged to fold into my evolving personal code. Empathy did not mean allowing, or making ready excuses for, moral transgressions, but it did mean one had to determine the nature of transgressions and their often moral complexity. One had to wrestle with what was right and what was not — as well as with the more formidable moral question of good and evil.
Hester Prynne, for example, is the adulterous wife of Roger Chillingworth in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter, and Chillingworth is a man whom Hawthorne makes us see as evil. Hester, whom Hawthorne compares to the before-her-time Puritan-era feminist and banished heretic Anne Hutchinson, is drawn into adultery with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who tells her their adultery has a sanctity of its own. It might be difficult, as D. H. Lawrence has suggested, to imagine those two at it in the woods, because Dimmesdale is so fraught with pained asceticism. But given Roger Chillingworth’s evil nature and Hester’s humanity and vitality, one understands her violation of the commandment that ultimately condemns her to wear the ignominious letter.
We realize that Hawthorne is dramatizing in The Scarlet Letter the shocking and heretical notion that people are in wretched and abusive marriages that make them capable of falling in love with, or making love with, others. There is also, in the character of Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s idea of the negative path, of Hester personally gaining greater empathy and a more profound understanding of her own humanity and the humanity of others because of her violation of the commandment and the punishment she endures. She becomes nobler than all the religious Puritans who condemn her and turn her into a pariah.
As long as marriage exists, adultery will be seen as a sin, because marriage, like the Ten Commandments, has been tied to belief in God, even though marriage wasn’t much of a religious phenomenon before Christendom, and specifically Catholicism, linked it to the church and made it a sacrament. According to feminist scholar Marilyn Yalom, the Greeks and the Hebrews saw marriage as a contract, similar to a promissory note today, with concomitant civil or financial consequences if broken. Yalom says marriage had the imprimatur of the gods in ancient Greece and Rome but was by no means an irreversible affair since divorce was permitted in the ancient world and even common in Rome.
In a number of states in this country, including New York and Florida, adultery and physical cruelty were for many years the only grounds for divorce. Now adultery, in the non-sharia West, appears nearly commonplace. A long-running syndicated reality television show called Cheaters catches the unfaithful, both married and unmarried, with hidden cameras, and the episodes turn into confrontations between the cuckolded and the faithless. And it seems as if almost every day some political figure, too, is exposed as an adulterer. These would-be public servants may aspire to nobler ideals, but they succumb to transgression, the word adopted by Tiger Woods following his notorious car accident that apparently was tied to an argument with his wife over his adultery.
Even popular attitudes toward adultery have changed with the times, as television and film no longer make it de rigueur for an adulterer, especially a woman, to wind up dead. And in the real world, both the Prince of Wales and John McCain had adulterous relationships without ever being much stigmatized for it. Britain has become, for the most part, a nation of nonworshippers, and morality in the United States has changed exponentially despite the high percentage of those who call themselves religious. Ronald Reagan was the first