Your assignment was to read Exodus 20:7 and
13, and Deuteronomy 5:11 and 17.
In case you don’t
remember the chapter numbers, we are now back in the Big Ten and I am about to
blow up another urban legend.
Commandment 5
about taking the Lord’s name in vain is NOT about cursing. The rabbis clarified that it means making a
vow about something impossible. If you
make a neder performance oath that you will fly over a house just by flapping
your arms, that is impossible. The
rabbis call it an oath in vain. Likewise
if you made a neder oath that you saw a Tyrannosaurus rex yesterday walking
down the main drag of your town, that is also an oath in vain.
What’s more, this commandment is about
praying for things that can’t happen without a disruption in the laws of
nature. The classic description is, if a
man finds out his wife is pregnant and prays that the child is a boy, that is a
vain prayer. Before modern pregnancy
tests, a woman usually didn’t know if she was pregnant until about the third
month. But the rabbis knew that by that
time, the gender of the child has already been determined. So it’s a vain prayer. Likewise, according to the classical
description, if you come home from a trip and hear loud lamentation, it’s a
vain prayer to pray that it doesn’t affect your family.
That is a limitation on free speech and
Jewish law could sanction people for this after due process.
Commandment 9 is not about lying in
general. It is about false testimony in
court. You already saw that courts could
punish false testimony.
When Jews think of lying in general,
they most often think of Leviticus 19:14 which says not to curse the deaf and
not to put a stumbling block in the path of the blind. The first part of the verse is bringing up
Gd’s name in vain; a curse isn’t valid without the Lord’s name in it, and the
deaf person can’t hear it, so the curse is in vain.
But the second part of the verse grows
in importance in Jewish law, to the point where the rabbis defined it to mean
doing or saying anything that takes advantage of a handicap, including lack of
knowledge. That is the fundamental
aspect of lying: trying to get away with saying something false on the
assumption that the other person will think it is true.
Jewish law does not protect cursing
under its free speech rights, and that gets into an important area of any legal
code so I will save it for next time.
For now, read Exodus 22:27 and 23:1-3, also Exodus 23:6-10 and Leviticus19:15-16.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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