Rod Dreher
over at Jewish World Review has a review of a book called,
"Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore The Ten Commandments at Our Peril." The title of the book sums up what it's about. It sounds like a book that would be worth delving into:
Another dangerous book this summer, this one for grown-ups, is David Klinghoffer's marvelously lucid Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore The Ten Commandments at Our Peril. It weaves theological insight with the author's reflections on living in a society (ours, alas) that has cast off the Decalogue's authority.
Mr. Klinghoffer is a religious Jew, but his argument is as sociological as it is theological. The Ten Commandments are far more than a list of taboos, Mr. Klinghoffer explains. They reveal what it means to live a fully human life, both as individuals and in community — and as commandments (not suggestions), they provide us with the psychological means of doing so.
That is, the justice of the commandments is guaranteed by the G-d who issued them — an all-powerful being who will judge individuals and cultures by these laws. The old-fashioned phrase "the fear of the Lord" meant precisely the respect men owed to G-d and his laws — a respect that, properly understood, bound their consciences and compelled their obedience.
In his review, he compares
"Shattered Tablets" with another book,
"The Dangerous Book for Boys." One chapter in
"Dangerous" is dedicated to the decalogue being, somehow, dangerous. Indeed, it is. It is dangerous to those who see themselves as the sole arbiters of what is "moral" and "virtuous". Those who cry "tolerance!!" while at the same time attempting to silence the church; those who believe that being friends with the world is paramount to humbling oneself before a holy GOD, and submitting to His commands (see
1st John 2:15-17). Dreher eloquates:
The Decalogue, dangerous? The commandments certainly are regarded as hazardous by the Irritable-American community, which successfully petitions the courts to banish them from public life. At least these stalwart secularists give the Decalogue its due; most of us admire the Ten Commandments just enough to avoid taking them seriously. If we grasped how radical they truly are, we'd find them an offensive stumbling block to us middle-class moderns, who live in a rebellious age characterized by sociologist Daniel Bell as "the rejection of a revealed order, or natural order, and the substitution of the ego, the self, as the lodestar of consciousness."
We have lost the fear of the Lord — and the absence of 'holy fear' makes us terrors unto ourselves and one another. Why? Because we know what humans who recognize no authority but themselves are capable of.
Amen, and Amen.
