For Easter weekend — and the end of Passover! — stories of people struggling to follow the Ten Commandments. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Host Ira Glass reads from the Ten Commandments. Not the original Ten Commandments, but some of the newer, lesser-known ones. There's the Miner's Ten Commandments of 1853, the Ten Commandments of Umpiring, and the Ten Commandments for Math Teachers — just to name a few. (4 minutes)Commandments One, Two and Three: As a boy in religious school, Shalom Auslander is informed that his name, Shalom, is one of the names of God, and so he must be very careful not to take his own name in vain. (9 minutes)Commandment Four: Six houses of worship in six different cities, each with its own way of honoring the Sabbath. (3 minutes)Commandment Five: When Jack Hitt was 11, he did the worst thing his father could have imagined. Neither Jack nor his four siblings will ever forget the punishment. (6 minutes)Commandment Six: Alex Blumberg talks to Lt. Col. Lyn Brown, an Army Reserve chaplain who served two tours in Iraq. Brown talks about what "thou shalt not kill" means to soldiers on the battlefield. (6 minutes)Commandment Seven: In the book of Matthew, Jesus says that looking lustfully at a woman is like committing adultery in your heart. Contributor David Dickerson was raised as an evangelical Christian, and for many years tried not to have a single lustful thought. (9 minutes)Commandment Eight: Ira talks to a waiter named Hassan at Liebman's Deli in the Bronx about some audacious thefts he's witnessed in his years in the restaurant business. (3 minutes)Commandment Nine: Chaya Lipschutz wanted to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger. But to save a stranger's life, she had to break the commandment against lying. And the person she had to lie to was her mother. Chaya talked to Sarah Koenig. (8 minutes)Commandment Ten: Ira talks to seventh-graders about the things they covet most. (4 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Chapter 1: What are some unconventional versions of the Ten Commandments?
So in 1853, during the California gold rush, a leafleteer out west published the Ten Commandments for gold miners who'd come out to prospect. Commandment number four. Commandment four in the traditional Ten Commandments tells you to observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Commandment number four reads like this.
Thou shalt not remember what thy friends do at home on the Sabbath day, lest the remembrance may not compare favorably with what thou doest here.
For commandment number eight, the commandment about stealing in the traditional commandments, commandment eight, thou shalt not steal a pick or a shovel or a pan from thy fellow miner or take away his tools without his leave, nor return them broken, nor remove his stake to enlarge thy claim, nor pan out gold from his riffle box.
There's the Ten Commandments of Umpiring written in 1949 by the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Commandment number one, keep your eye on the ball. Four different commandments on this list are basically about not getting mad at the players. There are the Ten Commandments of Tractor Safety. Number one, know your tractor, its implements, and how they work.
The Ten Commandments of Paris Dining, assembled by Fodor's Travel Guides, which include number two, thou shalt not be too familiar with a waiter. Don't expect to hear him. My name is Gaston, and I will be your server tonight. Also number eight, thou shalt not assume that the customer is always right. And number ten, thou shalt never use the term doggy bag. Let's see what else.
Ten commandments of cell phone etiquette. Number four, thou shalt not wear more than two wireless devices on thy belt. Ten commandments of sports betting. The ten commandments of protecting your million-dollar idea. The ten commandments of good historical writing. My favorite, number ten, thou shalt write consistently in the past tense. Interesting to think that you would need that.
The ten commandments of bilingual blogs. The ten commandments of pastors leaving the congregation. Ten commandments of working in a hostile environment. The Ten Commandments for Communication with People with Disabilities. This includes a very helpful. Number six, don't lean on a person's wheelchair.
Or number ten, don't be embarrassed or freak out if you accidentally use a common phrase like, see you later with somebody you can't see. Or did you hear about that with somebody you can't hear? The Ten Commandments of Being a Math Teacher. These actually reveal a lot about the internal life of being a math teacher. Number one, thou shalt recognize that some students fear and dislike math.
And be compassionate. And then there's, along this, it's basically different ways to encourage the math teacher to keep patiently explaining over and over in different ways things until your students understand them. And then at the end of that list, there's the rather mournful number 10. Though they may at times seem few, thou shalt count thy blessings.
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Chapter 2: How did Shalom Auslander learn about the sacredness of his name?
Elie said that his big brother said that Rabbi Breyer once broke a student's nose by slapping the student's face. Dov said that his big brother said that Rabbi Breyer had once broken a student's arm when he was dragging the student from the room for talking during prayers. Rabbi Breyer was the scariest rabbi in the whole yeshiva. © BF-WATCH TV 2021
And when, at the end of the first test, at the end of the first week, Rabbi Breyer shouted, pencils down, it was as if the commandment had come from God himself. At recess, we stood huddled together on the concrete slab beside the door, afraid to play, worried that Breyer was somewhere watching. Avi and Ellie started flipping baseball cards.
Flipping cards is considered gambling, which is forbidden, so we were supposed to return the cards to each other at the end of recess. Nobody ever did. Ellie won a large stack of cards from Avi, and I flipped Ellie next. I lost an old Willie Randolph, an afraid Lou Piniella, but I won a mint Carl Yastrzemski, whom I was pretty sure was Jewish. I'd been trying to win him for months.
The bell rang and everyone headed glumly back to class, where we sat quietly at our desks, waiting for Rabbi Breyer to return. I took out my Kali Yastremski, turned it over, and carefully wrote my name across the back. I didn't want to lose him and didn't plan on flipping him. "'Name of the Creator!' Rabbi Breyer shouted.
I jumped and turned to find him standing beside me, his face red, his furious finger pointing at the baseball card on my desk." Name of the creator, he shouted again. He grabbed the card from my desk. Name of the creator? I was confused. Yaz? Rabbi Breyer slapped my hand, grabbed me by the ear, and led me to the head of the classroom. He held Yastrzemski over his head and shook him.
This, he declared loudly, must never be thrown away. It must never touch the ground. It must never be covered. Then Rabbi Breyer waved the card in my face and told me that my name was the same name as God's, and I must never write it again. The Jewish God has 72 names, and even though I was only eight years old, I already knew a lot of them. There was Adonai, there was Yahweh, there was Elohim.
There was He who was full of mercy, He who was quick to anger, the Holy Spirit, the Divine Presence, the Rock, the Savior, and now, somewhere near the bottom of the list, there was Shalom. Peace. My name.
My name.
Rabbi Breyer handed me the baseball card and told me to take it to the prayer hall upstairs and immediately put it in the Shamos box. Shamos means names, and it was the place where any old or unusable names of God are left to be discarded. Pages from prayer books, crumbling Talmuds, old Torah scrolls, and, from now on, anything I wrote my name on.
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Chapter 3: How do different faiths and communities observe the Sabbath?
Such as?
Well, you know, should we be here? Should we be killing people?
Do you think that you have a different understanding of this particular commandment about the fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill? Do you feel like you have a different understanding of it after serving in Iraq than perhaps somebody who didn't serve?
Um, I think I'm much more hesitant about having a definite opinion about who should die. Um, just seeing the brutality and the, uh, you know, people's people have got body parts missing or, I mean, there's big holes, there's, um, you know, they died a violent death and it's not pretty, man. It just doesn't seem normal, you know, which it isn't. Um,
But also even with the Iraqi culture that there were times that people just said, well, you know, whatever group it was they didn't agree with, they just said, you know, kill them all. You know, and I was going, you know, these are people, you know. And I didn't like that attitude.
And then I was seeing it even among, you know, the armed forces that there was people that just would just kind of say, well, we just need to kill them all and then that'll take care of it. And I was going, whoa. You know, who nominated you to be God, you know? You know, I just... We all have a tendency to interpret the Ten Commandments in a way that's convenient for us.
You know, there's interpretation of thou shalt not murder. It shouldn't be a premeditated killing. It has nothing to do with war, you know, those kinds of things. But it just makes me... I'm looking at it as a principle that God says you need to value life and don't take it lightly. Just don't condemn people to death just because that's easy to do. You've got to stop and think about it seriously.
This is something that God himself doesn't take lightly.
Army Reserve Chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Brown talking with Alex Bloomberg back in 2007. Brown died in 2008. Coming up, adultery, thievery, lying, envy. No, it is not an afternoon of daytime TV. It is the last four commandments. We have one story for each of them. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass.
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