Do Not Covet
Friday night, February 6, 2015
Congregation B’nai B’rith Santa Barbara, CA
I was so happy to learn that the people who used to compile Newsweek’s annual list of The Fifty Most influential Rabbis decided last year to discontinue the tradition. You would think that with all the attention I get around here, I would not need the ego boost. But every year when that list came out, it just rubbed an emotional sore spot. Especially when friends of mine from school showed up on the list. Especially when my younger sister showed up on the list! So I was glad when they announced that they were discontinuing the list….although it turns out that now there are new lists: The Jewish Daily Forward’s “America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis” and My Jewish Learning’s “Top Rabbis.”
It looks like I will continue to be reminded that the tenth and last of the Ten Commandments is still as relevant as it was when God spoke it to Moses over three thousand years ago: lo tachmod. You shall not covet your fellow’s house. You shall not covet your fellow’s wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, nor anything that belongs to your fellow. Of course, God did not need to mention to Moses coveting being on the list of Top Rabbis, since Moses has made that list every year, forever!
Jews all around the world read the Ten Commandments from the Torah tomorrow morning, as we have every year at this season for more than two thousand years. And one question remains unanswered about that tenth commandment: You shall not covet. Can the Torah really command us not to feel something? The other commandments all speak to behavior: do not murder. Do not steal. Rest on the Sabbath. Do not sleep with another person’s spouse. These are all behaviors which we expect ourselves and others to control. But envy is an emotion; bubbling up at times unexpectedly and uncontrollably. We might wish we did not feel envy….but we either do or we do not. You can legislate actions, but can you legislate feelings?
It is an old question and it is alive today. What shall we do with our feelings? And specifically, what shall we do with powerful emotions that we wish we were not feeling?
When Cain saw that God had accepted his brother’s offering but had rejected his, Cain was filled with rage and his face fell. And God said to Cain “Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen?” Our God can be so dense sometimes! What was Cain supposed to do with his feelings of rejection, and anger, and intense envy?
When Joseph’s father gave him a coat of many colors, just in case Joseph’s brothers did not already know that their father loved Joseph more than all the rest of them, what were they, Joseph’s brothers, supposed to do with their envy and their hatred?
And when we feel strong feelings….of attraction for someone who is off limits to us, or of envy when we walk into a beautiful home, or of rejection by our parent, or rejection by the compilers of the Top Rabbis list, or rejection by God…as Cain felt when the world and the human race were still so young. What should we do with our feelings? In the Ten Commandments the voice of God commands: You shall not covet. So, how exactly?
In the 12th century, a Rabbi named Abraham ibn Ezra was born in Spain and eventually moved to live in Paris and wrote a commentary on the entire Torah. And on this commandment, ibn Ezra offered the following:
“Many people have wondered about this commandment, how can it be that a man will not desire in his heart that which is desirable to his eyes? And now I shall give you a parable. You know that a simple peasant who is of sound mind, who sees a beautiful daughter of the king, will not desire her in his heart, to lie with her. For he knows that this is impossible. This peasant is not insane, desiring wings to fly in the sky, for this is impossible. It is the same as not wanting to sleep with his mother, even though she is beautiful, because he has been trained from earliest childhood to know that this is forbidden. Thus every enlightened person must come to understand that since God has forbidden his neighbor’s wife to him, she will be more unattainable to him than the king’s daughter in the mind of the peasant. And so he will be happy with what he has received, and not allow his heart to desire or lust after that which is not his.”
Ibn Ezra, in this famous comment, takes a position.
In fact, he says, we do control our desires. As amazing as it would be to fly, we really do not long for that to happen. As beautiful or handsome as we find our celebrities….fill in the blank for yourself (Scarlett Johanson, Matt Damon, Jennifer Lawrence, Daniel Craig….) normal people, mature adults of sound mind, don’t feel ourselves actually desiring to sleep with them. And ibn Ezra even brings up our own mother or father! Oedipal impulses notwithstanding, we ordinary people of sound mind do not have difficulty controlling those feelings. Ibn Ezra says “we train ourselves. We parents help our children learn what feelings are ok to feel. And when we become adult, we take responsibility not just for our actions….but for our own inner life as well.”
How do we do that?
Like everyone here, there have been times in my life when I have felt completely powerless to control my emotions. Anger, lust, envy, anxiety, jealousy, rejection, insult. Many of the most memorable moments in my life....some of which I would love to forget,… have been moments in which my emotions rose up and took over my whole being. And getting older, I have slowly begun to learn what helps.
Mindfulness meditation helps. After the shootings in Isla Vista last spring, there was an interfaith service at UCSB, in which one religious leader after another spoke. The one that touched me deeply, the one who actually comforted and created some peace in the midst of that devastating emotional storm, was the young Buddhist woman, a graduate student, who lead the crowd in a simple loving kindness meditation. Here in this sanctuary every Thursday morning, Renee leads a group of us through a similar meditation, in which we are learning that we can choose, we can take responsibility for our inner life.
Prayer helps. Stopping early in the morning, or in the evening, to press the emotional “reset” button in our hearts, helps us to choose our inner life.
And here we are practicing our ancient Jewish path to peace: the path of Shabbat. The practice of Shabbat is a set of behaviors, of actions, but the purpose of this practice I believe is to help us take responsibility for our inner life. By stopping our doing, by not working, not shopping, not building, not acquiring…week after week, we slowly learn that what we have is enough.
We will always be human, and subject to emotional storms and inner battles with anger, desire and hurt. But Shabbat can help us enter a world, for just a while, where there is no need to desire or to covet anything or anyone that God has not already given us. Shabbat Shalom.