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| Monday, September 3, 2007 |
The Bookshelf: The Ten
This is part of our Sep/Oct 2007 issue.
David Klinghoffer thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But with a little help from a couple stone tablets, we have the power to turn things around.
David Klinghoffer, a fair-haired, boyish, 40-something intellectual, who is an author, husband and father of five is hyper vigilant as he makes his way from the bus each day to his Third and Pine Street offices at the Discovery Institute in the heart of Seattle's increasingly dense and dangerous downtown grid.
Although the drug dealers, junkies, and prostitutes along his route are likely oblivious to him, he has been watching them. They are the poster children -- Exhibit A -- prima facie evidence that American society is in serious decline, adrift without its divine blueprint -- the Ten Commandments.
Klinghoffer's urban neighbors also inhabit the first chapter of his latest book, Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril. In it, Klinghoffer "calls out" secular Seattleites and other moral relativists across America, including many in the highest ranks of Jewish leadership, who, he writes, are arguably much worse, unabashedly rejecting God himself.
As I make my way to his office on the 14th floor, I am greeted by a gracious and welcoming guy sporting a slightly disheveled and casual collegiate look marked by an untucked blue and white-striped cotton shirt and well-faded Levis. His "ensemble" is offset by a yarmulke affixed to the top of his head, a look that is familiar to many a yeshiva boy.
It reveals Klinghoffer's commitment and conversion to Orthodox Judaism.
Having grown up in a "very sweet" but "completely vacuous" Reformed Jewish temple in San Pedro, Calif., Klinghoffer was born to non-Jewish parents and adopted into a casually Jewish family. He would later choose Orthodoxy. His first book, The Lord Will Gather Me In, is a memoir about his transition to observant Judaism.
In his new book, he is hoping to capture the attention of "swing" readers, he tells me -- those people who have not yet decided if there is a God. "My main point in Shattered Tablets is that ultimately, you can't have a moral, ethical society without God and societies that attempt to disentangle themselves from faith ultimately fail," he says, getting very assertive in a way that you don't see coming. "Our culture is attempting to do just that."
Klinghoffer graduated from Brown University in 1987. After working at the National Review for 10 years and the Washington Times for two, he moved to Mercer Island, Wash., a mostly affluent suburb-turned-city, just east of Seattle. For the last year and a half, he has been a senior fellow in the Discovery Institute's Program on Religion, Liberty & Public Life.
In Shattered Tablets, Klinghoffer tours the reader through Seattle's moral milieu and the country as a whole. He explains how the first five commandments guide human relations, which, if disregarded, play out rather poorly in the second five commandments. "I'm not a rabbi, I'm a journalist, and I'm very far from being any sort of a moral exemplar," Klinghoffer admits. "But I try to use the insights of the Torah to help explain it to people who are curious and who are interested."
In today's atmosphere of materialism, a worldview that says "this is all there is," it is impossible to explain why some things are right and some things are wrong, he writes.
"We're in the very early stages of societies attempting to sever themselves from faith and we don't yet know what the ultimate outcome of that will be, but the Ten Commandments makes the prediction that it will be disastrous," he says. "It's not just a set of rules that keeps people in line. In the simplest terms, it's an answer to the question, 'Why does anything matter?'"
In this would-be cultural war, Jews could play a critical role if they would only step up and be a "nation of priests" as God intends, Klinghoffer explains, because the deep levels of meaning hidden in the Decalogue, according to Jewish rabbinical teaching, cannot be fully understood by those outside of the Jewish faith.
"It's a locked tradition to which Jews hold the key," explains Klinghoffer. "Christians don't have access to the deepest levels of meaning in the Ten Commandments without the Jewish tradition. That's why Christians need Jews and many Christians today in America understand that and would agree with it."
Instead, he writes, unrepentant anti-faith Jewish intellectuals like atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and antitheist Christopher Hitchens are paraded on cable news networks. They are Jewish by birth but have no reverence for God, says Klinghoffer.
"They're absolutely contemptuous of the Hebrew Bible," he adds. "These Jews will protest any negative depiction of Israel, we're all over that, but if the God of Israel is depicted in the most hateful, false, simplistic terms, than we've got no problem with that. That's fine. Not a peep from the Jewish community. Nothing."
As he sees it, the moral relativity that has invaded everyday American life can't
possibly hold up for very long. The next step is barbarism, tyranny, or religious revival.
"If the Torah is a fraud, if the Torah is not from God, then why on earth identify yourself as a Jew? For Jews it's the core."
-- Article by Janis Siegel -- a freelance journalist living in Seattle, Washington. Ms. Siegel often writes on religious issues and interfaith relations. / Photo by Steve Shay.
This is part of our Sep/Oct 2007 issue.
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