Interpreting the Commandments

Understanding the commandments is practically important to avoid unnecessary guilt when someone sees others observing them strictly. Torah’s recommendations are practical, natural, and easy to follow: no need to look for loopholes. Laborious interpretation makes them unrealizable, like the prohibition of killing instead of murder, or hypocritical, like having goyyim children work in Jewish houses on the Sabbath, though no foreigner may work in Jewish homes on that day. Interpretation is arrogant, since elucidation requires reading the mind of the one who wrote the book. Torah speaks a language of man, and that language is Hebrew. The depth of meaning is lost in translation.
There is little need to dwell on the first commandment. What could be clearer than the unity of God? But look deeper and you will see society competing for your unconditional allegiance and replacing the Mosaic law with human codices. The demands to worship the state come clad in the guise of national interest. People who lose religion wander around bowing to anything superficially suitable: stones in India, communism in Russia, movie stars in America. Universities opened on Sabbath, judges requiring an oath on the New Testament, sport events where crowds stand motionless listening to a national anthem—all whisper to forget religion. Secular requirements contradicting Jewishness need not be discarded, just not followed wholeheartedly. Remember your primary allegiance.
The second commandment does not prohibit images; it prohibits treating any object, a book of scripture, a flag, as a god by swearing by it or dying for it, for example.

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