Leon Kass on the Ten Commandments

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2017

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The revelation at Sinai was central to the transformation of the people of Israel into a nation. Fresh from their Exodus from Egypt, at the foot of that mountain, a nation of slaves heard the Lord Himself pronounce His law—His “Ten Commandments”—prescribing proper conduct toward God and man. It would be hard to overstate the influence of the Decalogue in the history of West. Even in our increasingly post-Christian age, the Ten Commandments remain a potent cultural symbol. Yet, for all this familiarity, their true significance remains elusive.

In 2013, Leon Kass—one of America’s deepest thinkers—sought to shed light on how the Ten Commandments ought to be understood. Published as Mosaic’s inaugural essay, “The Ten Commandments: Why the Decalogue Matters” analyzes the meaning of each Divine command, placing it in the context of the Bible as a whole as well as the permanent conditions of human nature.

In this Tikvah Podcast, Professor Kass joins Jonathan Silver for a reconsideration of this important piece of commentary. In a conversation that looks back toward creation and forward to the civic character of the modern Jewish State, Kass and Silver take a deep dive into the first five commandments and their meaning. Their wide-ranging discussion touches on the nature of God’s covenant with Israel, man’s relationship with nature, and the indispensable role of the family in the life of the people of Israel.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas.
0:11.4	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
0:13.3	If you like listening to our podcast, I invite you to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher,
0:17.7	and I hope you'll leave us a rating and a review.
0:19.5	If you want to learn more
0:20.8	about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org, follow us on Twitter
0:26.0	at Tikva Fund, or like us on Facebook. My guest today is Dr. Leon Cass, the Addy Clark
0:32.0	Harding Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He holds the Madden Jewett Chair at the
0:37.2	American Enterprise Institute.
0:39.3	From 2001 to 2005, Dr. Cass chaired, the President's Council on Bioethics.
0:45.3	Among his many books is, in my view, one of the great modern commentaries on the Book of Genesis.
0:50.3	The Beginning of Wisdom was published in 2003. Today we're going to discuss an early foray into the beginning of wisdom was published in 2003.
0:54.2	Today we're going to discuss an early foray into the book of Exodus.
0:58.6	His essay, The Ten Commandments, Why the Decalogue Matters, was published in Mosaic in 2013.
1:04.4	To understand what the Ten Commandments mean and why they matter, it's a pleasure to welcome
1:08.4	Dr. Cass to the podcast.
1:10.2	Dr. Cass, why don't you set the scene for us?
1:13.3	God offers this new way of life in the form of ten sayings, ten big things that should
1:20.8	structure our relation with God himself and with one another.
1:25.1	Do you read something meaningful, significant in the form, in the way
1:29.2	in which he presents them in the first place? Well, I mean, first one should say these statements
1:37.2	pronounced by God himself against the background of a tumultuous and spectacular eruption on the mountain,
	...

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