The Wisdom of the All Seeing Eye
Humans require both humility and imagination to live a moral life
Bind them as a sign upon your hand and as a symbol between your eyes. Write them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates. - Deuteronomy 6:8-9
To George Carlin, one of religion’s chief sins was convincing people “that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do” and maintains “a list of ten things he does not want you to do” at the threat of sending you to a place where you will “suffer and burn and scream and choke and cry forever.” The punchline: “He loves you and he needs money.”
Now, Carlin’s claim about “an invisible man” was a misdirection. As the Rambam notes in his great compendium of Biblical law,
Were the Creator to have body and form, He would have limitation and definition, because it is impossible for a body not to be limited. And any entity which itself is limited and defined [possesses] only limited and defined power. Since our God, blessed be His name, possesses unlimited power, as evidenced by the continuous revolution of the sphere, we see that His power is not the power of a body. Since He is not a body, the circumstances associated with bodies that produce division and separation are not relevant to Him.1
And the Ten Precepts2 include four things you are supposed to do, not only things you are not allowed to do. Carlin’s point nevertheless has some teeth. In his particular way, Carlin said that there are certain fantastical things that Biblical religion asks you to believe and then to do as a result of those beliefs, with dramatic consequences promised either for compliance or misbehavior.
Of these, few are as fantastical as the commandments to wear boxes and strings and to hang a scroll on your doorpost. For there are many more than ten things that Gods tells us to do in the Bible, and these include the command to each day wrap leather straps attached to leather boxes around our arms and heads. Inside those leather boxes are handwritten scrolls of portions of the Bible bound, as the text says, “as a sign on your hand and as a symbol between your eyes.”
Yehuda HaNasi once said, “Apply your mind to three things and you will not come into the clutches of sin: know what there is above you an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your deeds are written in a book.” This does not mean that God literally has a physical eye and ear, or that He writes in a physical book, for no such statement about His corporeality, as Rambam noted, can be made. We are though meant to imagine that such an eye exists because of the power of that image to positively influence our behavior. Means such as this are the only way an intelligent ape – torn between his physical and spiritual selves - can avoid a deviation from the correct path.
So too then can we say the same of the seemingly odd commandments of hanging scrolls on doorposts and wearing leather boxes and hanging threads. It is easy to ask why tie a leather box to your arm, or wear a shirt with tassels hanging from its corners. Harder is to know that he who wishes to walk a straight path needs every reminder he can acquire to keep him on that path, for the temptations to deviate are powerful, ever present, and baked into our animal nature.
It is proper then that God granted us physical commandments – the wrapping of leather straps on our bodies, the wearing of cotton fringes forever visible on our thighs and that pass easily through our fingers, the placing of a reminder on every doorpost of our house – that take advantage of our physical temptations to remind us of the moral path.
It is then the very physicality of these commandments that is their wisdom. For it is their physical nature that makes them impossible to ignore. “And you will see them and remember then, all of the commands of God.”3 Thousands are the things that pass each day through a person’s mind.4 But singular – and hard to ignore and forget - are those that we feel, see, and touch.
Here then is the great error of the adolescent sophistication (at least in matters divine) of someone like George Carlin. In believing that the good is both easy to know and to remember, and therefore that it serves no purpose to imagine an eye that sees all, he trades wisdom for foolishness.
“Precept” as opposed to “Commandment” was Adin Steinsaltz’s preferred English translation of the statements in the Decalogue. They are referred to in the text itself as דְּבָרִֽים which is usually translated into English as words, utterances, sayings, or the like.
Numbers 15:39
According to the Rambam (Berachot 5:1) the sages would “pause for an hour before prayer in order to calm their minds and quiet their thoughts.”