Book review: Shattered Tablets, by David Klinghoffer

Your average faithful Christian typically has an interest in seeing the Jewish perspective on religious issues, and for obvious reasons: the Christian religion springs from Judaism. Speaking for myself, I have found that the discovery of a Jewish point of view is almost always stimulating for my own faith. It was with this in mind that I eagerly read Shattered Tablets: Why we ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril, by David Klinghoffer. Mr. Klinghoffer is a practicing Jew, and the Ten Commandments form (of course) an important part of our common spiritual heritage; as well, he openly acknowledges the importance of that heritage for the world, and the role Christians have to play in preserving it. I looked forward to gleaning some new spiritual insights.

Well, I got them, and a whole lot more. And that, honestly, was the problem.

From the point of view of *spiritual* insights, I enjoyed tremendously how Mr. Klinghoffer would reach into the rich rabbinical tradition to elucidate particular points. For example, he repeatedly emphasizes the ancient tradition that the first five commandments can be read in parallel with the second five, such that commandment #1 is directly linked with commandment #6, #2 with #7, and so on. The Ten Commandments therefore become not just a set of laws that direct the love of God and neighbour, but also a window into the very dynamics of those laws, and particularly how they *connect* the love of God and neighbour in an organic whole. This insight is particularly important for Mr. Klinghoffer’s book, because his basic argument is that we can’t truly have the love of neighbour (the second set of five) without a proper relationship with God (governed by the first set of five). From his point of view, the idea that love of neighbour is possible without God is simply an absurd secularist pipe-dream. His book is meant to warn against such fantasies.

While these spiritual insights were welcome, however, I found that the book also suffered from some serious flaws. It has a maddening lack of footnotes, such that it is impossible to verify his claims regarding what Rabbi so-and-so might have said centuries ago while commenting on such-and-such. It also tends to toss out little “factoid bombs”: statements that appear to be self-evident truths, but which are not, and which tend to inflame the passions rather than nourish the intellect. For example, he spends a paragraph “proving” that Muslims and Jews/Christians don’t worship the same God. That is a bold and potentially incendiary claim, and it requires a great deal of treatment to tackle properly, but one gets the impression that the answer is simply self-evident for Mr. Klinghoffer and so should be for everyone else.

It is these sorts of things that lead me, sadly, to my most drastic conclusion regarding this book: that it is not really a work of theology, but of ideology presented using theological language. That Mr. Klinghoffer has an axe to grind (well, several actually) with many currents of post-modern culture is quite obvious in the book. What is more subtle is how he grinds those particular axes. Mr. Klinghoffer, for example, carefully presents examples of the worst excesses of secular culture in such a way as to provoke, rather than merely inform. Yes, he is telling it “like it is”, but at the same time his style of presentation tells me he is also trying to get people upset and worked up. In other words, there is as much a propaganda goal here as an intellectual goal, and that just smells wrong to me. As a Canadian, for example, a lot of the stuff he was presenting as “just terrible” really didn’t bother me that much: is it really necessary, for example, to attempt demonstrate that a push for universal health care is actually a plot to undermine the authority of the Ten Commandments? Funny, nobody sent us the memo on that here in Canada, and we are generally quite happy with the way things are thank you very much.

The bottom line? While there are many passages that are very thought-provoking, both on a spiritual level and on the level of social critique, the book suffers from a confusion between real theology and an attempt to push an ideology. Just read his passages on the definition of “true” masculinity, or his apologia for the good of nepotism (?!), or the recommendations for unbridled capitalism, and you will see what I mean. The stretch between the Ten Commandments and his own conclusions is sometimes simply to broad. And so, while I do not condemn this book, I can only offer it faint praise — a damning indictment in itself, I suppose. My rating: C-.