332: The Ten Commandments
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A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. So in 1853, during the California gold rush, a leafleteer out west published the Ten Commandments for gold miners who'd come out to prospect. Commandment number four. Commandment four in the traditional Ten Commandments tells you to observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Commandment number four reads like this. Thou shalt not remember what thy friends do at home on the Sabbath day, lest the remembrance may not compare favorably with what thou doest hereafter.

For commandment number eight, the commandment about stealing in the traditional commandments. Commandment eight, thou shalt not steal a pick or a shovel or a pan from thy fellow miner or take away his tools without his leave, nor return them broken, nor remove his stake to enlarge thy claim, nor pan out gold from his riffle box. There's the Ten Commandments of Umpiring written in 1949 by the commissioner of Major League Baseball. Commandment number one, keep your eye on the ball. Four different commandments on this list are basically about not getting mad at the players.

There are the Ten Commandments of Tractor Safety. Number one, know your tractor, its implements, and how they work. The Ten Commandments of Paris Dining, as said by Fodor's Travel Guides, which include number two, thou shalt not be too familiar with a waiter. Don't expect to hear, my name is Gaston, and I will be your server tonight. Also number eight, thou shalt not assume that the customer is always right. And number ten, thou shalt never use the term doggy bag. Let's see what else.

The Ten Commandments of Cell Phone Etiquette. Number four, thou shalt not wear more than two wireless devices on thy belt. The Ten Commandments of Sports Betting. The Ten Commandments of Protecting Your Million Dollar Idea. The Ten Commandments of Good Historical Writing. My favorite, number ten, thou shalt write consistently in the past tense. Interesting to think that you would need that. The Ten Commandments of Bilingual Blogs. The Ten Commandments of Pastors Leaving the Congregation. Ten Commandments of Working in a Hostile Environment.

The Ten Commandments for communication with people with disabilities. This includes a very helpful. Number six, don't lean on a person's wheelchair. Or number ten, don't be embarrassed or freak out if you accidentally use a common phrase like, see you later with somebody you can't see. Or did you hear about that with somebody you can't hear? The Ten Commandments of being a math teacher. These actually reveal a lot about the internal life of being a math teacher. Number one, thou shalt recognize that some students fear and dislike math and be compassionate. And then there's, um,

Along this, it's basically different ways to encourage the math teacher to keep patiently explaining over and over in different ways things until your students understand them. And then at the end of that list, there's the rather mournful number 10. Though they may at times seem few, thou shalt count thy blessings. Then, of course, as Peaches and Herb remind us, there are the Ten Commandments of Love. Thou shalt never love another. Thou shalt never love another.

I think there's so many different versions of the Ten Commandments because Ten Commandments are such a perfect way to get across an idea. There's ten of them, you know, so it's enough that you feel like you're getting a comprehensive view. And yet, at the same time, it's just ten, right? Ten. Manageable. Not too overwhelming. Sure, I could do ten. Ten, sure. But, you know, the biblical commandments have one important thing that all these imitator commandments don't.

And that is that they're about much more basic stuff. Honoring parents. And murder. And lying. And wanting things we don't have. Primal stuff that's in our lives. And we thought, it's Easter weekend. Passover's just ending. Let's find stories where people are grappling with these old primal rules for life. Perfect time to devote an episode to the Ten Commandments. The real ones. And that's what we have today. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Eric Glass.

Today's show, The Ten Commandments. Stay with us.

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This message comes from Warby Parker. What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras, without the extra cost. Like free adjustments for life. Find your pair at warbyparker.com or visit one of their hundreds of stores around the country. It's just American life. Today's show about the Ten Commandments is a rerun from long ago, 2007, that we're bringing back this Easter weekend.

Now, different denominations attach different numbering schemes to the commandments, to which commandment goes with which number, though the commandments are always the same. But however you count them, the first two or three commandments, they cover the same ground. They're all about acknowledging God. I'm the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not carve idols and bow down to them and worship them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

These commandments in particular are ones that Shalom Al-Slander tried to understand and obey as a boy going to religious school, a yeshiva, a school where they were drilled in all of the Bible's commandments by teachers who could be pretty intimidating, some more than others. Here's Shalom. "Eli said that his big brother said that Rabbi Breyer once broke a student's nose by slapping the student's face. Dov said that his big brother said that Rabbi Breyer had once broken a student's arm when he was dragging the student from the room for talking during prayers.

Rabbi Breyer was the scariest rabbi in the whole yeshiva. He was a stocky man, white as the doorway, with a long rough beard and thick angry hands. And everyone trembled that first day of third grade when he stomped heavily into the classroom, wrote his name on the blackboard, and shouted at Akiva for slouching in his seat. Nobody spoke during class.

Nobody doodled in the margins of their prayer books. And when, at the end of the first test, at the end of the first week, Rabbi Breyer shouted, pencils down, it was as if the commandment had come from God himself. At recess, we stood huddled together on the concrete slab beside the door, afraid to play, worried that Breyer was somewhere watching.

Avi and Ellie started flipping baseball cards. Flipping cards is considered gambling, which is forbidden, so we were supposed to return the cards to each other at the end of recess. Nobody ever did. Ellie won a large stack of cards from Avi, and I flipped Ellie next. I lost an old Willie Randolph, an afraid Lou Piniella, but I won a mint Carl Yastrzemski, whom I was pretty sure was Jewish. I'd been trying to win him for months. ♪

The bell rang and everyone headed glumly back to class, where we sat quietly at our desks, waiting for Rabbi Breyer to return. I took out my Kali Yastremski, turned it over, and carefully wrote my name across the back. I didn't want to lose him and didn't plan on flipping him. "'Name of the Creator!' Rabbi Breyer shouted. I jumped and turned to find him standing beside me, his face red, his furious finger pointing at the baseball card on my desk. "'Name of the Creator!' he shouted again."

He grabbed the card from my desk. Name of the creator? I was confused. Yaz? Rabbi Breyer slapped my hand, grabbed me by the ear, and led me to the head of the classroom. He held Yastrzemski over his head and shook him. This, he declared loudly, must never be thrown away. It must never touch the ground. It must never be covered. Then Rabbi Breyer waved the card in my face and told me that my name was the same name as God's, and I must never write it again. ♪

The Jewish God has 72 names, and even though I was only 8 years old, I already knew a lot of them. There was Adonai, there was Yahweh, there was Elohim, there was He who was full of mercy, He who was quick to anger, the Holy Spirit, the Divine Presence, the Rock, the Savior, and now, somewhere near the bottom of the list, there was Shalom, Peace, My Name.

Rabbi Breyer handed me the baseball card and told me to take it to the prayer hall upstairs and immediately put it in the Shamos box. Shamos means names, and it was the place where any old or unusable names of God are left to be discarded. Pages from prayer books, crumbling Talmuds, old Torah scrolls, and, from now on, anything I wrote my name on.

When the box was filled, the rabbis would take it outside, dig a hole, and bury the pages in the ground. "From now on," Rabbi Breyer said, "when writing my name, I was to replace the last Hebrew letter, the 'm' sound, with a simple apostrophe. I was no longer Shalom, I was Shaloh. I headed upstairs with a sigh." Life with God's name was more difficult than I imagined.

The Seamus box in the prayer hall filled quickly.

My homework, my test papers, my what I did this summer, even my highlights for children. And, buried at the bottom of the box, a pair of underpants my mother had written my name on with permanent marker. It seemed I couldn't go an hour without making something holy, and I wasn't the only one. Every morning, my mother wrote my name on my lunch bag, the name of God, in bright red magic marker, with a quickly drawn smiley face just below it.

and every afternoon, Rabbi Breyer would grab my lunch bag, shout, "'Name of the Creator,' dump the food out onto my desk, and send me upstairs to the Shamos box with my suddenly sacred lunch bag." It didn't end with writing. I was standing at the urinal one day when Avi came in. "'Hey, Shalom,' he said. "'Name of the Creator!' Rabbi Breyer shouted from inside the nearby stall. "'Name of the Creator!'

We heard him fumbling with his pants and ran back to class. Later, as we sat with our heads down as punishment, Rabbi Breyer explained that speaking God's name in the bathroom was also forbidden. And then, a few weeks later, it suddenly all clicked. I began spelling my name with an apostrophe without even thinking. My mother stopped writing my name on my lunch bag, and my friends stopped saying hello to me in the bathroom. It had been a hassle at the beginning, but now the whole God thing was growing on me.

My classmates were named after rabbis and forefathers. Abraham? Isaac? Jacob? Please, I was named after God. So I was surprised a few days later when I heard Rabbi Breyer, in the middle of an exam on the first chapter of Genesis, shout "Name of the Creator." I turned around, expecting to see him standing beside me, but he was on the far side of the classroom, standing behind Shlomo's desk, pointing a furious finger at Shlomo's test paper. "Name of the Creator!" he shouted again.

and he slapped Shlomo's hand, grabbed him by the ear, and dragged him to the front of the class. Shlomo isn't technically a name of God, but it means "His Shalom," "His Peace." And for some reason, that day, Rabbi Breyer decided that was close enough. But instead of feeling relieved that someone else in our classroom would share the burden of a holy name, I was disappointed. It was a pain in the ass being named God. But it was my pain, and it was my ass.

Rabbi Breyer handed Shlomo his test paper and told me to take him upstairs to show him where the Shamos box was. I still didn't quite understand God's reasoning behind the third commandment of "Thou shalt not use my name in vain," but I suddenly had a pretty good idea of the reason behind the first: "Thou shalt have no other gods besides me." It's one thing to be the only god. It's quite another, lesser thing to be one of two. I headed upstairs with Shlomo two steps behind me. I wanted to push him down the stairs.

I wanted to shove him out the window. As we walked toward the prayer hall, I remembered that Rabbi Breyer told us that Moses had killed an Egyptian by uttering the name of God. Shlomo pushed his way in front of me and hurried to the Shamos box. Adonai, I whispered. Nothing. Yahweh, I said. Nothing. I couldn't bear to watch him violating my Shamos box, so I turned and headed back to class, Shlomo running behind me, trying to keep up.

Using my name in vain and calling, Shalom, shalom, wait up. As I squeezed my eyes shut and whispered, one last time, Elohim, nothing. Shalom Aslander. His latest book is called Feh, a memoir. This brings us to the fourth commandment. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days will you labor, but the seventh is a day of rest, dedicated to the Lord your God.

Good morning, everyone. We're glad to have everyone here today. It is awesome to see you tonight. Thank you for coming to worship with us. The ushers are going to come forward now. We're going to be reading from the 48th Division of Psalms. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. We also begin with words of blessing at the bottom of page 104. Baruch atah Adonai.

Here are six congregations in six different cities remembering the Sabbath and trying to keep it holy. Lord, we pray for our sick and shut in everywhere, Lord. There's sick among us, Lord Jesus, that need you. Lord, we pray for the homeless on today.

United now in faith, we pray. May the Lord look with kindness upon all efforts to uphold the dignity of marriage and of family life. We pray to the Lord. We pray especially for the Neely family. We pray for the loss in the Golubiski family and the loss of a cousin. And here all of us can learn something from an ancient text which seems so irrelevant. When someone...

has for whatever reason had to separate themselves from society. The priest has to get involved and help this person get back into the community. People claim nowadays that they are the first ones who are asking for the woman's right. Islam, about 15 centuries ago, said, "O people, you must consider the rights of your wives. Be kind and nice to them."

Fear Allah and your wives and be good to them. Oh Allah, be my witness. Do I have a witness? You are the bride of Christ. Why? Because Christ died for us. He's married to us. And we need to understand what marriage means. You can't be married and cheating. And tie a fall to many of us cheating on Jesus. Nobody comes before Jesus.

Turn to our hymnals on page 154. All hail the power of Jesus' name. And we'll all stand. All hail the power of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Thank you all for coming, and you're all welcome to stay. Speak, O Lord, as we come to you.

This is the Bentree Bible Fellowship in Carrollton, Texas. And before that, the Northwest Venice United Methodist Church in Corona, Michigan, Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church in Chicago, the Muslim Community Association Mosque in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Temple Road of Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia, and Our Lady of Angels Monastery in Hantsville, Alabama. We recorded them in 2007 when we first broadcast today's show.

If you're just tuning in, we are devoting our show today to the Ten Commandments, and we are at commandment number five right now. Honor your father and your mother.

When he was 11 in Charleston, South Carolina, Jack Hitt and his friends back then formed a little club where they would hang out in this one backyard that was all overgrown, which they thought of at the time as a jungle. It had a big brick wall along one side. And they started doing things that did not honor their fathers and their mothers. Anyway, we had declared it to be our land. We were squatters. And so we started painting things on the wall.

And one of us painted a naked woman. And one of us wrote his name and then loves. And then, you know, the girl he had a thing for at that time. And that's how we got caught because he wrote his name on the wall. And then I wrote all these bad words. I just wrote every bad word I could think of. And so I came home one day and the police came to my house and told my parents or called my father at work or something. And anyway, he came home early from work.

And he sat me down in his big study and said, you know, I understand you painted some words on a wall. And I was like, oh my God, it's a burst into tears. You know, I was just beyond control. My father never cursed. He's not in front of us. And he was very strict about language. And so he asked me what words I, we painted, I painted on the wall. And, you know, I think I choked out H-E double hockey sticks or something. And, you know, he kind of looked down and

Very grave indeed. Anything else? I was like, yeah. That was just the warm-up. And so then I said, you know, I painted the other words. I can't say them. I can't say them. And then he said, tell me what it started with. He's going to get it out of me. So I coughed up the letter S, and he was just, his eyes blazed. And he bowed his head. Oh, my God.

anything else and i was i could not be contained i was wailing around on the sofa he said there's only one word left and yeah i painted it and he was just i mean i think he was actually thunderstruck and then he sat there in silence for a few minutes and then he looked up at me and he said he said now you have to understand

My father comes from the rural area, marries the Southern Belle in Charleston, South Carolina. It's a marriage of two kinds of families in the South. And he said, son, I've worked all my life to make sure that when you or your sisters or your brother walk down the street, people say, there goes a hit. They're good people. I don't think anybody, anything that anybody in this family has done

has damaged that reputation as much as you have today. And he said, that is your punishment. You may go now. You know, I was 11. Wow. I was just, I was floored, you know. I asked him, I think, to spank me. Because, of course, part of me wanted an explosion that would end it. But he said, when he dismissed me from the room, he said, you know, this has been your punishment. And then, of course, a couple of months later, he does.

And that's one of my last memories is him telling me that. Do you think he was being sincere? Well, I'll tell you. Years later, we had a little family reunion. I might have been 20. I was in college. And all my siblings got together. They were all married at this point. And we dismissed all the in-laws to go see the movies. And the five of us stayed up really late talking. And I don't think we'd ever really talked about our father ever.

in any deep way since he had died. And I started telling that story and I had never told that story because I was ashamed of it. It was the black mark on the family that I had done this. Right. And I, I couldn't bring to, I'd never told anybody that story. And I started telling that story and,

my sisters start wailing with laughter and then they all start telling the story that that what they had done that had prompted essentially the exact same speech like one of them had been caught shoplifting in atlanta and he had to fly there and get her you know and it was just you know a terrible story i'd never heard that one before either and i thought who we well you know painting a few bad words on a wall that's nothing compared to shoplifting in atlanta and

And was this the first time that everybody else was realizing that he had said the speech to them too? Or were you the only one who didn't know? I think I was the only one who didn't know.

I mean, they're much older than I am. I'm a mistake, right? So my oldest sister is 16 years older than I am. Yeah. So I think what was kind of moving about that whole encounter was that all of them had long ago forgotten their particular crime that had prompted daddy to give them the big reputation speech. But, you know, when I brought it up, it suddenly, for all of them, that all flooded back. I mean, it just...

created this great little moment where we all suddenly realized we were, you know, the whole family was just so defined by my father's rather Baptist sense of morality. Jack hit. Well, the Sixth Commandment seems like it could not be more straightforward. Thou shalt not kill. But of course, even this is one that is not always so simple to know how to obey. Army Reserve Chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Brown is back in this country from Iraq where he has served two tours. When he was in Iraq, he would run services for his unit once a week.

But most of his ministry was just talking to guys one-on-one. The main issue they have, he says, is about missing their families. But often they talk to him about killing. He spoke with Alex Bloomberg. I did meet with one soldier on several occasions to just work through the commandment. This young man had actually, along with another soldier, had gone forward when the vehicle in front of them had been blown up to kill.

you know, hold the hand of a soldier who was not going to survive. You know, somebody had told me that, you know, he was having a tough time. And so I went over to him and I just said, you know, you know, what are you thinking? And he said, I never thought about the killing that would be going on. You know, when you're firing at a target, you know, to practice, you know, you think of those things as targets, not as people. And for him to be there and to see,

you know, that he had some buddies that were on the receiving end. And he's just saying, you know, the Ten Commandments in the Bible says, you know, thou shalt not kill. And he says, I'm not certain I can go out and kill. But his concern was that, like, God wouldn't forgive him or that it was wrong. Well, that God wouldn't approve of him doing that. Right.

And he also brought up, you know, just, you know, if he were to do it, you know, who could he tell? Because he said, I wouldn't want to tell my girlfriend about this. I wouldn't want to tell my children. And that's why, you know, I went ahead and had a little Bible study with him. It was, you know, it was the kind of thing that I did meet with him on several occasions to find out, you know, what God had to say about war and

And, you know, where did the commandment, thou shalt not kill, where did that come in? But also to work through, you know, other instances where, you know, for example, in the New Testament where Jesus meets an army officer who has a child who's dying. And he asks Jesus if he would heal his daughter. But the interesting thing I would point out is that Jesus never condemned the soldier for his job.

Now, I also know that when King David wanted to build the temple, that God said, no, he said, your son's going to do it because you're a man of blood. And so there's a lot of controversy, as you can imagine, as to trying to interpret what God was talking about there. And of course, it seems to reflect on even my role as a chaplain. Why am I wearing an army uniform and trying to deal with people who are out to kill people? Are there times that you feel like

that faith and the U.S. military are sort of at odds? Yes. You know, we preach, you know, the love of God and the fact that we ought to be at peace with each other. In the same time, I'm wearing a uniform that says U.S. Army on it. And, you know, I'm there to support them in their mission of, you know, winning a war. And that means taking lives. So I do wrestle with that.

I mean, there's times that you just kind of go, you know, God, can I resign here? You know, can I get away from this? Rather than having to deal with the questioning that people have and often not having answers. I mean, I think that's probably the biggest challenge that I ever had was, you know, I couldn't just say, just think this way and you'll be fine. There were times that they were asking the same questions that I would be asking. Such as? Well, you know, should we be here? Should we be killing people?

Do you think that you have a different understanding of this particular commandment about the fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill? Do you feel like you have a different understanding of it after serving in Iraq than perhaps somebody who didn't serve? I think I'm much more hesitant about having a definite opinion about who should die. Yeah.

Just seeing the brutality and the, you know, people have got body parts missing or, I mean, there's big holes. There's, you know, they died a violent death and it's not pretty. And it just doesn't seem normal, you know, which it isn't. But also even with the Iraqi culture that there were times that people just

said, well, whatever group it was they didn't agree with, they just said, kill them all. And I was going, these are people. And I didn't like that attitude. And then I was seeing it even among the armed forces, that there was people that would just kind of say, well, we just need to kill them all, and then that'll take care of it. And I was going, whoa. Who nominated you to be God? I just...

We all have a tendency to interpret the Ten Commandments in a way that's convenient for us. There's interpretation of thou shalt not murder. It shouldn't be a premeditated killing. It has nothing to do with war, those kinds of things. But it just makes me, I'm looking at it as a principle that God says you need to value life and don't take it lightly. Just don't

condemn people to death just because, you know, that's easy to do. You got to stop and think about it seriously. This is something that God himself doesn't take lightly. Army Reserve Chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Brown, talking with Alex Bloomberg back in 2007. Brown died in 2008. Coming up, adultery, thievery, lying, envy. No, it is not an afternoon of daytime TV. It is the last four commandments. We have one story for each of them.

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It's American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, for Easter weekend, the Ten Commandments. We're doing one story for each of the commandments. First few commandments, of course, about how to relate to God. Then there's one on relating to your parents. And the rest are all direct injunctions about how to act. Basically, a list of things that you are not supposed to do. We are at commandment number seven, you shall not commit adultery.

And yes, we are at the commandment that is about sex. And while there is going to be nothing explicit in this next story, it does acknowledge the existence of sex. A little warning there. In 1976, in an interview with Playboy magazine, then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter admitted kind of famously that he had committed adultery in his heart many times, meaning, of course, that he had had lustful thoughts. There's this thing that Jesus says in the book of Matthew, whoever looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart.

David Ellis Dickerson grew up going to an evangelical church in Tucson, Arizona, and he remembers hearing about what Carter said about committing adultery in his heart. I was eight years old, and I knew just what he was talking about. He was just saying the same thing I had read in my Bible dozens of times. As an evangelical Christian, I wanted desperately to please God. So for my entire adolescence and up into my 20s, I literally tried to avoid having lustful thoughts. I was taught this was possible.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we take every thought captive in the name of Jesus, which means that any spiritually healthy person ought to be able to control every thought in his head. Of course, in practice, this is even harder than it sounds. So for young evangelicals like me, there's a whole sub-industry of sex advice columns and books with titles like "Every Man's Struggle" or "Taking Thoughts Captive." You can find them in the "For Men" section of any Christian bookstore. The first thing they always tell you is that sex is a beautiful gift from God.

Even though it's a gift they don't want you to touch or even think about because you're just gonna ruin it with your filthy paws. Any physical pleasure, even pleasure you'd give yourself while alone, is completely forbidden. Then they tell you how to survive until marriage.

They all run some variation on, you can't help the first glance, but you can prevent the second. You can obey God with your eyes. They don't have to see everything around them. If an attractive girl walks by, they don't have to survey her body, but they must obey Jesus Christ. This is Josh Harris in the audio version of his book, Not Even a Hint, Guarding Your Heart Against Lust. It's full of practical tips.

I don't know about your house, but at our home, all kinds of sensuous and provocative clothing catalogs arrive in the mail uninvited. I've come to realize that I have to view even getting my mail as a battleground. Will I throw them away immediately or steal glances and flip through them for a quick thrill? If you're a guy with a similar struggle, ask your wife or mother to help you in this area by ridding your home of these unnecessary temptations. Other tips.

These books tell you to watch TV with a remote in your hand, so if a sexy beer commercial comes on, or when the sports camera cuts to the cheerleaders, you can immediately jump to another channel. And be honest with yourself. When you watch ESPN2, aren't you hoping to see gymnastics? And guys need daily quiet time to read the Bible and pray for strength in the fight against temptation. I don't know why, but in my case, none of this ever worked. I wanted it to work. Longed for it desperately. But every week or so, late at night,

I'd give in. "M" happened again, I would write in my journal, as if it weren't an action, but an event. Something that could just engulf you like a flash flood or a car accident. Something so terrible it could only be referred to in code. I was an adulterer. That's what the Bible told me. And I struggled with the guilt of that every day. After high school, I went to a huge state college in Tucson. And on warm days, I would walk across campus feeling like a monster.

because I believed that noticing a girl's body was the spiritual equivalent of something like sexual assault. I assumed all this was the same for all of us fundamentalist kids. At every All Guys Prayer meeting I ever went to, someone was always asking for help with their thought life. But I'd never actually asked if anyone had quite the same problems I did. So I called my friend Derek, a missionary's kid who was my best friend from church back then.

You're right. It wasn't your own obsession at all. I developed a technique of seeing girls as just floating heads, you know? It's like, you just learn you're just not going to look below the neck, you know, because it's

Because there's only bad news there. Yeah. It did have this funny effect on... I mean, I was a cartoonist for my college newspaper, and I didn't actually know how to draw girls, really. I mean, you can see... That's right. You can see when I would draw a female figure top to bottom in a cartoon, there's an awkwardness to it because I didn't actually know what they looked like. And those kind of things are kind of...

It's funny to look back and talk about them now, but it was all very dead serious back then. Oh, yeah, that's the other thing. I mean, it seems so trivial and silly, and yet it caused actual agony. Yeah. You know, we felt depraved. Yeah, and there's this terrible, real anger, a sense of unfairness at the media. Like, you know, Coors Light put up these billboards with women in swimsuits on them, and they were very well-designed swimsuits, and...

And there they would be, right? Like right up in the sky. And so you just felt like the devil was just absolutely this very wily opponent, and it's just in your face all the time. And it's so frustrating if you're trying not to go out of your way to look for it, but then it seems like everybody's pushing it in your face.

Do you ever, you know, wish you could go back? Yeah. Okay. You know, it's funny you should ask that because I have actually had that imaginary conversation before. You know, you see some time travel movie. Vanessa is like, wow, if I had a chance to go back, you know, what would I tell that kid? And I think I would tell myself, you know what? You spend so much time straining over this one issue that you are

avoiding or overlooking the whole rest of your spiritual journey. I wasted a lot of time. There's a lot of time wasted obsessing and I think it's kind of what you found out yourself too, right? It gets to a point where things crack instead of bending. He's right. They do crack. And for me, they cracked worse than for Derek. I couldn't buy porn. That was obviously forbidden. I didn't have a girlfriend. I couldn't even watch MTV.

So the only sexual experiences I'd had were the ones that happened by accident. A woman bending over in a low-cut shirt, for instance. And then at 22, I started finding myself walking slowly along campus or in supermarkets at a library, hoping to see another accidental glimpse of something. It took more and more of my time. My grades started to suffer. I was like a stalker, but a shy one with incredibly low standards.

Then, after a couple unbearable months of this, I begged my pastor for help. He suggested Sex Addicts Anonymous. At my first meeting, we all told our stories. There was a guy who'd spent thousands of dollars on prostitutes in a single long weekend. There was a woman who'd slept with a different guy almost every night for years. There was a huge tattooed biker who was so ashamed to be there that a friend let him in blindfolded. And then there was me, a 22-year-old virgin.

When I told my story, there was an awkward silence. Even here, nobody understood my problem. A few days later, I went to a Christian counselor, expecting he'd just tell me to pray harder and look for answers in the scripture. I explained my problem, and he looked at me and frowned, and he asked if I ever did the act, the one that I found so horrible I only referred to it in code. "Trust me," he said, "let yourself do it. Give yourself permission and see what happens." This was shocking.

That a Christian would give me this kind of advice: that it's possible to obey too much. That you could lead yourself astray by following the Bible's rules. That very day, I took home my first Playboy magazine, and that was that. After five minutes, I was no longer desperate to glimpse random women bending over the freezer cases at the grocery store. It felt like a miracle. It was so fast, so life-changing, that it was like converting all over again.

David Ellis Dickerson. He has a sub stack called Slightly More Pleasant. Commandment number eight. This is your fried. Here's the cook for you. You shall not steal. Wait to order even more time. What can I do for you?

Hassan works the afternoon shift at a neighborhood restaurant. Really? Yeah.

He took away? Do you think he might have been mistake? I don't think so. Lawyers, they don't make mistake. There was two couples. One of the couple's wife, she used to sit on the right side of the corner. She used to sit in this booth? Yeah, this booth.

She used to take salt and pepper from the table. No matter what we did, no matter what we said, no matter what we act, she never changed it. She always took it. I believe that she took at least two dozens during the two years period. Two dozen? Yes. They sold two dozen salt and pepper shakers? Yeah, totally. I mean, during the two years period. Like at one second I miss, one second I miss, gone. And she was a regular customer? Oh, yeah.

Regular customer. And I believe she was doing everywhere, wherever she goes. Well, what I don't understand is what will she do with two dozen salt and pepper shakers? I don't know. I don't know. That's what I want to know, too. Maybe she has a store. He says it doesn't happen often, this dealing. But there is a pattern he's noticed. When a woman walked over to a display and took some food and then sat down and ate the food and he tried to charge her, she argued with him.

When a man tried to take a huge stack of napkins, like this huge stack, and a son caught him, he didn't even seem embarrassed. He got mad. He got mad at me because I said you're not allowed to take it. Now, the people who steal, are they good tippers or bad? Like the woman with the salt and pepper shaker, were they tip? They were good tippers.

And the lawyer with the umbrella, good tip or bad? No way. No way? No way. The lawyer? That's why he has two houses. Which brings us to the Ninth Commandment. This hour is going so fast. Ninth Commandment, do not bear false witness. Don't lie.

To understand this next story, you have to understand this idea of a mitzvah. For religious Jews, a mitzvah is a good deed. They're supposed to fill their days doing these good deeds. But mitzvah is also the Hebrew word for commandment. And when religious Jews count the commandments in the Bible, they don't just have the big 10. They count specifically 613 commandments they're supposed to follow.

Well, the woman in this next story wanted to do one of the biggest mitzvot ever. She was going to save somebody's life, a stranger's life. But to do this, she was going to have to break another one of the commandments, the one about lying. In this case, she was going to be lying to her own mother. Sarah Koenig tells more. Haya Lipschitz does all her mother's shopping. She prepares all her meals for her, does all her cooking. And they're extremely close. Best friends, Haya says. And she means it.

And they also live in this tiny space together, a two-room basement apartment in Borough Park in Brooklyn, where they share a tiny bedroom and sleep in two tiny beds, really cots, that are about a foot apart from each other. In this kind of setup, it's unimaginable that you could keep anything from your mother. But Haya had this whopper of a secret.

She wanted to donate a kidney to someone, to a stranger, after seeing an ad in a Jewish newspaper taken out by somebody who needed one. The ad was like screaming out to me. It said, save a life, be makayim, which means to fulfill a once-in-a-lifetime mitzvah. It would be an uber mitzvah, and she was going to do it, unless her mother found out first. Her mother has a kind of phobia about surgery, and also, like any parent, she would worry about all the things that could go wrong.

So Haya didn't tell her mother about her plan, which took many, many months to put together. And she got away with it until her mother found some ads about kidney donation that Haya accidentally left on the kitchen table. She lectured Haya about it. It's not for you. I think she said to me, like, you can do any other mitzvah except this one.

She just, like, didn't, I didn't answer her. Well, but, I mean, how old were you at this point? No, I mean, this was, this was only, yeah, I mean, right, I'm an adult, I'm, you know, I'm a grown-up. She didn't forbid you to do anything, really. You know what, but you know what, I didn't want to cause her any pain or any suffering. Don't forget, she's an older lady, and, you know, people sometimes are frightened and have heart attacks and die, and I wanted to give a life. I didn't want to take away a life at the same time.

But even if she didn't have a heart attack, it would give her so much suffering. And I didn't want to, I never ever liked to upset her. I had tried to follow the commandment about not lying. For her, lying's a sin. Never mind lying to your own mother. She could argue that not saying anything about the kidney transplant wasn't strictly lying.

But as the surgery date got closer, Haya couldn't cling to that technicality. She was getting a lot of phone calls. She had to go for medical tests all the time. When you would go out and get tests and do these things, where would you tell her you were going? Well, I had to say other things. You're dragging it out of me. Okay, okay, you know what? I did have to give little white lies. And what were the white lies? Like, what kinds of things would you say?

I don't even want to go into details. I'm embarrassed. It wasn't bad. I don't tell anything about it bad. Haya feels so guilty that she lied to her mother, she can barely talk about it. And the lies just became more overt as the day of the surgery arrived. I had to spend the night before near the hospital. What did you tell her? I told her I was going to go to a friend's house.

It was a house. And my friend was there. My kidney, the person that was the name, Kidney Toes, she was like a friend already. And so, oh gosh, it was, I had this huge bag, you know, to bring with me to the hospital because like I didn't want to see how much I was taking. When my mother went to the bathroom that night before I left the house, I took my stuff, I think, out to the side of the house. And left it there? I left it there and then I went back in the house. Oh.

So this way, you know, I just... I went... I didn't leave with that much, maybe a shopping bag to go, oh, gosh. But you know what? That was hard for me because I don't like to lie. But that, you know, it was all to do a good thing. It wasn't anything selfish. You know what I mean? It was all... You know, sometimes you're... Listen, I don't want people to think you're allowed to do white lies, but sometimes...

You have to. Sometimes you have to, you have no choice. And I'm doing this to save another person's life. I mean, so I'm sure, you know, as a result of what I did, God's going to forgive me for all those white lies. It's one thing to plan to donate your kidney and not tell your mother. It's another thing to actually have your organ removed and not tell your mother. So Haya had to figure out some way to break it to her once it was a done deal. And her scheme for doing this is so complicated, it makes all the earlier lies look really junior varsity.

What happened is that by chance, the same week of her surgery, somebody told Haya about this 23-year-old Hasidic woman who had also donated a kidney to a stranger. And I met this very lovely young woman, Fegi,

I said to her, would you be willing to tell my mother, to come over to my mother's house after the surgery and tell her that she donated a kidney and then tell her, by the way, I donated a kidney and I'm in the hospital right now. Let her be the one to tell her because my mother will see that she's healthy, she looks healthy and she's young and she doesn't look like she had major surgery a few months earlier. Right.

And so I told her, you know, call my mother and tell her this way, that you have tzedakah, a charity to give to one of my mother's charities. And that was a good way to get into the house. And...

I arranged it that my kidney recipient's family is going to call her after the surgery. So she called my mother, and my mother was like almost at the door, and she says to call, no, please, please wait. You know, I have Sudaka to give, the charity to give to one of your charities. And, of course, my mother waited.

And so she sat down with her and she said, you know, she donated a kidney. And my mother looked at her and found out and said, you know, she's normal and healthy. And she just did something like that three months earlier. And she came with a cute little baby. And then she said to her, by the way, your daughter's right now in the hospital. And she did the same thing.

To everyone's relief, Haya's mother did not have a heart attack. My mother smiled and she said, it's minashamayim, it's from heaven, it's heaven, you know, it's a heavenly thing that was meant to be. And she took it very, very well. Just like I thought, it was like, it was just exactly according to my script the way everything worked out. And she was happy. She was happy, you know, it was like, I was like so happy, it was like all over, like, you know, that she took it well. And she was proud of me and it was like such a relief.

It sounds like dealing with your mother was so much harder than actually doing anything. Exactly! The denated kidney was easy for me. The hottest pot was not telling my mother. Haya's mother never said anything to her about the white lies, and Haya's still not sure she even knows about them. And she never chastised Haya for keeping the surgery from her. She's just proud of Haya, which is what Haya wanted all along.

Last month, Chaya's brother, inspired by her, donated his kidney to a stranger. He said his mother had no problem with it at all. Sarah Koenig, she's the host of Serial. She did this story back when she was a producer for our show. Since we first broadcast this story, Chaya's mom has died. Over the years, Chaya has facilitated dozens of kidney transplants. So many, she says, that she's stopped counting. You can learn more about her kidney matchmaking project at donateakidney.org.

And so we arrive at the end of our list, the end of God's to-do list for humanity, commandment number 10. Like iPods, everybody wants iPods. iPods, iPods, it's really important. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass. You want phones, you want iPods, you want shoes, you want clothes, whatever.

And it's a lot of things that's really important. You shouldn't covet anything that is thy neighbor's. So it's kind of hard for a lot of people to fit in because they want that same stuff. Amy and her friends Selena and Kayla are in seventh grade. Or they were back when we first broadcast this episode in 2007. That was a month before the first iPhone was released. And so during the lunch break, they explained that the latest thing that they all covet was a Sidekick 3. Which, if you don't remember, and I did not, is a kind of souped-up Blackberry.

They wanted sidekick threes so bad, they could not help but notice every single person who had one. Well, she's not in my class, but her name is Arlene. My friend Amanda has a sidekick. My cousin has a sidekick. Arlene has a sidekick. Christine has a sidekick. Who else got a sidekick? This girl on the train got a sidekick. I saw her sidekick. Almost all my family got a sidekick. I want a sidekick. I don't have a sidekick. I lost my phone, actually, but...

I want a sidekick, but I don't got it yet. See? Yeah, she has one. She, yeah, she has one. You have a sidekick? Can we see? This girl, Christine, pulls out her sidekick and shows it around. The photo on the sidekick's little display is herself, which definitely is one of those things that is normal when a kid does it, but would be so weird if an adult tried it. She hasn't had the sidekick for very long. I don't really remember. I think it was in the beginning of April. Oh, so just a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

It's cool, actually, because I get to go on the internet and I get to go on the AOL. Text message. Text message, all of that. It's really good. It's like an extra computer, a little computer for myself to carry around. A portable everything. A portable everything, basically. And did you want one for a long time? Yeah, I actually did. Now, were there people who didn't talk to you before the sidekick, who went and you got the sidekick? Yeah, there was a lot of people that didn't talk to me. And now that I have my sidekick, they like every day want to use it.

So they just want to use the sidekick? Yeah, they just want the sidekick. They don't want me with the sidekick. These girls actually had a very grown-up attitude about all the stuff they covet. That stuff matters to them. But it doesn't totally matter. Kegel wasn't wearing Nikes or Cons, and nobody cared. Selena and Amy recently got iPods, and they're the first to admit it didn't change how anybody saw them.

I remind them that it's in the Bible that we're not supposed to want stuff or be jealous of people who have stuff we don't have. Do you think it's realistic that people aren't going to want stuff?

No, because everybody wants stuff at some point. I think it's just natural. Everybody is going to want something in life. You're not going to go through life not wanting anything. You're not going to just go through life, okay, I have this and I have that. I don't need anything else or I don't want this. I think it's just natural for people to want things. But then you're saying in a way it's natural that we're always going to be breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Basically, yeah. Yeah.

If we needed any proof of this, we're always going to want stuff. Sometimes we're going to want stuff that we probably shouldn't. It was just a few feet away. A girl named Nadie had written on her arm, down the length of her arm, Nadie N. David. That's N, the letter N, with a heart underneath it. That's my boyfriend. And is he in your grade?

Nah, he's older than me. He's two years older than me. Talk about him. That's your girlfriend, egging her on. He's nice, you know. I broke up with him once, but we're going back out. And he broke her heart, but I don't think she should be going out with him because she's my soul. I'm mad at her. Because people were saying that he talks s*** about me. It's true, it's true. But I love him, so... You don't know what love is, lady. That's until you get to 16.

Look, that's David over there. That's David over there, look. That's the right one. He's with another girl. With the one in black sweater. He's walking arm in arm with another girl. David! Right there. That's it, right there. See, that's what makes us mad. Oh my God, Nadine. You see her right there. You don't see anything. I know. That's her stuff. That's her stuff right there, yo. That's her stuff. David.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says the Tenth Commandment concerns the intentions of the heart. The Catechism talks about desires that are often good, wholesome desires, but come to exceed the limits of reason and make us want things too much, especially things that really belong to somebody else. Wanting things too much, it says, is a form of sadness. And the Tenth Commandment, that's what it's trying to eradicate. I wish you'd always have faith in me.

And thou shalt always have faith in me.

Help on today's rerun from Angela Gervasi, Stone Nelson, and Ryan Rumery. Music help today from Jessica Hopper. Mary Robertson produced our story about the Ninth Commandment. Thanks today to Liebman's Deli in the Bronx, where we taped the story for the Eighth Commandment about stealing. Thanks to Middle School 51 in Brooklyn, where we taped our Tenth Commandment story. And especially to one of the seventh grade teachers who worked there back when we did this show, Andrew Raven.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange, our website, thisamericanlife.org. Thanks for listening.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatia. You know, he says that when he goes home, he sees the mailings from our own public radio station that arrive at his house, pile up in his front hallway, asking for money, and he cannot help himself. He just has to pledge. If you're a guy with a similar struggle, ask your wife or mother to help you in this area by ridding your home of these unnecessary temptations. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Next week on the podcast of This American Life. Mari's fiance, Mikael, has a lot of tattoos. Mari likes to make fun of them. Like the one he has of Mickey Mouse smoking a blunt. And then somebody sends her a video and she recognizes Mikael by one of his tattoos. And he's in a prison in El Salvador.

This next week on the podcast or your local public radio station.

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