Skip to main content

Forty-nine Days and Counting

 Earth date: September 14, 2020

One of my favorite movie moments was in History of the World, Part 1 where Mel Brooks playing Moses comes down Mount Sinai carrying three stone tablets. “The Lord Jehovah,” he says loudly for all to hear, “has given us these fifteen.” He accidentally drops one of the tablets onto the rocks, smashing it to pieces. He looks at the mess at his feet. “Oye. Ten,” he yells, “ten commandments for all to obey.”

I was in my thirties when I first saw this movie and this slapstick scene caught me so off guard that I burst out laughing and crying at the same time that I forget whatever scene came after.  

In the years since, I have wondered what if the Lord HAD intended for there to be fifteen Commandments instead of ten, but only ten survived to be mentioned in the Exodus and Deuteronomy.  

The first four Commandments honor and respect the Lord God, and the other six honor and respect the people and community around us, so maybe the last five were intended for us to reach out beyond our selfishness, and were meant to honor and respect the world around us.  Maybe He would have instructed us to be good stewards of the flora, fauna, and resources He gifted us? Surely, we are not here to devour everything for personal use and disregard the rest of God’s creation?  

Mel Brooks said that the Moses skit was something he added on the spur of the moment, but I personally think it is the best episode in the whole movie. It makes me think that God set the template with the first ten Commandments, and we can deduce if there were another five, they would honor and respect the natural world around us. It serves us and we should take care of it.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more

Grandma’s Dining Table

Twenty five years ago my first husband and I bought a new home with four bedrooms and three baths, but my favorite part of the house was the enormous room you walked into from the front door. It had no dividing wall but the design was to use half of it as a formal living and the other half as a formal dining. From the beginning I decided to make it into one huge dining room that would catch the eye when everyone walked in through the front door of my home.   My three children were very young, but I envisioned them grown and married. We counted five at the time, but one day we would grow to eight, maybe more if we factored in grandchildren, so I bought a table that sat a family of twelve.  My husband thought it silly to look that far ahead and convinced me to buy only ten chairs. The room looked magnificent – the long, majestic table, the ten chairs, the buffet, a couple of real ficus, and a few other nice pieces of furniture – I was pleased. The table lasted longer than t
6 comments
Read more