Jamie Metzl

Really?

And from Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who I just absolutely love, who's one of the lead reform rabbis in the United States.

And the reason why I think that's the case is what I'm saying is these are not replacement Ten Commandments.

I'm not saying these are better than anything else.

What I'm saying is that we have these multiple traditions.

Judaism and Christianity has the Ten Commandments.

Islam has the fivefold path and Buddhism and has the eightfold path.

I'm getting it all confused.

But every tradition has these distillations of their ethical principles.

And I'm not saying we need to get rid of those.

I'm saying, actually, these are really wonderful principles.

But our ancestors, even if they are mythical or real, the people who were maybe in Sinai or the people who came up with these original Ten Commandments, they had no clue there was an advanced civilization where we are now in the Americas, where these people had their own ethical traditions trying to answer the exact same questions.

What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to build a meaningful community and all of these other things?

We should celebrate our individual traditions, but wouldn't it be wonderful if we could look at all of them and see ourselves collectively like the Artemis II astronauts saw when they looked at Earth and just kind of saw us as one thing, and they didn't look like, oh, there's the U.S.-Mexico border.

There's this little ball of life in a dark and lifeless surroundings.

And so for me, that's what my message is, not we need to get rid of those original Ten Commandments,

But these are 10 principles based on all of us.

And I will say that when I gave that first talk at Chautauqua, and I went through our 10 commandments, and I explained why if you take them literally, it's hard to do.

That's what AJ's book was about, taking them literally, and it becomes ridiculous.