by PJ SchwartzForward
This story was originally published by Forward. Click here Forward’s free email newsletters to be delivered to your inbox.
As of this month, Alabama has many public schools The Ten Commandments must be demonstrated In classrooms, libraries, lunch rooms and all other common areas.
Supporters of Senate Bill 99, signed into law by Gov. Kay Even on April 10, claim that these enforced displays are historically, educationally and religiously neutral. As an Alabama rabbi — and father of two future public school students — I see that defense as not only wrong, but fraudulent, especially because the version of the Ten Commandments that the law authorizes is not historically accurate.
The Ten Commandments are a sacred Jewish text. They were given to the Jewish people, written in Hebrew, and rooted in a specifically Jewish story of redemption and covenant. This act takes that text, rips it out of context, and reshapes it using a Christian lens.
The version of the Ten Commandments that appears in our schools omits the defining opening of the text: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” This line underlies the commandments describing the Jewish people. Removing it is not saving. It’s distortion.
Claims to the neutrality of law are a strategy intended to provide legal and cultural cover that clearly privileges a particular Christian worldview in public institutions meant to serve all.
It does not reflect the beliefs or aspirations of all Christians. Many Christian leaders and communities understand that faith loses its integrity when it is promoted or enforced by the state. Many of my Alabama colleagues, across religious traditions, are frustrated by this as well. They understand that this law is an ideological move that uses religion to draw boundaries around kinship, and objects to the weaponization of something sacred.
The American Historical Association opposes Senate Bill 99 Point made clearlyArguing that the act presents a distorted version of American religious history under the label of “historical truth.”
The bill’s text describes the Ten Commandments as “an integral part of the Judeo-Christian religious and moral tradition” — a claim that does not reflect consensus among historians, jurists or the judiciary.
A unified concept”Judeo-Christian“Tradition itself A confusingly modern construct. It did not come from Judaism. It emerged within a Christian framework and recast Judaism as a precursor to Christianity rather than a living, evolving tradition in its own right.
Alabama students, like students across the country, deserve an education that is sound, intellectually honest, and grounded in real scholarship. Public schools should be places where students can build a proud identity, develop values that guide them, and begin to understand how they can contribute to the world around them. They should be places where students feel safe, nurtured and valued.
This law undermines those principles. Instead, it replaces actual education with ideals, narrowing what students are taught and how they are taught to understand their country. It denies students exposure to the full diversity of American religious life, replacing that rich landscape with a single, imposed narrative.
When a classroom wall presents a version of a religious text as if it were the foundation of civic life, it sends a message. Some students will see themselves reflected in the text. Others, like my kids, will learn that they belong outside. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Atheists and others will fall further behind.
This law is about power: who has it, and who doesn’t. Whose story is it told, and who is reshaped to fit someone else’s narrative? And it teaches something dangerous: not to think, but to obey. Get in line. to keep quiet Learn, early on, where you stand.
America cannot be great when it elevates one religion over another. Our students deserve better than education presented as education. They deserve a system that reflects that we are a nation made up not of one tradition, but of many.
As a rabbi, I am outraged that a sacred text from my tradition is being taken, altered, and presented as something it is not.
As a Jew, I am outraged that our story is being stripped of its context and reframed in a way that marginalizes others.
And as the father of two children who will attend public school, I am deeply troubled by what this signals to them about who belongs — and who doesn’t.
That is why we must speak out and do everything we can to oppose and repeal this law. We must work to preserve a better kind of American society—one that ensures that our public institutions remain open to all and that our children grow up in a world that reflects the dignity of difference, not the demands of conformity.
This story was originally published by Forward.
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Previously published Forward
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