The Ninth of the Ten Commandments
When I’ve asked groups to name the Ten Commandments, the most frequently omitted is “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:13)
This commandment, which we read in our Torah portion this week, prohibits lying in court testimony as well as lying outside of court.
The Torah understood that for a civil society, the integrity of the court had to be above reproach. The Torah later teaches (Deuteronomy 19:18-19) the penalty for bearing false witness (lying while testifying) is that the false witness could be subject to the penalty that the accused would have received. In other words, if the penalty for stealing was five years in prison, the lying witness could receive that sentence. In a murder trial, the false witness could be subject to death.
The commandment concludes with “…against your neighbor,” which means it is not limited to court. It also prohibits lying to hurt your neighbor. As the commentator J.H. Hertz wrote of the Ninth Commandment, “The prohibition embraces all forms of slander, defamation, and misrepresentation, whether of an individual, a group, a people, a race or a Faith. None have suffered so much from slander, defamation and misrepresentation as the Jew and Judaism.”
So much of evil is rooted in lies—including communist totalitarianism, African slavery, Nazism and antisemitism—making the importance of following, or violating, the Ninth Commandment particularly consequential.
— Rabbi David Woznica
Rabbi David Woznica can be reached via email here.