The Commandment Don't Covet

[macnietspingal]

I was simply shocked last night by Dershowitz on the History Channel presentation of the TEN COMMANDMENTS. He said :We should covet because that's what grows capitalism. I don't covet any one. I did once write in my secret diary that I was "jealous" of my best friend. When we both were in our fifties, I showed her this. I was 15 at the time I "coveted". She was terribly hurt. Now we were both grandmas at that time I showed her this. She started telling everyone, even people I didn't know. I just laughed inside myself. Eventually, when she introduced me to new people, I told them first.

Not a single person asked me why. I had skin trouble. I knew my Habonim friends would stereotype me to new people as the girl with the pimples on her face. How else did the boys know my name when I never laid eyes on them. That was the one time in my life that I broke down and wrote something like that whining about my skin which tortured me in many ways from the age of 6 until they discovered cortisone and I luckily got a good doc who managed it properly from the get go. In addition to acne, I had a poison ivy type lesion chronically which itched me the whole time. No dermatologist could handle it. In addition, when I was 15 YO I got chicken pox.

I'm so grateful I don't itch any more, since I was 27YO, that I don't covet anything or any one. Just grateful not to itch any more.

[theflipflop]

Baruch Hashem you don't suffer from that anymore, Macnietspingal. It must have been so difficult to deal with as a youngster, when our feelings can be hurt so easily by others.

I find the concept of coveting to be a difficult one to understand. It's best to simply remind oneself that "who is a happy man/woman? One who is content with what he/she has." The person who is unhappy with what they have in life insults Hashem, since Hashem gives us exactly what we need - no more, no less. If we can instill that Torah concept in the minds of our kids, we would not have to worry about coveting.