Musar sobre Êxodo 20:2

Commandment 25 of the 613 commandments is אנכי ה' אלוקיך, "I am the Lord Your G–d."

The commandments: "I am the Lord your G–d," and "you must not have any other god," tell us that אנכי, "I am the Lord your G–d," is the source of all positive commandments, and לא יהיה לך tells us that the same G–d is the source of all negative commandments. Our sages teach us that Israel heard these two commandments directly from G–d's mouth (Makkot 24). This is why you find that G–d addresses Israel in the second person in these two commandments. When G–d introduces the third commandment, He switches half-way through the commandment (20,7) to indirect speech, i.e. כי לא ינקה, "For He will not consider blameless, etc." He also did not say "Do not utter My name in vain, but "do not utter the name of the Lord your G–d in vain." It was Moses quoting G–d who said these words; hence the change in style. The same applies to the remainder of the first set of the Ten Commandments.

Trust is impossible without faith, as it is written : "And they that know Thy Name will put their trust in Thee" (Ps. 9:11). For those who know His Great Name and recognize His greatness and power, and believe in Him with all their heart — only they can truly trust in Him, for trust and faith are partners; if there is no faith, there is no trust. And faith is the very beginning of the Torah, as it is written : "I am the Lord, your God; you shall have no other gods" (Exod. 20:2-3). And if a man does not believe of what good is his Torah? And where a man believes from the depths of his heart that the Creator will fulfill all that is written in the Torah, sending troubles to the sinner and paying a good reward to those who fulfill the precepts of the Torah, then he will carefully guard the Torah. For if all the thieves and robbers knew with certainty that they would be slain because of their thefts and robberies and would be unable to escape this fate, they would restrain themselves from wrong doing. But all of the thieves and robbers are sure that they will always be saved from this tragic end, and, therefore, they do what their heart desires. And, also, in the case of the sinner, if he believed with certainty that he would be punished greatly, he would not sin.

The result of all these considerations is an awareness that G–d is the Original Cause and Existence, and has in turn, brought into existence any phenomena we observe. As a result He is able to do whatever He wants as He demonstrated in Egypt when He performed all the miracles. This is why the first of the Ten Commandments concludes with the words: "who has brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slaves." It was in that environment that the uniqueness of G–d and His Power was demonstrated to the greatest number of people simultaneously.

The first of the משפטים deals with the Jewish servant, both male and female, and is hinted at already in the first of the Ten Commandments. G–d had liberated Israel from bondage to become exclusively His servants. We know from Leviticus 25,55, that כי לי בני ישראל עבדים, that "the children of Israel are My slaves." Rashi refers to this when explaining why the servant who chooses to remain in service has his ear pierced with an awl (Exodus 21,6).

It is no accident that when Abraham's descendants moved to Egypt they numbered seventy, i.e. a counterweight to the seventy nations of the world. There they became refined through their bondage to the Egyptians. When G–d took them out of there they had been prepared to exchange bondage to the Egyptians for becoming servants of the Lord, as G–d says: כי עבדי הם, "For they are My servants" (Leviticus 25,42). G–d instilled in the Israelites the feeling that they were slaves so as to make the transition to becoming G–d's servants easier for them. This is also what G–d had in mind in the first of the Ten Commandments which states: "I am the Lord your G–d who has taken you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage," i.e. in order to become My servants.