1. God has shown great kindness to our nation; we Jews must therefore more than other people show ourselves grateful to Him, love Him as our Deliverer [[249]]and Benefactor, and do willingly all that He commands us to do.

2. When we are in trouble we must trust in God, pray to Him, and hope that He will help us when our fellow-men cannot do so. When they give us up as lost we need not despair; for the Almighty can help where human wisdom and power are insufficient.

3. The wicked may for a time succeed in doing wrong, whilst the good and just suffer; but this does not last for ever. There is a Master above all of us, who in due time punishes the wicked and saves the good.

Second Commandment.

“Thou shall have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them, for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing loving-kindness to the thousandth generation of them that love me and keep my commandments.”

There are no other gods in existence; it is impossible for us to have other gods. There is only one God, as we repeatedly declare, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” The commandment is nevertheless not superfluous. There have been whole nations, and there are still people, who, in their ignorance [[250]]and folly, attribute Divine power to things that have no Divine power, and who give the name of god to things that are not gods. Such people are called heathens, idolaters, or idol-worshippers. The second commandment forbids us to do any such thing.

It was the custom in some countries to worship the king, either during his lifetime or after his death, as a Divine being; it is still the custom in some countries to pray to departed saints. All this our holy religion forbids us to do. We must respect our king, we must honour the memory and the name of good men, but only as human beings, not as gods; we may not deify them. As to our prophets, our great men, the Patriarchs, the kings, their names are a pride unto us, their memory a blessing, ‏זכרונם לברכה‎—they are honoured by us as human, mortal beings: they are not worshipped. When we visit the graves of those near and dear to us, and honour their memory by reflecting on their virtues, when we revere those holy men who have devoted their lives to the service of God, or the martyrs who have sacrificed their lives for the sanctification of the Name of God (‏קדוש השם‎), we do not endow them with Divine attributes, and do not offer up any prayer to them.

The second commandment, in forbidding all kinds of idolatry, includes the following prohibitions:—

The words, “For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God,” are to be understood in a figurative sense; we cannot say of God that He is jealous, in the literal sense of the word. It is only because we call a person jealous who is anxious that no one else shall enjoy the same right or privilege as he enjoys, that we apply the term “jealous” figuratively to God, because He does not concede Divine worship and service to any other being. He demands of His worshippers that they serve Him alone and none besides.