Boaz’s Ten Commandments

Boaz Brandstetter’s Ten Commandments give concise form to a moral outlook built around pity, self-restraint, and useful work. Recalled by Ilana Sommo and reflected in Boaz’s own later words, the ten principles reject the violence and bitterness that once shaped his responses to family conflict, while insisting that care for other people and for the country must be lived in ordinary actions.

Identity and Form

Ilana records the commandments while trying to understand what first drew her to the man who became her husband. She introduces them as their son’s words, written down in random order but in his own phrasing. The list comprises ten short directions and prohibitions: pity everyone; pay more attention to the stars; resist bitterness, mockery, and hatred; recognize that even scoundrels remain human; oppose beating and killing; refuse to consume one another; and cool down. Its name invokes religious authority, but the content is expressed as Boaz’s personal, plain-spoken principles rather than as a formal religious code.

The commandments move between compassion for others, control of one’s own conduct, and a sense of perspective. Several state what Boaz opposes—bitterness, ridicule, hatred, assault, killing, and the figurative devouring of people—while the others offer positive practices: pity, attention to the stars, and restraint. The final injunction to cool down gives the list a deliberately unceremonious ending. Its ethical seriousness is carried by everyday language rather than by a sermon.

From Childhood Anger to Restraint

Boaz explains the background to his former violence by recalling how, as a child, he understood Ilana and her partner’s quarrels as being caused by him. When Ilana repeatedly attempted suicide and was taken to hospital, he wanted to attack the man he blamed; when she became involved with that man’s friends, Boaz wanted to harm them. Instead, he says, he used to beat up people who came within reach. His account does not present the commandments as an abstract doctrine: the rejection of beating and hatred answers directly to conduct he recognizes in his own past.

He describes a change in how he responds to violence. He is now against beating people up unless they hit him first, and even then says he would hit back only a little. He presents this qualified self-defense alongside a preference for work and taking life more easily. The commandments’ opposition to violence therefore marks a shift, not a claim that his earlier anger never existed. His rule against killing extends that refusal beyond personal quarrels to the wider political violence he sees around him.

Country, Conflict, and Ordinary Life

Boaz calls himself a Zionist, but explains the term through practical concern: he wants people to be all right and believes each person should do a little for the country, even half an hour a day, so that people feel useful and know they are needed. In his view, leaving life without constructive activity encourages people to get into trouble. This emphasis on small contributions gives the commandments’ instruction to cool down a social dimension: people should stop feeding conflict and find something useful to do.

His criticism reaches across political and religious divisions. He objects to people arguing and killing instead of living, and says that religious settlers, political figures, and Arabs alike can become absorbed in scripture, politics, speeches, and disputes rather than in life itself. He does not deny that people can be cruel; he insists that even those he condemns remain human beings, and that their deaths would be a loss. His warning that mutual destruction could leave only scripture, the Koran, foxes, and ruins links the commandments against hatred, dehumanization, and killing to his fear of a country consumed by conflict.

Work, Stars, and Later Practice

The commandments recur in Boaz’s later letter to Michel Sommo and Ilana. He tells them that he has received their letters and money, asks them not to worry, and says he agrees with much of Michel’s writing while finding some of it difficult to follow. He objects to Michel’s entanglement with religion and politics, and asks Ilana to leave tears and feelings behind and start doing something. The appeal to action echoes his earlier insistence that people need useful work, while his criticism of religious and political abstractions recalls his warning against living by arguments instead of life.

His treatment of the stars, however, complicates any simple reading of the commandments as hostility to religion or reflection. In the letter, Boaz says the stars neither speak nor preach; instead, they make a person feel quiet in the soul. The injunction to notice them therefore points toward attentive quiet rather than a message or doctrine. He has accepted the money and put it to practical use, buying a sprayer and a mower, and asks for further assistance toward a small tractor because the work cannot proceed properly without one. He also sends peacock feathers for Yifat, explaining that an older woman gave them a peacock that now walks in the yard. These details set his principles beside the material tasks and modest exchanges of daily life. The commandments matter not as a detached creed but as an ethic joining compassion and restraint to work, attention, and the effort to build a life.