There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from bad news, but from repeated bad news. In recent months, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, each news cycle seems to deliver another grim revelation about the alleged associations of prominent figures with Jeffrey Epstein.
Another respected name. Another institution once thought beyond suspicion. Another reminder that power, prestige, and access can conceal moral rot.
The details are salacious. The implications are disturbing.
But the most serious damage is quieter and more corrosive: a steady erosion of public trust.
When figures who shaped policy, culture, education, or philanthropy are exposed – directly or indirectly – as being complicit, silent, or morally compromised, the question is no longer only what did they do? But who can we believe anymore?
This Shabbat, Jews around the world will read the Torah portion of Yitro, hearing once again the Ten Commandments.
It is hard not to feel the jarring contrast.
At Sinai, morality is presented as solid, absolute, and public.
In our newsfeeds, morality appears negotiable, hidden, and disturbingly elastic.
Sinai speaks in thunder.
Epstein-era revelations arrive in whispers, leaks, and footnotes, until suddenly they are unavoidable.
Yet perhaps that contrast is precisely the point.
In his final book, Morality, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned that modern societies have misunderstood what holds them together.
Markets and states, he argued, cannot function on rules and regulations alone. They rely on something far more fragile and far more precious: trust. When that trust collapses, no amount of law can fully replace it.
Morality 'not enforced by police or courts'
“Morality,” Rabbi Sacks wrote, “is what we do for one another.” It is not enforced by police or courts; it lives in norms, expectations, and shared restraints. Once morality is reduced to a private lifestyle choice, public life begins to rot from within.
The Epstein revelations feel so destabilizing because they suggest that corruption was not merely individual, but systemic: that many “knew something,” suspected something, or chose not to look too closely.
Rabbi Sacks describes this phenomenon chillingly: when societies abandon shared moral language, then wrongdoing no longer shocks, but merely inconveniences.
Silence becomes safer than truth; reputation management replaces conscience.
Here, the Ten Commandments speak with unsettling precision.
The final commandment, Lo tahmod – “You shall not covet” – is unique.
It does not regulate action, speech, or even planning, but desire itself.
Long before theft, exploitation, or abuse occurs, the Torah demands restraint at the level of imagination.
Coveting is the engine of moral collapse.
It is the refusal to accept limits: I want what is not mine; I deserve what belongs to another; my status places me above restraint.
Once desire is unbounded, the remaining commandments become negotiable. Theft, deception, and exploitation follow naturally.
Sacks argued that modern culture has elevated desire into a virtue. We are told to want more, push boundaries, reject limits, and view self-restraint as repression.
But a society that sanctifies appetite cannot be surprised when power devours the vulnerable. When elites believe they are entitled, to bodies, to silence, to impunity, then trust disintegrates.
Judaism, by contrast, is unsentimental about human nature.
The Ten Commandments are not given to angels, or to saints, but to a deeply flawed people only weeks removed from slavery, and soon to be guilty of the Golden Calf.
Sinai is not a celebration of human virtue: It is a response to human weakness.
Crucially, the Torah makes morality public.
The commandments are proclaimed before an entire people: men, women, elders, and children alike. No elite class receives exemptions. No one is “too important” to be bound by restraint.
Rabbi Sacks returns to this point repeatedly in Morality: when ethical norms are universal, trust grows; when they are selective, trust collapses. A society in which rules apply only to the powerless is not merely unjust: it is unstable.
This lesson is not only theoretical.
In Israel, too, especially in a time of war, polarization, and profound strain on public confidence, our resilience depends not merely on military strength or political victory, but on whether our leaders and institutions are seen to be bound by the same moral limits as everyone else.
There is a temptation, after repeated betrayals, to retreat into cynicism: Everyone is corrupt. Nothing means anything. Power always wins.
Sacks warned against this despair. Cynicism, he argued, is not realism: it is a failure of moral courage. It assumes that human beings cannot rise above self-interest and therefore excuses the very behavior it claims to condemn.
The Torah rejects that conclusion.
The Ten Commandments begin not with prohibitions, but with memory: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”
Before law comes responsibility. Before rules comes the reminder that freedom without limits becomes cruelty.
The positive takeaway from this grim chapter is not that religion immunizes societies from abuse – it does not.
Nor is it that leaders will never fail – they will.
The Jewish message is more demanding: when people fail, values must not. When role models collapse, standards must stand taller, not be lowered to match the rubble.
The Ten Commandments remind us that ethical life cannot be outsourced to heroes.
It must be embedded in culture, education and daily discipline, especially the discipline of restraint.
“Do not Covet” teaches that a moral society begins not with policing actions, but with shaping desire.
In an age of shattered trust, Rabbi Sacks offered a simple but radical prescription: rebuild moral culture, not just legal systems.
Teach limits. Honor restraint. Refuse to treat decency as naïve.
Sinai still speaks, not because we are better than previous generations, but because we are not.
And not because it offers simple answers, but because it asks enduring questions.
Who sets limits? Who is bound by them? And what happens when desire is allowed to outrun responsibility?
“Do not Covet” reminds us that moral life begins long before laws are broken or scandals exposed.
In a time when trust feels increasingly fragile, Judaism offers a restrained but resilient hope: that societies can recover not by lowering standards to match disappointment, but by reaffirming the values that disappointment has tested.
The writer is a rabbi and physician. He writes and teaches on Jewish ethics, leadership, and resilience. His work appears on rabbidrjonathanlieberman.substack.com and youtube.com/@rabbidrjonathanlieberman.