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By Rabbi Joshua (increasingly known as The Hoffer) Hoffman

The last commandment of the Decalogue is not to covet that which belongs to another. We are told, “You shall not covet your fellow’s wife, his man-servant, his maidservant, his ox, or his donkey, not anything that belongs to your fellow” (Shemos 20:14). The difficulty raised by the commentators is how can there be a command to control the emotions? One either has the emotion or he doesn’t.

Ibn Ezra’s answer to this question is well-known. He says that one should view someone else’s things as being beyond his reality, akin to a villager who would not covet the king’s daughter. This approach links the end of the Decalogue with its beginning, as belief in God as the creator also should inculcate the principle of divine providence. The problem with the Ibn Ezra’s approach, as Nechama Leibowitz has pointed out, is that in today’s modern society the differences between the classes is no longer so innate as it was in the past.

There is, however, another way to answer our question about controlling the emotions, rooted in the Ramban to parshas Kedoshim, as pointed out by Rav Simcha Zisel Broyde. The Ramban in parshas Kedoshim cites a midrash which says that the Decalogue corresponds with mitzvos in parshas Kedoshim. As an example, he says that the prohibition against coveting is connected with the mitzvah of loving your friend like yourself. The Ramban in explaining that mitzvah says that a person would usually wish well for others, but will always want an edge over them. This mitzvah holds him to wish good for his fellow just as he desires for himself. What the mitzvah is precisely about, then, is the removal of jealousy. But how does one attain this level of feeling for the other?

Perhaps the teaching of Rav Shimon Shkop in his introduction to Sha’arei Yosher can be helpful here. In explaining Hillel’s statement “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” he says that different people have different definitions of the self. Some include only themselves, while other definitions include other people, some all of humanity, and some all of creation. The goal is to have an expansive self, and that is the way to attain the feeling for others prescribed by the Ramban.