The Forgotten Commandment

Anson Hugh Laytner is a retired liberal rabbi, living in Seattle, whose career in nonprofit and academic settings focused on fostering positive interfaith and interethnic relations. He is the author of Arguing with God (1990), The Mystery of Suffering and Meaning of God (2019), and Choosing Life after Tragedy (2023); coauthor of The Animals' Lawsuit Against Humanity (2005); and coeditor of The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng (2017). To learn more, visit his website: ansonlaytner.com.

Locked in a vacuum-sealed glass tube, stowed away for centuries in the Vatican Secret Archives, is a manuscript appearing to be an animal rights fable but containing a dire prophetic message about humanity's destruction of the world's environment. Will it help humans to finally wake up and save life on the earth? The Forgotten Commandment is a work of historical eco-fiction. It braids together a genuine thousand-year-old fable, written first in Arabic by Muslim Sufis and, in this story, protected by the Jewish Aboab clan beginning at the time of the First Crusade in Jerusalem, traveling to twentieth century Europe and surviving the deadly perils of World War II, then reappearing in the present, when a pair of young scholars rediscover the manuscript and succeed in revealing it to the world. A story for our times, The Forgotten Commandment is deeply researched and enriched with true historical events and the lives of actual people. The characters contend with the many challenges and evils that humanity has created: tyranny, anti-Semitism, prejudice, enslavement and destruction of animals, and the apathy of the majority. In the end, this book shines with hope as humanity begins to change the path we have been treading.