Unexamined Truth

All of this year’s High Holyday sermons touch on some aspect of truth. Tonight we will examine why so many people hold certain things to be “true” even when they know there is firm proof they really aren’t.

           Remember when you returned to grade school in the fall and the teacher often had you write an essay entitled “How I spent My Summer Vacation?” If I were to write it now, I would discuss how fortunate Marian and I were to visit Scandinavia during our summer vacation.

           There were, and I’m pretty sure this is true, few, if any, Jewish Vikings. So what am I doing wearing this silly helmet? What’s wrong with it? One of the horns is missing, right? I’m pretty sure those of you who are awake realize this is a trick question. What’s wrong with this helmet is that it has any horns at all. As one internet maven suggests,

No self-respecting Viking warrior ever wore a horned helmet in battle – they weren't that dumb. As anyone who has done any slaughtering can tell you, horns provide nothing more than a good handhold to steady your work while you're slitting someone’s throat.

Scholars agree: the truth is the Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets. But it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. On our trip Marian and I had the opportunity of visiting Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. In every tsochke shop and tourist trap there were hundreds and hundreds of statues of Vikings, all wearing horned helmets.

Enough already. I’m sure this is more than you’ve ever wanted to know about Viking helmets. It’s just one example, though, of the things we hold onto as “true” even though they aren’t.

There are so many similar situations it boggles the imagination:

1. The idea that Betsy Ross made the first flag isn’t true. The idea was conceived by her descendants to make themselves seem more important.
2. It isn’t true Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem about Paul Revere (“one if by land, two if by sea,” etc.) was written during the Revolutionary War. It was written during the Civil War to impress Northerners with the necessity of fighting for liberty. [King Duncan, Dynamic Preaching, Seven Worlds Corp. (Knoxville, Tenn.), July/August/September, 1994, Richard Shenkman, I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode Or Not, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 9-10.]

 

1.  It’s not true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. First, the fiddle had not yet been invented. Secondly, Nero was fifty miles away at his villa in Antium at the time.
2. It’s not true that Aesop wrote “Aesop’s Fables.” They were written by a Greco-Italian named Babrius Socrates, and other writers are credited with attributing Babrius’ work and other similar tales to Aesop – who some claim never lived.
3. It’s not true the needle of the compass points to the North Pole. It points to the Magnetic Pole which is 1,500 miles south of the true North Pole. [Dynamic Preaching, by King Duncan, Seven Worlds Corp., Knoxville, Tenn., Oct/Nov/Dec 1994, “Truth.”]

You know those warnings in some of the movie or TV magazines: Spoiler Alert? This is one such warning. If you don’t want to hear this you might want to wander out for a few minutes, or put your hands over your ears. I won’t be upset, I promise. Your neighbors can tell you when I’m finished debunking one of our favorite stories. It’s the one about the little bottle of oil found in the rubble of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Maccabees that was only enough for one day but miraculously lasted for eight. Scholars think it’s not true. It never happened. Says my colleague, Rabbi Nathan Landman,

Chanukah rates as a “minor” festival. Why, when it tells the story of one of history’s earliest struggles for freedom of religious practice?

Ask anyone, “What is Chanukah?” and the response will be the Talmudic story of the little bottle of oil that was enough to light the Temple menorah for one day but miraculously lasted for eight. (Shabbat 21b)

In the vast encyclopedic scope of the Babylonian Talmud, this one small paragraph is all that is revealed to us about the circumstances which gave Chanukah its birth.

But we do have a great deal more material about Chanukah, from sources preserved by the Catholic Church!
In unequivocal language, we learn that Chanukah owes its eight-day character to the celebration of a substitute Sukkoth, the festival of thanksgiving.

If this was the real reason for what we now call Chanukah, how do we reconcile the account in the Talmud concerning the miraculous cruise of oil? Because once they won, for the next hundred years the history of the Hasmoneans, the family of the Maccabees, was one of degradation and corruption. The rabbis were so chagrined that they suppressed the events of the next century in the Talmud. They shifted the focus of the Maccabean story from a glorification of the military heroism of Judah Maccabee against a superior Greek foe to the story of praising of God for enabling the cruise of oil found in the Temple to burn for eight days, instead of one, a story they made up. [Rabbi Nathan Landman, Torah Fax]

One family wanted to believe the Chanukah oil story to so badly that when I insisted, like the majority of scholars, it wasn’t true, they quit the Temple!

OK, you can listen again.

So here’s what I think we should do: I think we should all buy a blackberry or the handheld gadget du jour with the fastest possible download rate so we can Google everything. The Rabbi says the Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets, so go Google. Uh oh, some of them did, but probably for ritual ceremonies, not for battle. Your neighbor boasts of the fantastic bargain she got on a dress at Loehmans? Google helps you find it for even less at a store just a few miles away.

Yes, that’s what we should do: question everything, accept nothing as the truth until we’ve proven it to be true for ourselves.

That, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is a one way ticket to the insane asylum. Let’s say we eliminate the silly stuff, like horned Viking helmets, or bargains at Loehmans (though some would say this is crucially important). Let’s just seek the truth of more important things, like why some in our society are unconscionably rich while others struggle to put bread on the table. Let’s seek the truth as to why you and I can receive excellent medical care and millions of our fellow citizens can barely receive any. Yes, let’s seek the truth of things like this.

But there’s a real problem here, an insurmountable problem: there is no truth. Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, is wonderful, but it is constantly being updated. Which is the truth? What was said then or what is said now? How many times in your own experience has one well-trained, moral, caring physician told you one thing, and another, equally well-trained, moral and caring physician told you something else? Where is the truth there, or anywhere?

As we’ve discussed before, only God has the truth with a capital “T”. As philosopher and holocaust theologian Richard Rubinstein reminds us,

Many are the appellations men have given to God.   Not the least of them is Truth. [After Auschwitz:  Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, by Richard L. Rubinstein, The Bobbs - Merrill Company, Inc.,(Indianapolis, 1966), pg. 90.]

We mortal, fallible human beings can only skate on the thin ice of supposition, guesswork, theorizing, honest effort and sometimes, unfortunately, out and out lies.

Finding truth is beyond us.

Instead, our tradition counsels us pursue not truth but justice: Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof. Justice, justice, you shall seek. One of the main ways of seeking justice is asking not for the truth, but asking instead how things ought to be, why they aren’t, and how we can make them that way.

Sometimes we fail miserably. You remember the Noah story. God tells Noah to build an ark, take his family and a whole bunch of animals to save them from the flood that God is bringing to destroy all humanity. Do you remember what Noah said? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! God’s going to kill everyone except Noah and his family, and Noah doesn’t utter a peep!

That’s one of the reasons our tradition considers Abraham, the first Jew, far superior. God tells Abraham the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are going to be destroyed, and Abraham argues: “You can’t kill the good with the evil. If there are fifty righteous people, will you spare the cities?” God agrees. “What if there are only forty?” God agrees. Abraham manages to argue God down to ten, but apparently there weren’t even that many righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah, so the cities were destroyed.

That’s our job: to argue for justice, even though Abraham, as human as we are, didn’t always argue when he should have. God told him to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on top of Mt. Moriah, but Abraham said nothing. He seems to have caught the Noah disease. He didn’t seek justice. He just marched off like a zombie, apparently ready to sacrifice another human being just as all the pagans around him were doing.

Then there’s Moses, who did a better job than any of them. The Israelites had an orgy at the foot of Mt. Sinai while Moses was up at the top getting the Ten Commandments. When Moses came down, God threatened to destroy the Israelites, all except him, and start over. Moses convinced God that wouldn’t be just, that justice actually meant forgiving the people for their sins and letting them live.

Isn’t that why we are here? I think many modern Jews become frustrated because the symbolic language of God sitting on a throne judging our actions doesn’t strike us as true. It isn’t! It’s not so important that God can judge. It’s far more important that we judge. It’s far more important that we examine ourselves and our own behavior, examine whether we’ve been like Moses or like Noah. We’ve probably been more like Abraham, sometimes good, sometimes bad. It is up to us to weigh those things and see how much towards the good and just we can tip the scales in the year ahead.

The story is told that each evening before he went to sleep it was the custom of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev do what we come here to do each High Holydays: to make a Cheshbon Ha-Nefesh, an examination his thoughts and deeds. Except If he found a blemish in them, he would say to himself, “Levi Yitzchak will not do that again.”
Then he would chide himself, “Levi Yitzchak, you said the same thing yesterday.”

Then he would reply, “Yesterday Levi Yitzchak did not speak the truth. Today he speaks the truth.” [Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner, cited in Moments of Transcendence: Inspirational Readings for Rosh Hashanah , edited by Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins, Jason Aronson, Inc. (Northvale, N.J., 1992), pg. 84.]

May this be a day when we vow to seek the truth of which we are capable: justice. May tomorrow be a day on which we actually do it.

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