A Magician of Truth

This year’s High Holyday sermons all touch on some aspect of truth. Today we will focus on how our tradition teaches us to create our own truth.
A story:
Once upon a time – that’s how it usually starts so you’ll know it’s just a story and not the truth - there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domain, and no sign of God, the prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace and came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
“Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.
“Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.
“And those strange and troubling creatures?”
“They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”
“Then God must also exist!” cried the prince.
“I am God,” replied the man in evening dress with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
“I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
“Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.”
“I saw them!”
“Tell me how God was dressed.”
“God was in full evening dress.”
“Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
“That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”
At this, the prince returned to the next land and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
“My father, the king, has told me who you are,” said the prince indignantly. “You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”
The man on the shore smiled.
“It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”
The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father he looked him in the eye.
“Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”
The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves.
“Yes, my son, I’m only a magician.”
“Then the man on the other shore was God.”
“The man on the other shore was another magician.”
“I must know the truth, the truth beyond magic.”
“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.
The prince was full of sadness. He said, “I will kill myself.”
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses. “Very well,” he said, “I can bear it.”
“You see,” my son, said the king, “you, too, now begin to be a magician.” [John Fowles, The Magus (Dell Publishing Co.), pp. 499-500]

Like the prince, we often accept without question much of what we’ve learned, even informally, as true:

One weekend in Atlantic City, a woman won a bucketful of quarters at a slot machine and wanted to stash the quarters in her room. “I’ll be right back and we’ll go to eat,” she told her husband and she carried the coin-laden bucket to the elevator.
As she was about to walk into the elevator she noticed two men already aboard. Both were black. One of them was big... very big... an intimidating figure. The woman froze. Her first thought was: These two are going to rob me. Her next thought was: Don’t be a bigot, they look like perfectly nice gentlemen.
But racial stereotypes are powerful, and fear immobilized her. She stood and stared at the two men. She felt anxious, flustered, ashamed. She hoped they didn’t read her mind, but knew they surely did; her hesitation about joining them on the elevator was all too obvious. Her face was flushed. She couldn’t just stand there, so with a mighty effort of will she stepped forward onto the elevator.
Avoiding eye contact, she turned around stiffly and faced the elevator doors as they closed. A second passed, and then another second, and then another. Her fear increased! The elevator didn’t move. Panic consumed her. “My God,” she thought, “I’m trapped and about to be robbed!” Her heart plummeted. Perspiration poured from every pore.
Then... one of the men said, “Hit the floor.” Instinct told her: “Do what they tell you.” The bucket of quarters flew upwards as she threw out her arms and collapsed on the elevator carpet. A shower of coins rained down on her. “Take my money and spare me,” she prayed.
More seconds passed. She heard one of the men say politely, “Ma’am, if you’ll just tell us what floor you’re going to, we’ll push the button.” The one who said it had a little trouble getting the words out. He was trying mightily to hold in a belly laugh. She lifted her head and looked up at the two men. They reached down to help her up. Confused, she struggled to her feet. “When I told my man here to hit the floor,” said the average sized one, “I meant that he should hit the elevator button for our floor. I didn’t mean for you to hit the floor, ma’am.” He spoke genially. He bit his lip. It was obvious he was having a hard time not laughing.

She thought: “My God, what a spectacle I’ve made of myself.” She was too humiliated to speak. She wanted to blurt out an apology, but words failed her. How do you apologize to two perfectly respectable gentlemen for behaving as though they were going to rob you? She didn’t know what to say. The 3 of them gathered up the strewn quarters and refilled her bucket. When the elevator arrived at her floor they insisted on walking her to her room. She seemed a little unsteady on her feet, and they were afraid she might not make it down the corridor. At her door they bid her a good evening. As she slipped into her room she could hear them roaring with laughter while they walked back to the elevator. The woman brushed herself off. She pulled herself together and went downstairs for dinner with her husband.
The next morning flowers were delivered to her room: a dozen roses. Attached to each rose was a crisp one hundred dollar bill. The card said: “Thanks for the best laugh we’ve had in years.” It was signed, Eddie Murphy and Michael Jordan! [From the Atlantic City local newspaper.]

           You see? Much of what we see, much of what we believe is the truth, is the values and ideas that others have created. The prince accepted what his father taught him and the lady accepted as true the racial stereotypes she’d picked up, probably not even knowing she was doing it, from the world around her.

Sometimes, out of arrogance or hope or who knows what, we’re convinced we have “it,” convinced we’ve found “the Truth.”

           A woman had a dream in which she was given to know all truth. She awoke with a feeling of unbelievable peace, only she couldn’t remember the truth which had been bestowed upon her. The next night she had very much the same dream. Again when she awoke she couldn’t recapture the truth which filled her with a sense of well-being. So the third night she went to bed prepared. She took pencil and paper with her. She would write down the truth and share it with the world.

Amazingly she had the same marvelous dream. She had been given all truth. This time she immediately wrote it on the pad in pencil. In the morning she awoke ecstatic. Now she could tell the world what the truth truly is. She reached for the paper and read what she had written:
“Black shoes come in different sizes.”  [“LectionAid,” April/May/June 1995.]

           No one “gets it” no matter how loudly they proclaim they do, not matter how deeply they’re sure they’re right. To change what we believe to be true takes courage most of us seldom reach. There’s a wonderful true story about Reb Shlomo Carlebach, guitar-playing, soul-stirring source of Jewish wisdom to the hippie generation of the sixties and beyond. There’s a shul in Manhattan that bears his name. He relates,
I happened to spend a Shabbat at one of the synagogues in Europe the Nazis left standing. To my dismay, the chazzan proved to be someone with a feeble, tuneless voice and I could hardly distinguish his niggunim [wordless tunes] from empty murmurs. Worse still, his pronunciation of the Hebrew text was dreadful; two words being swallowed for every one recited. The fact that I been looking forward all week to an uplifting service and was now compelled to hear this rigmarole caused me a great deal of aggravation.

Noticing how certain worshippers grasped the cantor’s arms and guided him along toward the bimah, I asked one of them the reason for this and [he] gave me a whispered explanation:
“Can’t you see that the man is blind? For many years he was the chief cantor of the holy congregation in Lemberg [Lvov]. When he conducted services there, his voice was as powerful as a lion’s roar: it shook the very pillars of the synagogue and penetrated the heart of every worshipper. Then the accursed Nazis laid siege to Jewish districts and shtetlach, rounding everyone up. Nazi thugs waded into the crowd, grabbed hold of him, and proceeded to beat him unmercifully.

“They dispatched him to Auschwitz, where he lost his sight and had to endure forms of torture that I prefer not to mention out of regard for the [holy] Sabbath. By the grace of God, however, he managed to survived the death camp and it is now our privilege to have him daven for us here. Those terrible ordeals robbed the cantor of his voice and diction, but we are sure there’s no one better qualified to lead our services, pouring out the anguish and supplications of Israel before the Throne of Glory.”

Hearing all of this, [Reb Shlomo said] I felt a shudder go through me. What a shallow person I must be to judge a man by outward appearances and not to have observed the power of his spirit or the depth of his prayer! I waited for the old chazzan to carry the Sefer Torah back to the Ark. Then, instead of kissing the sacred scroll, I kissed his saintly hands. [Source: Reb Shlomele: The Life & World of Shlomo Carlebach, M. Brandywine, translated by Dr. Sabriel A. Sivan, Mt. High Productions, Israel.] [The American Rabbi, Fall, 2000, pp. 11-13.]

Our sages remind us that the Hebrew word for truth, emet, has three letters. The first letter, aleph, is the first letter of the alphabet. The second letter, mem, is from the middle of the alphabet, while the last letter, tav, is the last letter of the alphabet. This is to teach us, they say, that truth is never found in any one place. [B. Shabbat 58a]

But if truth is so fluid, so ephemeral, how is it truth?

It isn’t. It’s an ever-flowing, ever changing attempt to find out what God does, so we can do some of it, too. Personally, I’m not overly concerned with princes or princesses. They’re easily found here in the suburbs, and elsewhere. I don’t have any trouble believing in islands. Having been to several, besieged by offers of tanzanite, tee shirts, and discount watches, I’m sure they exist.

But God? We can’t have God’s truth, but we can learn to do what God does, something more important than truth. The Midrash teaches:
When God was about to create human beings, various angels formed themselves into parties and factions to lobby for and against our creation. “Love” thought we should be created because we would do acts of love. “Truth” argued against it, since we would lie. “Righteousness” said yes, because we would do righteous deeds, while “Peace” said no since we would make war.

What did God do? As the angels argued on and on, God took “Truth” and cast it to the ground, and said, “Why are you still arguing? People have already been created.”[Genesis Rabbah, 8:5]

Why Truth, why not one of the others? Because we frail, fallible humans are apt to seek truth most of all. But, says the passage, truth is not the most important thing, not to God and therefore not to us. What is most important? The Midrash says it is creativity. God’s message to us is to do as God did: create, especially justice.

           So the truth of our lives is not to seek, but to do, not to look for a place to stop, but constantly create new places to begin.