Lies and Truth
Friday June 10, 2022
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
I’d like to begin tonight with one of the saddest verses in the entire Bible, which has haunted me for years. Psalm 116, verse 11. In the middle of a joyful song of gratitude, the psalmist gives voice to a moment of despair: ani amarti v’chofzi kol ha-adam kozev. “I said in my haste “every human being lies.”
The entire psalm extols God’s faithfulness, but the verse kol ha-adam kozev,“everybody lies,” expresses a crisis of faith. Not in God, but in human beings. Every human being lies.
I can’t get that sad, pessimistic view of people out of my mind. The author lived about 3,000 years ago, but to my ears the voice sounds contemporary. Tonight I would like to reflect for a little bit on truth and lies, and how we might return ourselves to a world in which our faith is restored. Not so much faith in God, although that would be wonderful, but faith in human beings.
One of my very earliest memories is of a time that I lied. I was six years old, and our family had spent the previous year in England and traveling in Europe. I really have very few memories of first grade, but I do remember the day that we were learning about the pyramids in Egypt and I declared that I had seen the pyramids with my family. Later that day, after school, my mother got a call from my teacher and then confronted me: “did you tell your class that we saw the pyramids last year?” I explained to my mother that I was pretty sure that we had been able to see the pyramids when we were traveling in the Alps. And my mother gently but firmly said “no. we couldn’t see Egypt from the Alps.” Of course it was a harmless lie, but my teacher did not consider it trivial. Sixty years later, of everything that happened in my life when I was six years old, that moment of being caught in a lie is lodged forever in my memory.
In truth, that was not the last time I lied.
Twice when I was a young rabbi, a long time ago, I chose to lie rather than admit that I had made a mistake. I won’t go into detail, sorry! But suffice it to say that I had a hard time admitting I was wrong. And it was so much easier to just lie. Both of these conversations happened over 30 years ago, but I remember them vividly. One with Bernie Haber and one with Selma Rubin, two of our community elders who cared about me….just like my mother 25 years earlier…cared about me enough to catch me and to teach me to speak the truth.
It is not irrelevant that two of the ten commandments, #3 “you shall not swear falsely in the name of God” and #9 “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” are essentially commandments to speak the truth. And when we conclude the Amidah, the section of our prayer service when we see ourselves standing in the presence of God, before we step away from our prayers and return to the world of our everyday lives, we ask God to “guard our lips from speaking deceit.”
This delicate world of human relationships depends entirely upon our speaking the truth, and yet as the psalmist declared in a moment of deep disappointment, kol ha-adam kozev, everybody lies.
In this country, right now, truth and lies are at the forefront of our national conversation.
I have not had time to watch the entire recording of yesterday’s hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. But I watched Vice-Chair Representative Liz Cheney’s opening statement. I encourage you to do the same, and to watch as much as you can of the hearings.
Obviously, we will bring widely differing points of view to our experience of the hearings. And no doubt, we will come to widely differing conclusions about what we see and what we hear. The greatness of this country, and also the wonderful thing about this congregation by the way, is that we do not require or even hope for everyone to share a single point of view. Our differences expand our minds and allow each of us to know more than any one of us could on our own.
But this is a significant moment in the history of our country. Profoundly serious charges are being brought against former President Donald Trump, who is accused of being the first President in the 200 year history of this nation to refuse to accept the result of a fair and democratic election, and of organizing and inciting a violent insurrection to prevent the transfer of power.
Those are the charges. A President refusing to allow a peaceful transfer of power.
After listening to all the arguments, from the members of the committee and from their opponents, we will probably not all come to the same conclusion. That must not prevent us from listening, and watching, carefully, thoughtfully, and having the courage to discuss and to think for ourself.
The charges are too serious for us to simply ignore. This is our country, our democracy, and if we do not care enough to pay attention in a moment like this, when will we?
I know that we may be tempted to throw up our hands, like the author of Psalm 116, and to say kol ha-adam kozev, every person lies. I hear this from many friends, and at times I think it to myself. Especially about politicians. Everybody lies. But let’s pay closer attention for a moment to the words of the psalm: “I said in my haste: Every person lies.” The psalmist I believe is telling us to stop, in the middle of our haste, and to slow down. “Everybody lies” is the feeling we might have when we are rushing and do not have the time, or do not take the time, to listen closely and to discern the truth. “Everybody lies” is what I said in my haste, says the psalmist. But by stopping to listen, I begin to hear deep truth.
There is a wonderful midrash, an ancient Jewish legend, about the debate that went on in heaven when God was deciding whether or not to create human beings. The ministering angels gathered into different teams, maybe we should even picture them as forming political parties! Some of them were arguing that humans should not be created, and others argued that humans should be created. The angel of loving kindness argued: “create them! Because they will perform acts of loving kindness!” And the angel of Truth pleaded “do not create them, for they are full of lies!” The angel of justice argued: “Create them, for they will perform acts of justice!” But the angel of peace urged “do not create them , because they will be constantly at war!” The midrash then continues: What did the Holy One Blessed be He do? He grabbed Truth…who had been arguing against the creation of human beings…. and threw it to the ground, as it says in a verse in the Book of Daniel “He will throw truth to the ground.”
Seeing this, all the ministering angels cried out, “Sovereign of the Universe! How can you treat Truth, your most important minister, so badly?” And in that moment, Truth sprouted from the earth. As it says in Psalm 85, emet mei-eretz titzmach, Truth shall grow forth from the earth.
We are living in a time when it often seems as though truth lies gasping on the ground. In our haste, we may decide that kol ha-adam kozev, everybody lies. But if we care for this fragile but marvelous creation, democracy, we will interrupt our haste, our rushing around. We will pay attention to the seriousness of this moment in history, and we may be blessed to see the miraculous return of truth imagined in the midrash. Emet mei-eretz titzmach. Truth will sprout forth from the earth. Ken y’hi ratzon. May this be God’s will. Shabbat shalom.