In the attic of the Altneu Shul, the old/new synagogue in
the Jewish quarter of Prague, rest the remains of a creature of legend, giant,
foreboding, formed of clay: the famous Golem.[1] The creature was created out of necessity, by
the chief rabbi of that old city, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the
Maharal. His father’s name, Bezalel,
perhaps hinting at his creative prowess, named for the chief Israelite builder in
the Torah.
Prague at that time was a city of violent hatreds between
the different groups, and the Jews were not spared. Another blood libel and more false
accusations and scapegoating all lead to a feeling of unease and impending
danger among the Jewish residents, and their rabbi decided that something had
to be done about it. And so he and his
son-in-law snuck out of the Ghetto, and under the dark of night formed a
creature out of clay hauled from the banks of the river, and named it Golem, from
the word in the psalms meaning shapeless,
describing humanity before creation.
After fashioning and forming it into a human likeness, the
rabbi and his son-in-law began to intone words of prayer, spells really, from
the Kabbalistic—the mystical—tradition, seeking to breathe life into the
nostrils of the beast. But the creature
did not move, did not breathe, until finally, the rabbi knelt down beside it,
and carved into the wide forehead of clay three Hebrew letters. Aleph, Mem, Tav. The word: Emet. Truth.
No sooner did the rabbi finish the final letter than the
creature sprang to life, breathing heavily.
The rabbi commanded the Golem to awaken and instructed the creature that
its one purpose was to protect the Jews, to guard the Ghetto at night, and to
find those placing false evidence against the Jewish community. The creature of truth was to ferret out the
lies. By day, Golem was instructed to
help out around the synagogue, and if anyone asked, his name would be Joseph.
The rabbi, however, could not anticipate that as anger
against the Golem grew from those outside the Jewish community, so too did the
Golem grow, until it was almost too big for the rabbi to handle. Golem could swat away an angry mob with his
bare hand. But, the result was unfortunately
more vitriol, not more peace.
The Emperor, seeing what was happening, summoned the rabbi
to him, and demanded to know when this might stop, when the monster might no
longer persist, as the people were frightened.
“This stops when the Jews are no longer in danger,” answered the
rabbi. With that, the Emperor guaranteed
the Jews’ safety and commanded the rabbi to destroy the monster.
The rabbi agreed but said that if the Jews were threatened
again, Golem would return, and even stronger.
The rabbi went to find the Golem and came upon him in the
cemetery reading the many tombstones.
“Joseph. The Jews are safe now. It is time to return you to the earth from
which you were born.”
“But I don’t want to,” Joseph replied. “What if I don’t obey?”
“You have no choice.”
And with that, the rabbi reached up with his staff and quickly erased
the first letter, the silent Aleph, from the Golem’s forehead. With that, emet, truth, became met,
death, and the Golem breathed no more.
Again a lump of clay.
The Golem, emblazoned with the word Truth, is set out to
protect from the dangers and results of lies, the dangers of falsehoods, the
dangers of alternative facts. The Golem,
emblazoned with the word truth like a
crown, seeks out those who would cause harm by trafficking in stories created
to enrage a populous, in fantasies of malfeasance constructed to elicit harm,
and to divide the community.
Would that we had a Golem today! Given the battering truth has taken, however,
I fear that we’d all be in danger.
Much like the middle of the 16th century, when
this version of the Golem story was written, truth is under assault in our
society and our nation today.[2] Our leaders and their surrogates are so brazen
as to tell us that what we see with our own eyes and what we know to be reality
is not so: “3,000 people did not die in
Puerto Rico.”
Truth has become relative. There is no longer a sense of
shared reality. We have lost the ability
to live peacefully alongside one another because the world we live in has been
divided into sides, each holding on to their own facts, even if those facts are
not supported by evidence. Feelings and
opinions have taken the place of facts, statistics, and news.
This shift in our culture away from a shared sense of truth
did not suddenly appear. No, it is the
unfortunate ends of a politics based on cynicism, greed, and the hunger for
power. There has been in the last
generation an overextension of the recognition that people experience life in
different ways. It is important,
probably even necessary, to understand how a person’s narrative relates to the
truth. And it is important to honor
those narratives and the many stories of our families, friends, and
neighbors. But, extending this line of
thought to say that everyone’s personal narrative is true and aligns with facts
brings us to a dangerous point of relativism.
If every feeling and emotion is held as truth, and every story is
equally true, then bigotry, hatred, and prejudice become valid expressions of a
person’s identity, not something to be shunned or at least questioned. Hannah Arendt would argue that it is the
inability to distinguish between fact and fiction that lays the groundwork for
the rise of totalitarianism.[3] Truth, and the search for it, therefore, is a
weapon, and perhaps the most important, of democracy. Truth is under constant
assault, and it’s getting worse by the day.
Some of this truth decay[4]
has to do with technology. We have
diversified how we get our information.
There are many options for news: in print, on TV or radio, and
online. We choose where we get our news,
and often we choose a source based on what we already believe, confirming our
biases and putting us into echo chambers.
The democratization of information can be an asset, allowing for more
and varied voices to be heard and amplified, allowing for the panorama of
America to be painted in more hues than ever before. However, disparate mass media combined with immoral
impulses has become a detriment to society rather than a benefit. Lies have been weaponized to attack our
sensibilities, our communities, and our nation.
On this day of confession, we are, at least partially, to
blame. Al chet shechatanu: We
have, in the last decade, reprogrammed ourselves and our minds, thanks to the
devices in our pockets. We now expect
immediate information and answers. And
no matter what we find when we search, we assume it to be true.
Today, within milliseconds of asking, we have information
shining brightly back at our faces, and we tend to trust that information,
partially because it all looks the same.
But we don’t know or ask who put it there, or whether we should
trust it. We used to have to go to an
index, look up a subject, then open a second book to find information. Truth required curiosity. Truth required effort and persistence. Truth required experts in a field. Truth required reasoned debate, objectivity,
the scientific method. Today, all that truth
requires is that we ask Siri or Google and see what comes up on our small HD
screens. The convenience is intoxicating
and addictive. The immediacy of
information has trumped vetting whether or not the information is true,
factually accurate. And, studies have
shown that the first piece of information we receive is usually the one we will
believe, whether it is true or not; and Google does not rank results based on
accuracy.
* * *
The rabbis who composed Pirkei Avot, Chapters of the
Fathers, were concerned with helping the people lead ethical lives, and they
gathered their wisdom together. In that
famous tractate of Mishnah we read about what holds up our world. We read at the end of Chapter 1: “Rabban
Shimon ben Gamliel used to say: ‘On three things does the world stand: On
justice, and on truth, and on peace,’ and then he quotes the prophet Zecharia: ‘As
it is said (8:16): “Judge with truth, justice, and peace in your gates.’” [5]
In his 18th century ethical text Mesilat
Yesharim, The Path of the Just, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato takes the
baton from the rabbis of Pirkei Avot. He
explains the importance of this teaching from Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel. He writes: “Truth is one of the very
foundations upon which the world stands.
As this is so, when you speak falsely, it is as if you are nudging at
the world’s foundation. Conversely, when
you are careful about truth, you are likened to someone who maintains the
world’s foundation.”[6] Truth telling keeps the world upright. Lies
cause the world to crumble if we are not careful. It is only the truth, alongside justice and
peace, which holds everything in balance.
Without truth, we shatter the underpinnings of creation.
The Talmud, in tractate Shabbat, shifts the focus of truth
from the foundation of the world, to the foundation of God. “The truth is God’s seal,” our sages teach us. Luzzato elaborates that, “if God has chosen
truth as God’s seal, its opposite must certainly be abominable to God.”[7] God doesn’t just prefer truth; falseness and
lies are an abomination to God. Speaking
truth is a Godly act. Being truthful
allows us to be like God, to emulate the divine!
When we chant from the Torah, we recite blessings composed
by the ancient rabbis. The blessing
after the Torah reading refers to Torat Emet, a Torah of Truth, picking
up on a verse from Malachi, one of the minor prophets of the Bible. The Torah, as God’s word, is true, we remind
ourselves. When God speaks to us through
our scriptures, we believe it.
On these High Holy Days and our festivals, as we open the
Holy Ark, containing the Torat Emet, the Torah of Truth, we announce
that God is Rachum vechanun, erech apayim, v’rav chessed ve’emet:
compassionate, gracious, endlessly patient, loving, and true. Truth is not just in God’s words, but truth
is an attribute of God, equal to God’s kindness and compassion.
But what kind of truth are we talking about when we are
asked to speak the truth like God? As
people of faith, how are we supposed to understand the concept of truth? The word emet is used throughout our
tradition. What kind of truth does it
describe? Is it merely that which is, as
professor Adele Berlin describes, whatever is authentic, valid, and
trustworthy? [8]
Professor Baruch Schwartz of Hebrew University explains that
there are two kinds of truth for people of faith: empirical and religious. Empirical he says, “is obtainable…only
through the scientific method…Religious truth pertains to that which is outside
the realm of the empirical. It
consists of the teachings accepted as normative by the community of believers
with regard to God and what God expects of them.”[9] We hold in our two hands, simultaneously,
empirical truth and religious truth.
When we learn more about our world, the realm of religious truth
shrinks. When we experience the awe of
God, however, it grows again. As
moderns, we are always working to find that balance between these two truths.
Are we supposed to understand Emet as empirical
truth, based on science and evidence? Or
are we supposed to understand it as something else, referring to the more
universal, ethical, and religious truths which cannot be codified and cannot
necessarily be observed? Maimonides
would say both. He teaches that truth is
about two kinds of perfection: intellectual and ethical.[10]
We might think that all references to truth in our tradition,
in our scriptures and sacred texts, deal only with the notion of religious
truths. But the Torah gives space for
the human search for empirical truths, truths beyond the religious and cultural
understandings. In Deuteronomy, no less
than three times, the Torah advises that we search for truth. In Chapter 13, relating to news about idol
worshipers in a town, the Torah advises: “You shall enquire and search and interrogate thoroughly and behold if it
is true, the fact is established…”[11]
Of these
examples, Dr. Isaac Sassoon teaches: “In these scriptures, the Torah
assumes that emet can be ascertained by means of human
striving and, moreover, that humans are endowed with the capacity to
distinguish emet from sheker (falsehood). These
verses… [allow] emet [to equal] empirical truth.”[12] The Torah makes space for us to discover
evidence. The Torah makes space for us
to find those truths which exist regardless of belief. The Torah asks us to do the research, to find
the facts, and then to make a decision based on the reality of the situation,
not just based on an accusation or on hearsay.
The Torah knows that it cannot be the end all of our knowledge and that
all the answers are not within. There is
truth to be discovered!
Because there are two kinds of truth, it is up to us to
distinguish between them. Because there
are two kinds of truth, which we equally value, it is up to us as Jews in the
21st century not to allow them to be conflated. We must be speakers of truth and know what
kind of truth we are speaking.
But speaking truth is not the only divine quality we ought
to emulate. For God not only speaks the
truth, God is a judge of truth. Yom
Kippur is a day which is filled with imagery pushing us and prompting us to
ponder our mortality. We plead with God over
these 26 hours of fasting and soul-affliction to be inscribed into the Book of Life. Kol Nidre is sung with an ark void of
Torahs. The ark in Hebrew is called the aron,
and that word also means casket. When we
see the open and empty ark, we see our end, in the hopes that coming so close
to our mortality, we might finally repent.
It is at the end that we learn that God is the judge of truth, as we
recite the blessing Baruch Dayyan HaEmet, blessed is the judge of truth.
This blessing, recited upon hearing the news of a death,
puts God into the position of judge and arbiter of our lives, able to see the
truth of our actions and our intentions, no matter how we might try to falsify
who we have been. God sees the truth,
and God judges based on that truth. This
is the entire purpose of Yom Kippur: to stand before God the judge, to lay out
our truths to God, as if God didn’t already know them, to speak the hard words
of confession before God, and to let God decide on our fates, on how we will
make it through the New Year.
Just as when we bless God as feeder of the hungry, we
understand that as an internal call to feed the hungry in our midst, we must
seek to emulate the God of dayyan haemet. Just as when we bless God as redeemer of the
captive, we understand that as an internal call to us to work to end
oppression, and we must seek to emulate God as judge of truth. We must seek out the truth and all make a
commitment to do God’s work on Earth, each of us becoming dayyanei emet,
judgers and arbiters of truth. We must
each become golems. When truth is under
such assault, being a judge of what is and is not true is a divine call, a
divine action, and a divine imperative.
This evening, we began our worship, after a few introductory
prayers, with our Kol Nidre, so beautifully sung by our Cantor, choir, and
musicians. The text of this prayer is
really a legal formula that seeks to prevent us from becoming speakers of
falsehoods before God in the year ahead.
As Dara Horn puts it: Kol Nidre is “for the kind of vows one [makes] in
complete desperation, when catastrophe or stupidity or some other smallness of
the imagination [makes] life unbearable, when one [needs] to break the laws of
the universe and [sees] no other way but to sign over a first-born child, or a
first-true-love, or one’s ability to enjoy being alive.”[13] We announce that any vow we might make to
God, any promise we might make in a tight situation, isn’t really a
promise. We know that we won’t hold up
our end of whatever vow we make before God.
By nullifying them in advance, we hold up the truth we know we will put
aside in that moment of passion. By
nullifying our vows on this night, we prevent ourselves from being liars in
God’s presence. By this formula, we
render ourselves truthful before God for the year ahead, from this Yom Kippur
to the next. But it only works between
us and God.
Every day of the year ahead, we ought to strive to speak the
truth, to hold the world’s foundation firm.
Let us go into this year with Emet
written on our souls if it cannot be written on our foreheads, such that we
might do the hard work of seeking out truth in all its forms. Let us make truth our seal, as it is
God’s. Let us be dayyanei haemet:
arbiters of what is true and what is not.
Our nation depends on it.
Our faith demands it.
G’mar chatimah tovah.
[1]
Adapted from Rabbi Jennifer Gubitz’s version of this story in her sermon: “The Golem and
Truth.” Based on a retelling by David Wisniewski in Golem
[2]
Much of this is inspired by Kakutani, Michiko The Death of Truth. 2018,Tim Duggan Books
[3]
See Kakutani, pp. 11, 13
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Avot 1:18
[6]
Mesilat Yesharim, trans. By Ya’akov Feldman.
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
http://thetorah.com/torat-emet/affirming-the-torah-as-authoritative-and-authentic/
[9]
http://thetorah.com/torat-emet/empirical-truth-vs-religious-truth/
[10]
From Pirke Avot Commentary by Kravitz and Olitzky on Avot 1:18
[11] Deut 13:15
[12]
http://thetorah.com/torat-emet/truth-must-be-ascertainable/
[13]
Horn, Dara. Eternal Life. P. 50
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