Truth and Its Sanctuary
Sermon Shabbat Yitro 5785
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
My wife Sophie, our daughter Ayelet and I just returned from a vacation in Asia, visiting and touring with close friends who moved to Bangkok, Thailand. It was a great visit, and we thoroughly enjoyed Thailand, a fascinating and enjoyable country. We were a little worried to be taking this trip with an almost 2-year-old—Ayelet turned two on our journey home, more about that in a moment—but it really was a wonderful experience.
First of all, if you want to gain a lot of attention in Malaysia, Thailand and Japan, travel with an extremely outgoing and friendly red-haired, blue-eyed toddler. It seemed like everyone in Asia was eager to take photos of, and with, this unique child. Red hair and blue eyes are not exactly common in the countries we visited—frankly on that entire continent—and people could not possibly have been warmer or more excited to post shots of themselves on their Instagram feeds and Facebook pages with our smiling and laughing little girl, who also loved the attention lavished on her everywhere.
The other interesting detail was that Ayelet’s birthday was last Friday, February 7th. We were scheduled to travel home that day. We began flying from Bangkok the day before, but had to connect through Kuala Lumpur. That meant that we left Malaysia near midnight the day before her birthday, so the whole 7-hour flight to Japan it was Ayelet’s birthday. Then we spent about 14 hours in Japan and toured around Tokyo, before heading back to the airport, and it was still her birthday. Throughout a couple of hours of flight delays it was still her birthday. We boarded our flight back to the US from Japan, about 10 hours, during all of which it remained Ayelet’s birthday—we crossed the international date line—and when we landed in Los Angeles it was still her birthday. And then we flew home to Tucson, landed here at 10pm, and it was still our daughter’s birthday.
She had, I believe, the longest birthday in human history. Ayelet’s 2nd birthday was 39 hours long. Now that’s amazing… I think if you don’t want to get any older, you could just reverse this trip on your birthday, starting in, say, Tahiti and flying to Fiji. You could begin around midnight and land the next day, an hour or so later, at midnight, completely missing your birthday and then claim to stay the same age, right?
So while in Thailand, we saw beautiful temples, impressive ruins, lovely scenery, a huge, complex modern city in Bangkok, and phenomenal traffic jams. But my favorite site was a place called the Sanctuary of Truth, a huge all-wooden building intricately carved and set in a fantastic coastal location near Pattaya.
The Sanctuary of Truth is the somewhat eccentric creation of a very wealthy Thai businessman that serves a couple of important functions. It memorializes his own complex philosophy and theology, which blends Buddhist, Hindu, animist, and other elements to emphasize the central truths of all existence, as he saw them, and our human resistance to acknowledging and understanding them. And it also keeps vibrant and active the great Thai tradition of elaborate wood carving, since it has been under construction since 1981, isn’t quite finished, and will have to be continuously restored and rebuilt forever as wood doesn’t last forever in a location overlooking the sea in the Gulf of Thailand.
The ideas incorporated into this remarkable building are fascinating. The wood is carved in elaborate ways to illustrate a series of seven truths: “Who are we and where do we come from? How do we survive? The end of life. Great teachings from civilizations past. What is the purpose of life? Society is a balance of positive and negative attitudes and actions. And, finally, the family is the foundation of society.” There is a certain progressive process to viewing the carvings, a mixture of spirituality and reality, an exploration of themes that shape our existence, influence our lives both daily and in a larger sense, and bring us to an awareness of what matters most.
I loved the focus on truth in the entire physical structure, the ways in which it dramatized our own human ability to delude ourselves about what is and isn’t real, and our ultimate requirement that we face up to and accept truth. It makes it clear that we cannot progress as human beings without a high level of honesty.
While the prevailing religious ethos of the carvings comes from Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, and even animist traditions, there are many aspects of this structure that reflect ideals and understandings we Jews share. We are taught, after all, that God is emet v’emunah, true and faithful, that Adonai Eloheichem emet, God is the essence of truth, that we must live lives of honesty above all. And our own central revelation, the Ten Commandments which we chant this Shabbat in Yitro, are also a mixture of the ideal and the pragmatic, all based in honesty: the oneness of God, but the injunction never to steal—theft, of course, is a profoundly dishonest act; the insistence on respecting our parents and ancestors, and the obligation to rest on Shabbat and grant rest to all our workers; the instruction to preclude jealousy and covetousness and the instruction never to commit adultery.
The focus in this building on seeking to bring people, through a visual and physical experience, to come to terms with both the reality of their own lives and the higher truths present in our world, is laudable. The focus is not on some kind of promise of future rewards for goodness in an afterlife, but on making our lives virtuous and valuable in this life.
That, it impresses me, is also a profound Jewish teaching.
Now you will hear people say that we live, today, is a post-truth world. That is problematic in so many ways. When we can’t agree on basic facts about ourselves and our world, we risk falling under the influence of demagogues and liars of every persuasion, and being persuaded to think and do things that are destructive and even evil. Truth may eventually triumph, and facts come out, but it is no longer guaranteed in our society.
The Sanctuary of Truth has a great deal to teach us, especially in our current social and political climate.
You know, there are always legitimate differences of opinion in a free society about events and policies, and these are naturally subject to interpretation. That is what vibrant, open debate is about in a democracy. But what we have increasingly seen in recent years is the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods and the intentional propagation of misinformation. The ensuing controversies are not about the right way to do things but about what is actually going on in the first place. And that weird ambiguity, the strange and disturbing sense that what used to be facts are now considered opinions, that what clearly appears to be happening is not generally accepted as real, is doing great damage.
I’m not saying America was an infinitely better place when we all believed
everything Walter Cronkite said on the CBS evening news, and I’m
certainly not saying that challenging accepted pieties is a bad thing. But I
am saying that something deeply wrong has taken place over the past
couple of decades that calls into question so many simple facts that we are
now very often unable to tell truth from lie. As Shakespeare has Falstaff
exclaim in King Henry IV Part 1, “Is not the truth the truth?”
Lest you think that this is all the result of some deliberate effort on one
political side, I must tell you that much of this began with an academic assault on the verities of accepted scholarship. It was a philosophical approach, from the left, that stated that truth was all relative: you believe about the world what you believe, while I believe what I believe, and who’s to say who’s right or what’s actually true? The critique held that truth is relative, and one’s approach to facts is culturally determined and subject to systemic bias. In this way of thinking, not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder but so is truth. There are many truths in the world, and they can conflict freely, because truth is just a matter of perspective, or opinion. Relativism is often associated with postmodernism and philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. It is a contemporary school of thought that calls into question the very nature of truth. I have heard people argue many times—on the left side of the political spectrum—“Well, that may be your truth; but I have my own truth, and there is no such thing as objective truth.”
That approach—that facts are just a matter of opinion—was, in the past,
the province of conmen, shysters and quacks, snake-oil salesman and
hucksters. Later it became the stock-in-trade of professional political liars
like Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist who invented and popularized
the use of the Big Lie. In more recent years it moved into the realm of
postmodern philosophers and soft-thinking people with less malign
intentions, but damaging applications nonetheless. And, of course, there were certain nations and cultures that always specialized in obfuscating, denying and revising the truth.
When I was younger, each year before the High Holy Days my father used
to take my brother and me to the garment district in Los Angeles to buy
new clothes for yontiff. The garment district in LA was, in those days, a
Jewish industry, and the particular store my father favored was staffed by a
Jewish immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union. One year, after I
started college, I didn’t go with my dad and brother on our annual
pilgrimage to purchase new Rosh HaShanah clothes for. The salesmen
noticed. Where, he asked my father, was the other son, die alter zun? My
dad answered, “He’s in university now, and he has exams and he has to
study.”
The Russian man asked, “So what’s he studying?”
Now, to a Jew who grew up in the Soviet Union, “What’s he studying?”
meant, “What’s he going to do for a living?”
My father answered, “He’s studying history.”
The Russian Jewish salesman frowned and shook his head.
“History? In this country, in America, no good. No work. But in Soviet
Union, study history? Very good. Lots of work. Every few years, change history!”
And that was true. Whenever Joseph Stalin changed his mind about someone or something, or the regime changed, or a new alliance was arranged or dissolved, the entire historical narrative was revised. It was called revisionist history. And then, of course, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain regimes collapsed an entirely new history had to be crafted. History, and facts, were always subject to authoritarian re-interpretation, and truth was a matter of policy, not reality.
This approach has now been adopted wholesale by the leaders of entire
nations, including those who pretend to represent conservative values
based on eternal verities and unshakeable truths. And because of this it
has become nearly impossible to find agreement in society on the most
basic facts. Truth has indeed ceased to be truth.
I am not just talking about politicians. You know the old joke: “How can you
tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” But back in the days
when that joke was funny, we were talking about the promises politicians
made and never kept: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Or, “I will keep our
boys out of the war.” Or even, “I did not have relations with that woman.”
Statements that weren’t worth the paper they weren’t written on.
Today it’s not the promises we can’t trust; it’s everything. It’s virtually every
single statement made by some leaders, in government, yes, but in business, the arts, you name it. It’s a cascade of shameless lies that pour out of some very powerful people. And it’s the entire way our fragmented media reports these patent falsehoods.
We do, and should, value freedom of speech. We just shouldn’t value the
freedom to deny facts and wildly invent lies.
I want to talk about how differently Judaism understands the word truth, emet.
Truth is associated almost universally with God’s essential nature. In fact,
the Hebrew word “Emet,” truth, is considered to be an aspect of God. The
Talmud tells us that, “Truth is the seal of God.” And the Zohar teaches that,
“There is no faith without truth.” As Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel puts it in
Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Ancestors, “The world is sustained on three
things: by justice, by truth, and by peace.”
In a larger sense, God is actually composed of truth; that is, God is truth.
As we say at the end of the Shema, Adonai Eloheichem Emet—God, your
Lord, is truth. Rashi teaches that the Hebrew word for truth, emet, is
formed from the very first letter of the alphabet, alef, a middle letter, mem,
and the final letter, tav. That is, the whole alphabet of the Lashon Kodesh,
the holy language of Hebrew testifies to truth. In the Torah service there is
a magnificent meditation, taken from The Zohar, that says, “The Lord is the
God of truth, the Torah is truth, the prophets are truth.” The God of truth is
found wherever there is truth, and God’s absence is felt wherever there is
falsehood.
Truth in Judaism is profound, eternal and unchangeable. It is not relative.
It is not the result of some careful combination of bombast, advertising and
weak memories. It is not the result of persuasive opinions repeated
endlessly. It is not based on aggressively propounded invented stories
pretending to be fact. It is not—not—the denial of facts in the service of
dishonest motives. It is not a lie that pretends to be true to one person or
party’s devious advantage.
Truth is real, unmediated and honest. It is fact. It is hard, concrete,
unshaken. And truth is, in essence, what God represents.
If you are distressed by the damage to truth taking place in contemporary society, by the repetitions of the Big Lie and the attempts to fragment our
world along deeply misinformed ideological lines, then you owe it to yourself to tell the truth about your own life, without varnish or veneer.
And if you can do that, then you can, and should, insist that those who
represent us, and who speak to the world about what is happening in the
world, do so based on facts, in truth.
And then every synagogue, and every house of worship, and every home, can become a sanctuary of truth.