The truth is absent
We are in an inverted age, when many core and foundational beliefs have been uprooted and overturned. What does this mean in the context of Judaism? What should we make of the fact that truth, a core value in Judaism and one with which we actually identify as a trait of The One, is no longer part of our experience?
Thousands of years ago, sages in the Talmud wrote about two kinds of dishonesty: one is to conceal the truth, and the other is to lie. Both are equally abhorrent in the eyes of Jewish law. I am confronted with these blatant examples of deception every day…not from friends or family, but from other inputs: political ads in my snail mail, social media posts, “news” reports, advertisements on my search engines, and countless more.
So, certainly this notion is not new, and has been in play in our own generation for decades (more than we think). Naively, I kept thinking the situation would get better. People would ‘come around’, ‘come to their senses’ and finally realize that we were headed down the wrong path. Not so.
In a commentary on Psalm 126, Steinsaltz says that our time now, when we are in exile from our homeland, is one of distortions that seem normal, such as the distinction between truth and lies.
For me, the situation that started the frightening ball of twisted-lies rolling was the outright denial of the Holocaust / Shoah1. Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in 1993—over 30 years ago, grappled with the prevalence of those who persistently denied history. Then, I found it hard to comprehend that there were so many who refused to believe2 acknowledge the horrific truth laid bare in photos, testimonies, witnesses, maps, and artifacts. There was just so much——sometimes I felt too much.
Could there have been a more unlikely subject of a denial than the Shoah?
Lipstadt named a primary denier by name, British writer David Irving, and it was equally unfathomable to me that he sued her for libel in the U.K. The fact that this trial took place there was itself a stab in the stomach. Why? Defamation law in England puts the burden of proof on the defendant! So, the plaintiff does not have to prove falsehood.
He lost, but the world still remained stuck in the persistent ‘world is flat’ mode, repudiating the mountain of evidence she brought forward3. In her book she writes that “many of us have been taught to think there are facts and there are opinions — after studying deniers, I think differently. There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies”.
More recently, an ADL 2023 report on instances of Holocaust denial online notes that all but one (X) social media platform has a Holocaust denial policy, however, not a single one enforces it by taking action against a user who doesn’t conform to it. Is it no wonder then, that a recent poll by The Economist finds that 1 in 5 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth.
I do take this personally, since I’m a living example of the devastation that was caused by the Shoah. My parents’ families were decimated.
But truth is of little value when words like genocide are verbal swords, thrusted against the very victims of its’ devastation years before. Use of this word is not questioned by mainstream media either. It stands there, as a witness again to the deniers who persist in telling a lie, what we now euphemistically refer to as an ‘untruth’ or ‘falsehood’.
Our sages don’t offer an encouraging picture of what will occur in times when truth and lies are inverted…and unfortunately these are our times.
“…the wisdom of scribes will putrefy, and people who fear sin will be held in disgust, and the truth will be absent….normal family relations will be ruined…” Talmud, Tractate Sotah, 49b
The sages then ask, so what do we rely on then? When things are so broken, and so fallen apart…what then? Their answer is to rely on Hashem. My response is…but what if that is broken too?
What are we to do when part of the answer is part of our problem? How can we come to terms with the majority of people who do not ascribe to a moral Judge of the universe? In our relativistic society, when everyone’s truth is individualized, how can we come together about a shared value based on a universal principle of right and wrong?
I do not ask this question in vain.
I ask it to motivate anyone who reads this to speak out and speak up against lies. We are at a tipping point when our very foundations are being shaken to our core. The earthquakes are not just happening ‘out there, somewhere’. Our tradition, beautiful as it is when it speaks about the symbiotic connection between us and the earth, tells us a shocking fact. Earthquakes happen to the earth, but the subsequent reflective tumult of our times? We feel those aftershocks in our very being.
What we do now matters. It is now easier than ever to amplify our own voice. Do not be silent. Do not let the deniers of reality walk away with the prize of your lifetime—- your moral center.
Shoah means “total and utter destruction”, and originates in the Bible. I (and others in the Jewish community) prefer this word because the word Holocaust technically means “total burnt offering” which implies that the event was an “offering”, containing overtones of a sacrifice acceptable by God. Also, the word Holocaust has been used in other contexts to describe other horrific events.
I was a casualty of our current word games as I was writing this. You can’t believe facts about the Shoah. You know them. You don’t believe the truth, you know it. So, I crossed out the word so it would stand in testimony to our times. “Believe” is for when you don’t have knowledge. It’s the reason that in Judaism there is a distinction made between “belief” in God and saying there is knowledge of God. The Torah never mentions “belief” and instead assumes we acknowledge God {the first commandment for example}.