They explain the letters of the word emet, Aleph/Mem/Tav all
stand on two legs, each letter touches the line with two ‘feet’. The letters of sheker stand on one foot only
– the shin, kof, resh, as you can see, only have one foot on the line. The lesson from this observation – truthful
actions stand firm, actions based on falsehood do not.
Next, they demonstrate that the letters of emet, truth, are
far from one another – the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew
alphabet as we can see on the handout.
The letters of Sheker, falsehood, are bunched together. The lesson from this observation, truth is
hard to attain – it requires effort over the long haul, striving, reaching,
stretching ourselves to grow. Falsehood
is readily at hand – as the Great Rabbi and Master Yoda said to Luke Skywalker
his student in Jedi Yeshiva, the quick and easy path is the path to the darkside
of the force.
As the 2016 presidential election kicks into its next gear
with Super Tuesday now behind us, and with more debates to come – I will share
that I tend not to watch the debates themselves. I find much more interesting the fact
checking analysis the day after. I find
I’m interested for sure in the ways the candidates propose to tackle the issues
of the day, but I’m equally interested in knowing how truthful they were in
speaking about other candidates and in speaking about their knowledge of past
events and policies.
Does our tradition require that candidates for public office
be truthful? If we assume that in its
purest form the desire to hold office is to do the most good for the largest
number of people, then what role should truthfulness, honesty, and clarity of
knowledge of facts be a part of how we decided on who to vote for?
Today we heard the special Haftarah for Shabbat Shekalim,
the story of the new King Yeho’ash who noticed that after 23 years in office,
the Temple priests were not following instructions he gave in his first year as
King – instructions to the priests that from the donations they received to
support themselves they should allocate monies for making repairs to the Temple
building. The Temple building was in
disrepair.
How could it be that the people most involved in the life of
the Temple, the priests whose job it was to carry out God’s sacrifices and sing
God’s praises, would, in effect, perpetuate a falsehood for over 20 years and
let the Temple fall into disrepair?
If the people who represented the nation before God were not
true, and King Yeho’ash decided to remove their responsibilities in this area,
then should we not also hold our public officials, those who represent us –
ourselves, our families, towns, states, and nation to a standard of truthfulness
in speech and practice?
The Torah is clear that we must strive for truthfulness and
honesty. We must have honest measures of
length, weight, and capacity, honest balances and weights such that when
customers make purchases they can be sure they are purchasing the correct
amount at the agreed upon price.
If we misrepresent ourselves, or others, we are guilty of genevat da’at, literally stealing
knowledge, taking away other people’s God given right to know the truth of
where we stand in relation to others based upon information we have.
And just as King Yeho’ash did, it is up to us to maintain
the expectation of honesty in our society.
God instructs us to offer constructive critique to our fellow human
beings so that we do not bear guilt – guilt from not speaking up since someone
else’s dishonesty may negatively impact not only that person but others as
well. As Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried writes
in his Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, the one who has the opportunity to prevent the
commission of a crime and does not do so will be caught with the crime
himself.(1:95f)
In evaluating a candidate for office we also look to that
candidate’s record. Perhaps the
candidate is truthful and behaves justly now but he or she may have done the
opposite in the past. A question we
should ask is whether we should judge negatively someone who argues he or she
will work for the benefit of others now but did not do so before. Rabbi Ganzfried teaches, “It is forbidden to
derive any benefit from a notorious thief or robber…all of whose property is
presumed to be either stolen or robbed”. (Kitzur 4:73) The presumption here is strong and
wide-ranging, but once there is a breach of honesty – unless that breach is
corrected by showing the person was not in fact dishonest – there is a
presumption we may have that tinges the perception of that person’s future
actions.
When the Hebrew High School students and I discussed these
questions over the past week, the tragic consensus was that politics inherently
involves falsehood and coloring the perception of the truth, in other words it
is in the DNA of the way political systems work that there are lying, cheating,
misrepresentation and the like. The
Midrash echoes this idea saying that only people, not God, created falsehood
and exaggeration. (Pesikta Rabbati 24)
Our Hebrew High students are not voting in this year’s
election, but we did discuss also how we might choose to evaluate a candidate based
on his or her record of truthfulness at the very least within the campaign –
perhaps that record would predict how dependable the person would be in office,
perhaps…
Our tradition values truthfulness but also recognizes that
as human beings we are flawed and that each value we teach is a hope, a
striving, a prescription for a world that we hope to create. Jewish tradition recognizes moments when a
white lie, a careful adjustment of our perception of truth, is required but 9
times out of 10 Jewish tradition demands from each of us to strive to live by
the broad-ranging word Emet that spans the Hebrew alphabet and is the source of
strength as the letters of the word remind us how truth makes us all stand up
strong on our own two feet.
Shabbat Shalom.
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