Facing our Truth

Kol Nidre/5784

Rabbi PJ Schwartz

A parable.  Rabbi Shimon said:  When God was about to create Adam, the first human being, the ministering angels split into two competing groups. Some said, “let him be created!” while others cried “Let him not be created!”  The angel of Mercy said, “let him be created, for he will do merciful deeds.”  The angel of Truth responded, “let him not be created, for he will be false.”  The angel of Righteousness said, “Let him be created, for he will do righteous deeds.”  The angel of Peace said, “Let him not be created, for he will never cease quarreling.”  God looked at the four angels and what did the Holy One do?   God took the angel of Truth and cast her into the ground, hiding her deep within the earth, for God knew that it would be far too dangerous for her to dwell on earth among humanity.^[1]

This midrashic tale tells us something important about our own humanity: mercy, righteousness, and peace are within our grasp, but it is Truth, with a capital T, that remains hidden from us.  We can be models for compassion, goodness, and wholeness, but it is Truth that we may constantly be seeking to understand.

Truth, then, is such a precious commodity, as Mark Twain famously said.   There is  a Talmudic teaching about the Hebrew word for truth, emet.   The word is composed of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph-Mem-Tav, letters that could not be farther apart.   This implies that the all-encompassing nature of Truth is seldom found because Truth itself is expansive.   In contrast, the word sheker, lie, is composed of letters adjacent to each other.  Based on this insight, the Talmud concludes that “a lie is common, while the truth is rare.”^[2] 

Truth is becoming increasingly complex to understand.   On the one hand, we know that the world is filled with narratives, perspectives, and experiences that may diverge from each other.  We know that there are various truths that may simultaneously exist. Our tradition even affirms that there is more than one truth, and all opinions and perspectives are important to reflect upon and learn from.   No one person possesses the entire truth, and there are numerous interpretations, opinions, and perspectives that can be valid.      

On the other hand, we also know how dangerous Truth can be.   Our society is filled with misinformation that may be seemingly true, even if not necessarily true.   Comedian and late night talk show host Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe this phenomenon.  He notes:

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty… Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’^[3] 

It has become easy for us to manipulate the truth, to feel and even believe in a Truth.   So much so that our lies can become our Truth.  

In 2018, journalist Jessica Pressler’s story in New York Magazine about the alleged German heiress, Anna Delvey broke the internet.   She was accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks, financial institutions, and her friends in hopes of establishing a member’s only club called the Anna Delvey Foundation. Turns out, Delvey was really a Sorokin, a Russian-born, German-raised scam artist who fooled New York’s super rich and powerful into giving her more than $275,000.

Despite being convicted in 2019 on eight counts, including three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny, she continues to insist that her plans for the Anna Delvey Foundation were entirely legit. “I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything,” she told the New York Times in 2019.  In many ways, people believed her because Anna Sorokin believed her narrative as Anna Delvey.  She became so immersed within her fabricated life that she even believed it to be True.^[4]

We are reminded on this Yom Kippur that we are not the best judges of Truth.  Often our perceptions and understanding of what may be True may be distorted and often misleading.   We all fall prey to confirmation bias, the compulsion to find validation for what we want to believe is true. We can always find a website or an article that reassures us that what we want to be right is right.  How many of us have fallen into the trap of self-diagnosing our ailments using Dr. Google or WebMD?   Our identities become so caught up in our beliefs, that as psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes, “when facts conflict with our values, almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”^[5]  Psychologically, especially during times of stress, we may only see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and believe what we want to believe.  It is this very type of self-deception that keeps us from growing.

But I think there is something deeper here.   Alan Moranis, the founder of the Mussar Institute, links dishonesty to fear. We manipulate or manufacture the truth because we are afraid.  He writes, “A student acknowledges that she ‘tells a story’ ‘out of fear of being taken to task, to be seen in a negative light.’”  Once she had to miss a board meeting because it conflicted with her husband’s seventieth birthday party.  “I found myself preparing all kinds of stories that would “protect” me from these fears,’ she said.  He adds, “We lie because we fear facing someone else’s disappointment, or having disappointment ourselves, or fear of shame, or loss, or any number of other possibilities . . .^[6]

Fear is deeply rooted into who we are as human beings, often emerging when we feel powerless or have lost control.   It stems back to our Creation stories.  Remember, Adam and Eve hid themselves from God after eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. When they ate the fruit, “their eyes were opened and they realized they were naked,” so they made clothing. Knowing where they were, God nevertheless called out to them with one word, “Ayekah/where are you?” Adam replied, “I heard the sound of You in the Garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”  Hiding from Truth was created on that day, as Adam and Eve felt compelled to “cover up,” after facing their own truth of mortality and nakedness.^[7]

We learn from this that the journey of fear, shame, and regret is in part our own creation, it also means that we can overcome our regret, let go of the struggle, and not be locked into old behaviors.  The Rabbis make a play on words and say that Yom Kippur is Yom ki Purim, a day like Purim.  How is Yom Kippur like Purim? Because on Purim we put on masks so that when we look in the mirror we see someone else.^[8]  On Yom Kippur, we are faced with taking off those and seeing our own true selves, stripped away and naked: to acknowledge our mistakes and to be flawed.

Throughout these High Holy Days, we have been given the opportunity to be honest with ourselves.    We beat our hearts each time we acknowledge that we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken slander…” and we admit our failings when we say “Al Chet Shechatanu L’fanecha…for the sins I have committed against you….”  We are given a structured framework for acknowledging our shortcomings, forcing us to confront our Truths.   The repetition of these prayers reminds us that this transformation into our Truth is slow, indeed, such as a moth becoming a butterfly.

Recognizing these Truths publicly and privately demands from us a type of courage and self-awareness that I believe we all strive to have.  It expects us to be radically honest with ourselves and others, unabashedly willing to be vulnerable, and no longer concealing from fundamental Truths about who we are.  It is about peeling back the layers of self-deception and allowing the light of truth to illuminate our innermost being.^[9]

This type of radical honesty though must be paired with compassion.  The Midrash tells us that when we blew the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, God shifted his throne of din, judgment, to the throne of rachamim, compassion.^[10]  So, in our prayers on Yom Kippur, when we face God and ask for God’s forgiveness, we are asking to be judged kindly as we are choosing to tell our authentic Truths.  Perhaps, then, we should judge ourselves kindly, and give ourselves the grace and compassion we seek from others.

  We have the opportunity, time and again, to change, to grow, and to improve ourselves.  Most of the time, the only person standing in the way of our Truth is ourselves.  After all, if we can create our own narratives about Truth that are, in fact, untrue, what would it look like for us to write a story of Truth?  A story of how our self-perceptions and Truths can change, a story about us taking off our masks, finding true freedom – freedom from the mistakes of the past and compulsion to repeat them, a freedom to live a life of wholeness and integrity, a story about how we can reach mercy, righteousness, and peace, and how we can dig Truth up from the ground and embrace the possibilities that emerge.  As we stand before the Divine today, let us also stand before ourselves, with hearts wide open to the truth that resides within.

I’d like to conclude with another story.   There once lived a man who set off to look for the truth.  He scoured the world in search of it, giving up his possessions, his family, his home, all to search for truth.  After many years of wandering, his travels took him to India where he heard tales of a distant mountain.  Atop that mountain, people told him he would find that place where truth resides.   For many months he searched, until he found the mountain of which they spoke. He climbed for several days and finally came to the mouth of a cave.  He called into it and, a minute later his call was answered by the voice of an old woman.  “What do you want?”  “I seek the truth.”  “Well, you have found me.”  He entered the cave and there, in the back, saw the most horrific creature he had ever laid eyes on, huddled over a fire. Her eyes bulged out, one further than the other, and bumps covered her face. Stray teeth stuck out from her mouth and her long-tangled hair hung down in matted strands.  “You?” he said. “You are truth?”  She nodded.  Though shocked at her appearance, he stayed with her and found that she was, indeed, truth.  He lived there many years, learning her ways.  Finally, as he prepared to leave, he asked how he could ever repay her for all she had done for him.   “I would ask simply this,” she said.  “When you go out in the world and speak of me, tell them I am young and beautiful!”^[11]

Sometimes the truths we face are beautiful, redeeming, and freeing.   And other times, they are ugly, harsh, and difficult.   But that’s the thing about Truth – it’s complicated.  But as the gates gradually close during these next hours,  may we discover that there is a new way of being, a being in which our Truths are indeed truthful, and that this new possibility can become increasingly more real for us.