Temple Beth El Blog

Well, I – for one – am glad that those confessional prayers did not end with chadeish yameinu k’kedem, you know, that “renew our days as of old” stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy the music. But if I am asked to think about returning to the “good old days” once more, I don’t know what I would do.

I tell you: If you were around during those “days of old”, you’d not want to return there. Yes: the days of creation that you read about seem very bucolic and serene, and a return to Eden has been our dream for two-and-a-half millennia. But just like other nations’ creation stories and their tales of the gods’ jealousies and deceits, the Israelite stories of God and the angels who compete for our God’s attention also have their accounts of trickery, disagreement, and violence.

Here is what I mean:

According to Midrash Rabbah[1], when God was pondering the question of whether to create a human being, the four Ministering Angels – God’s closest personal assistants, according to our lore – immediately took opposing sides on that question.

Some said, “Kol Hakavod, God, great idea, go to it”, while the naysayers argued, “Big mistake, God. Do not create humanity”. So, you see, there was hardly unanimity on the answer to the question.

Then, four ethical values, personified as other celestial beings, stepped forward to testify about their predictions about humanity’s future.

The value of Kindness said: “Yes, create humans, because they will, in time to come, perform many acts of kindness.”

The value of Peace said: “Don’t create humans, because their souls will be full of discord and strife.”

The value of Justice said: “Please create humans: They will engage in just and righteous actions.”

And the value of Truth said: “You better not create humans, God, because nothing but lies will come forth from them.”

God did not think ‘lies’ were a component of the human species that the Divine One had in mind to create. But the reality of Truth’s statement somehow got under God’s skin, so to speak. The Divine One picked up Truth by the scruff of its neck and threw it toward the earth.

The Ministering Angels pushed back.

“God: You know humans will lie. You know they’ll be deceitful. What’s the matter, can’t You stand the Truth? And, by the way, why did You treat Truth, Your most important earthly value, so shabbily?”

God immediately saw the error committed, repented, and elevated Truth from the Earth.[2] This is the reason – says the Midrash – that Psalm 85 has truth “sprouting forth” from the earth.

Despite the great amount of lying or evasions in our speech and intention, Truth is still a vital ethical standard to preserve.

As I wrote in this year’s High Holy Day program, I am moved by Psalm 85’s reunion of these four values, where it says, “Faithfulness and Truth have met; Justice and Peace have kissed. Truth will sprout forth from the earth, Justice will look down from heaven.” Each of these values needs our protective care and cultivation, and it is the job of every person, through our personal and communal acts of goodness. And we need to ensure especially that Truth regains its rightful place in the human world.

Look: We know that Truth and Fact have been – shall we say – “in debate” as of late; Truth’s pessimistic assessment of humanity’s need to lie is proven correct every day. So let us begin by examining this working definition of Truth, in order to have a common basis of understanding.

Truth is:

• The absence of falsehood … and it is more than that
• It is “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”
• It is speaking, living, and loving in completely authentic and transparent ways
• It is the willingness to acknowledge the consequences of our actions
• Truth can be confrontational – agonizingly so – and yet is, ultimately, best delivered directly and without filters
• More importantly, Truth is a value to be sought, acquired, cherished, preserved, and diligently employed
• And with proper intention, Truth never gets depleted; that is, the more one practices speaking Truth, the more truthfulness grows deeply into the soil of one’s character.

In the structure of Psalm 85, we see an intersectionality between Truth and Justice. Where the Psalm offers that “Truth will sprout forth from the earth; Justice will look down from heaven”, I interpret from this passage not merely a case of beautiful cosmic convergence, but also a statement of causality:

When Truth will sprout forth from the earth – that is, when we humans work to:

• prepare the soil for Truth,
• plant seeds of Truth,
• nourish Truth regularly,
• cultivate Truth through trimming it back occasionally and pulling out the weeds,
• harvest Truth,
• and venerate the Truth instead of trying to conceal it

– only then will Justice look down from heaven, and grant measures of Justice and Righteousness to the world.

Sadly, we, as a species, are not yet ready to practice this level of honesty, as we can see for ourselves that Truth is clearly under assault these days. What I find most distressing are the intentional manipulations of Truth we hear all too often, in order to achieve some personal, political, or factional end.

Consider, for example, the ongoing turmoil over the teaching of the history of the Black experience in America. There should be no debate about this matter; it should be abundantly clear and accepted by all that we must understand – far better than we have – the 400 years of the Black experience in North America.

And so, here is some Truth: It is likely that only a few of us have studied the subject of ‘Black history in America’ in any great detail. To those who did, kol hakavod, that is great. For those who studied it as part of a general social studies or history class, it may have been part of the curriculum, or it might have been the efforts of the exceptional, subversive, or iconoclastic teacher who injected this subject into class discussions.

What about future generations? It is our responsibility to prepare the soil of Truth for those who follow us in this world, which is why we must learn well, and then teach about the systemic inequities and injustices in our society. This can lead us to create a world where every human being can live a life of dignity and respect.

Our children need to be prepared to take on their share of this task when they enter the adult world. Yet, without knowing the True history of how our nation came to be, they cannot understand the underlying causes of the issues we face, and therefore, will be ill-equipped to meet the challenges they will confront as adults.

There are those who would not agree with these statements. The forces of White supremacy and racism confront school board members, and they also support state legislators, in pressuring them to reduce or bar the teaching of the Black American experience from their schools.

• They want to declare the teaching of historical racism and its impact on our society as divisive and racist.
• They also strive to prohibit anti-racist and diversity training among teaching and administrative staff. If we believe that teachers have the task – and the amazing power – to influence and guide our students, then they must be properly equipped to perform this part of their jobs, and given license to do so.

Such legislation has been proposed in at least 22 states, and has been passed in at least five[3]. Here in Wisconsin, proposed Senate Bill 411 would permit the state to punish school districts who wish to educate their students about these topics by withholding some of their state education funding. The proposed legislation would also allow parents to bring a civil suit against those districts for any alleged violations.

These proposals tear at the very fabric of Truth: they allow Truth to be concealed, discounted, and denied. They permit the prejudices of uninformed, biased, and selfish legislators to eclipse the professional judgments of educators whose job is to guide American children to their greatest potential. They prohibit Americans of all colors from joyfully and completely reaching out to offer mutual help and friendship.

Nothing could be more divisive than these proposals to suppress and contradict the Truth about our nation’s systemically racist past. We are, in our day, thankfully learning and acknowledging much about the behavior of rogue law enforcement officers, the violent activities of White supremacists (who, as we Jews know, don’t like us too much either), and – in general – about the systemic racism that has denied Black Americans equal access to the American Dream. The Truth is that we have much more to learn.

Rather than suppressing and prohibiting exposure to the Truth of our nation’s racist past, all Americans should study, ponder, debate, and reflect on this history. For when we do – when we bring the Truth of our nation’s past to light; when we understand not only the history but also the implications of more open viewpoints in the future – then the attribute of Justice will, indeed, peer over the edge of the heavens, look down upon us, and shower us with its life-sustaining waters. Righteousness will be present, and Peace and Kindness will follow.

I know that Yom Kippur is not necessarily the day to dream, a word here which could mean ‘permitting one’s imagination take one away from the world of reality’. Yom Kippur is a serious day of contemplation and reflection and real-world action. Yet I do wish to dwell for a few moments on the dream of Gloria Ladson-Billings, the first Black woman to become a tenured professor of education at the University of Wisconsin.

One of the areas of focus in her working and academic life was on the educational accomplishments – or the lack thereof – of Black children. She saw few succeeding, and dared to wonder why. For her, the Truth about the success of Black children was not in the difficult home environments they might come from. It was from the dearth of Black educators and educational role models. Black students were not exposed to Black educational leaders who could demonstrate how to guide, persuade, and enrich learning.

She began asking questions about teachers of students and their classrooms. She took a hard look at how children were taught. She examined how teachers view Black students and about how those attitudes affected their teaching. She asked herself, ‘What could be done to help teachers succeed to help their students?’

“I had two hunches,” she is quoted as saying. “One was that black students who found themselves in classrooms with skilled teachers could be academically, culturally, socially and civically successful. My second hunch was that African American teachers, whose numbers were dwindling, were key to black student success.”[4]

Perhaps she was being humble when calling her intuitions as “hunches”, but she pursued this dream with a vital and passionate energy, which has turned her hunches into a Truth, which has made a serious impact on the lives of students.

This is a small but important vignette. Small, because it will be some time until her teachings make a significant impact outside of the circles of academia. Though, there, too, in Madison, schools, she has had success already.[5]

Such is the influence of Truth. We see that

• Truth can enliven the dormant human passions for work, for advancement of knowledge, and for human improvement.
• Truth can release our inhibitions and allow us to develop honest and candid relationships with one another.
• Truth can also help us determine when to rebuke someone with the Truth, or when to gently offer encouragement to people who simply have made errors.

Each of us makes mistakes; each of us speaks unTruths that represent our thinking, and may not be tied to our genuine intent or our persona. Still, Maimonides reminds us to remember the value of Truth, lest we fall prey – he says – to “the vanities of the times”, and we “pursue years of self-importance and idleness”.[6]

According to our lore, Rabbi Judah Loew both used and abused Truth when he created the Golem of Prague.

That creature was formed to serve the goal of Truth, distinguishing the serious antisemites from the casual ones and carefully determining appropriate punishment for the Jew-haters of the times.

As the last step of the monster’s animation, Rabbi Loew was said to have inscribed the Hebrew word for Truth – “emet” – on the forehead of the Golem. And yet, when life entered his body, the Truth he found compelled him to plunder, murder, and take other revenge on the ignorant people of Prague.

To stop his creation from performing further deeds of violence, Rabbi Loew removed one letter, the alef, from the word emet on the monster’s forehead, turning emet, Truth, to met, or Death. At that moment, the Golem went into “sleep” mode.

Perhaps this tells us of the dangerously slim region between Truth and Death, an area of which we must be cautious. Yet for us to find that paradise we all desire, that place where our “days will be renewed as of old”, we must take the risk to find, articulate, and defend Truth from those who would otherwise destroy it.

The prophet Zecharia had a prescription for us. He recommended us to ‘speak the truth: one with another’; that we should ‘render Truth and Compromise within our gates.[7]’ May our desire for Truth and Justice allow us to find them it in our day, and in the years to come.

G’mar Tov. May you have an easy fast and a good year ahead.