This week's newsletter focuses on the issue of truth.
michael
A word of Torah:
R. Simon said: When the time came for the Holy One to create the first human, the angels divided into factions and groups. Hesed-Love declared: Let humans be created because they will perform acts of lovingkindness. Emet-Truth declared: Let them not be created for they will be full of lies.
What did the Holy One do? God took Truth and threw Truth down to the earth.
The angels asked the Holy One: Master of the universe, why do you despise Your seal? (Truth is God’s seal: see Shabbat 55b). Raise Truth from the ground as it is written: “Truth springs up from the earth,” (Ps. 85:12). Adapted from Genesis Rabbah 8:5
Jacob needs to leave his family behind as his brother, Esau, seeks to kill him. Unlike Abraham’s journey (lekh lekha) to a promised land, Jacob has no goal or purpose except survival. He makes the journey not out of choice but out of necessity. Va-yetze, he goes out from all that is familiar and travels alone until he stops for the night. He falls asleep with only a stone as a pillow and he dreams of a ladder going up to heaven with angels going up and down it.
What is he to make of this dream? Certainly, it conveys to him that he is not alone on his journey, God is accompanying him. When he awakens, he proclaims: How awesome is this place! It is a gateway to heaven. We notice something else about the dream. The Torah says that the angels ascend and descend the ladder. Shouldn’t the order be the opposite, that the angels first descend from heaven and then go up from the earth? The midrash quoted above provides an explanation. In order to create the world, despite the angels’ accurate description of human beings, God has to get rid of Truth, by throwing it out of heaven. However, God is told that truth will rise from the earth.
This suggests that in our world we, humans, are the creators of truth. In Jewish mysticism, Jacob is identified with the quality of truth, not because he is always truthful, but because he struggles with the nitty gritty of life. He has moments of clarity when he sees God and holiness in the world. He will wrestle with an angel/God/himself and come away limping. He is the most human of patriarchs.
The process of throwing Truth down to the earth means that Truth will only exist in broken pieces. We have pieces of the truth. Each of us holds on to our truth. Often, we wonder how other people’s truth can be the opposite of ours. Yet no human has the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Even the pieces we hold on to tightly can be distortions of the truth. Our task is to struggle with our truth and others’ truths through the dark times in our lives. We hope out of that struggle angelic pieces of wholeness and holiness will emerge and ascend both to heaven and into the reality of this world.
Instead of a Psalm verse for the week--a quotation:
“From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth;
from the laziness that is content with half-truths;
from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth – O, God of truth, deliver us.”
Mordecai Kaplan
Song
Emet attah hu rishon
Emet attah hu aharon
The truth is God is first
The truth is God is last
from the liturgy
Or this could be understood as meaning from first to last God is about the truth
