Truth For those who express difficulties with belief Rabbi Aaron Goldstein November 2011

One of my favourite sources of inspiration is the Sefat Emet (lit. the Language of Truth), the divrei Torah, the wisdom of the Gerer Rebbe, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter. They are stimulating to me, not because they always strike me as true but because they challenge me to seek truth.

Moses sings of God as being a God of truth (Deut 32:4) in his final appeal to the Israelites. If Truth is a divine attribute, then what happens when we question the ‘truth’ that we read of both in the Torah and our prayers?

A Talmudic passage suggest that in their prayer, Jeremiah (32:17f.) and Daniel (9:4f.) omitted words contained in Moses’ words because they could not apply them to their own reality. Jeremiah omitted a word when he saw the Temple being destroyed and Daniel on seeing his fellows being enslaved. They are criticised by those who plied a theology that God’s might and awe would hold good in the long-term: Israel would ultimately survive despite short-term suffering. R. Eleazar concludes that, “Since Jeremiah and Daniel knew that the Holy One insists on truth, they would not ascribe false things to God,” for in their circumstance, God desired to hide divine attributes attested to by Moses (bYoma 69b).

We know that science seeks fact by experimentation and observation. There are facts that are completely and utterly consistent, whilst others are more random, more chaotic. There are facts that form the foundation of the universe and its operations and those that are unpredictable or are occasional.

That is how we read the Torah as Liberal Jews. There are those universal truths that stand the test of time. They are true for all generations that have lived and will live after us. So when Rabban Gamliel provides his aphorism in Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Sages (1:18, p. 624 in Siddur Lev Chadash), “The world stands on three pillars: justice, truth and peace,” we do not disagree with him.

That there are circumstances in life where one or all of these characteristics are absent from a situation, that is also true. Indeed, at times we come across a word in a prayer that sticks in our throats. We are stuck there, unable to move on in our prayers. We might indeed become disillusioned so that we are unable to say, not just one word but any word in praise of God, or worse any prayer at all even for strength or hope.

That single word challenges our understanding of truth. It might lead us to lose an attribute that is closely connected to the Hebrew word for truth, emet, that of emunah, faith. How might we regain our ability to say that one word?

One approach is to acknowledge that some words we read in our liturgy have become obsolete. They held truth for many generations or in a particular milieu but no longer appeal to our sense of truth. The notion of appealing to God to ‘pour out Your wrath,’ on those who are considered are enemies is not a sensibility that we can accept. The concept of God that is a ‘Man of War,’ clearly offends our conception of our God or any divine being. Apart from it being far too anthropomorphic in language and thought, this is not our notion of a just God. This has been our approach to liturgy and continues to be so, occasionally we acknowledge that a truth once held was not universal.

There are other words that we will never say again, not because to the majority they are redundant. Rather, our personal experience does not allow us the lens to ever see that word being related to truth again. We might use the vehicles of prayer and study to explore them but always end up at a dead end. This might be in conflict with others around us who are able to utter such words with sincerity.

Another approach is to accept that the exhortations of our Scripture and Sages are in themselves worthy.

“Keep far from a false matter (Ex 23:7).”
“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely or lie to one another (Lev 19:11).”
“Who shall dwell you’re your holy mountain? Those who walk uprightly, perform righteous deeds and speak truth in their hearts (Ps 15:1-2).”
“Accept the truth from whoever it is (Maimonides, Shemona Perakim 4).”
“Truth is a light to the eyes; falsehood a trap for the feet (Tosefet le’Mivhar, 35).

To live truth in our lives, to live with integrity is in itself to express faith in God.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes that: “Children speak of true and false; adults know better. This is not to say that we have given up on truth, only that we now understand how elusive it is. Nor is it to suggest that truth is relative. Indeed, we now suspect there is an absolute truth and that it is mysteriously connected to what some people call “God.” God is not truth but standing in God’s presence may be.”

Eternal God, you know our weakness. You have given us a word for truth that in Hebrew emet constitutes the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. “Truth has to be broad enough to encompass all letters, all words, all of existence (Arthur Green in These are the Words, p.12).” We are not divine, our vision is unable to be all encompassing and we struggle with emunah – faith and what is presented to us as emet - truth. We are Jeremiah and we are Daniel. Yet we seek and struggle, sometimes not with the fixed words of liturgical prayer; but we do so faithfully and with integrity in the way we seek to live life.

If this is Your will, then give us strength and hope that on occasion, we might grasp the faith that our ancestors expressed of the truth they perceived. Our moments of clarity are as pure as our language of truth.

If you want to discuss issues raised please do contact me.

These thoughts were published in the November 2011 edition of Davar, the magazine of NPLS