Yom Kippur: Truth

Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2018/5779

When I was about the age of our TIPTY choir participants, in the year 1969, I fully and completely believed that Paul McCartney of the Beatles had died in an automobile accident. Paul was dead. There was proof of it! I had read all about it in several pop music magazines and even in major newspapers.

The clues were all there – the 28 IF license plate on the Volkswagen on the cover of Abbey Road (meaning that Paul would have been 28 years old “if” he had lived). And in that same picture Paul is dressed for burial, Ringo like a funeral director, George as a gravedigger, and John as God.

If you played parts of Revolution 9 on the white album backwards (a trick you can do with vinyl) you could hear the words “turn me on dead man.” The famous front cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s album features a left handed bass guitar in flowers on the ground like at a graveside. On the back cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, Paul is the only Beatle turned with his back to the camera. The song lyrics “without you” are right over his head.

At the fade out to the song Strawberry Fields Forever you can clearly hear John Lennon saying “I buried Paul.” On Magical Mystery Tour, three of the Beatles are wearing red carnations. Paul’s is black. Another photograph has Paul in uniform seated at a desk with a large sign in front of him that says in full caps: “I WAS.”

There were, in fact, hundreds of provocative clues indicating that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike contest winner. Clearly someone was trying to tell us something, and I was transfixed.

The only problem was… that it was total nonsense. Narishkeit as we say in French. Paul wasn’t dead. He’s still not dead. He is 74 and performing, live.

The reason I remember this so vividly almost 50 years later is because at the time, and for almost two full teenage years of my life, I completely believed it. It wasn’t until a few years later when they were talking about how idiotic all the fans had been to believe this stuff, that I realized I was one of those idiots!

The year this phony story broke we were living in Jerusalem. It was a year of uncertainty. We had uprooted from northern California – boom – to the Middle East. New friends, new language, new home, new schools: everything was turned on its head. Unlike the Israel of today, there was not a lot of English being spoken or printed so we were glued to the twice daily BBC broadcast and the Jerusalem Post weekly newspaper which I read cover to cover. I was eager for information and evidence of certainties and truths.

Everybody deals with anxious uncertainty in different ways. I remember that same year my father was smoking his way through two and a half packs of cigarettes every day. It was the brand where the company told you that real tough men smoked them. When we would beg him to kick the habit he would respond: “Don’t worry,” he’d say, “I’m too mean to die!” As it turned out, he was wrong. Convinced of his immortality by a corrupt tobacco industry peddling false facts… as hard truth… to sell their product.

We latch on to supposed truths because they make us feel better. We join chat rooms and receive Twitter feeds that confirm things we already believe. You see? I was right! If the information supports our point of view then it is true. If it does not then it is false. As weird as it sounds, “facts” are becoming relative.

The Colbert Report famously coined the word truthiness. Something that seems pretty truthful, but who cares if it is factual or not? He would joke: “I don’t like encyclopedias. They are elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true. What did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that’s my right…”

Colbert continued, “Ladies and gentlemen [the truth] comes from your gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than in your head? Look it up. Somebody’s gonna say I did look it up and it’s wrong. Well, mister, that’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time try looking it up in your gut.”

There is nothing new about people presenting things as facts that are simply not true. There have been many articles recently testifying to the “death of truth” in our time. But truth has been getting the shaft for centuries, and few groups of people in the world know the dangers of “false truths” as well as the Jewish people.

We are, after all, the children of Treblinka, the concentration camp that the Nazi propaganda machine portrayed to the world as a comfortable existence and a model of the benevolent protection the Third Reich gave their Jewish citizens.

We are the children of Alfred Dreyfuss, the French Jewish Captain accused falsely of treason in a famous trial in 1894. One that lasted 12 years and was viewed with fascination the world over by folks who believed in his guilt without any sound evidence.

We are the children of the blood libel, perhaps the oldest lie in human history. For 2,000 years, we were subject to the fraudulent accusation that we are Christ killers. We know the cost of absurd lies portrayed as truth.

And the beat goes on. Only this last year the Polish government sought to rewrite their own history, making it illegal to describe Polish death camps, or to assert that Polish citizens had any part in the Holocaust. Why the bold lie? To make people feel better about their origins, I suppose.

As we journey into the future, the accuracy of the historic past gets harder to prove. Today, nearly one-third of all Americans, and almost half of Millennials believe that substantially less than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. And while there is evidence of over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos, more than half of Americans can’t name a single one. When you have that kind of gap in historical knowledge it is so easy to fill it with tripe.
We are also the children of a warming world. A world which contains an alarming number of people denying sound, factual, compelling climate science. Why? Because it is scary, and when we don’t want to think about something we invent “alternative facts.” We peddle it as the truth.

This is, of course, human nature. We all fall prey to falsehoods and misinformation. And every one of us carries around facts and stories about ourselves and others, only some of which are accurate.

I, for example, have told the story of my mother’s parents endless times, based on what my mom told me growing up. How they lived in the little village of Malsch. How, when things started going badly, her parents got her and her brother out but they were relocated to Gurs, a French internment camp in the Pyrenees, where they suffered for about two years, and then the train that took them directly to Auschwitz where they were killed the day they arrived.

I was telling this very story to Yehudit Shendhar, the assistant director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, a few years ago when she was here speaking. As I got to the part about the train going directly from the camp to Auschwitz she started shaking her head. “What?” I asked. “What?” She said: “That could not have happened.” And she recited some facts from her detailed studies indicating that no trains went directly from Gurs to Auschwitz.

This was stunning to me. Not only was the sacred history of my grandparents’ demise being called into question, but the reality was that I myself had been guilty of telling an inaccurate story about that crucial moment in history for almost half a century.

It made me wonder, how precise is any of the information encased in my skull? How much has been altered in the course of communication and my own fabrication? I’m a creative guy. I make stuff up!

It is human to bend and stretch information. The Torah and the Midrash themselves are stunning examples of the sages trying to make sense of a complex universe by making up stories.

Curiously, Judaism teaches that there are certain times that lying is allowed, even perhaps encouraged. To save a life, to prevent future harm to someone, even to exaggerate a point. In Genesis, even God lies. When Sarah laughs that her husband Abraham, at 90, is too old to father a child, God says “Oy, that is not going to play well with the old man!” And proceeds to tell Abraham that Sarah was laughing at her own inability to have children at her advanced age.

OK, so God didn’t say “oy.” I made that up.

It should be simple to spot the truth and to stop lying, right? As the Torah teaches, midvar sheker tirchak: “distance yourself from words of falsehood” or from the holiness code: lo t’cha’chashu v’lo t’shak’ru ish b’amito, “you shall not deceive or lie to one another.” It’s even one of the Ten Commandments: You shall not bear false witness.

To be human is to twist tales and exaggerate. But don’t present them as facts! As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”

I remember seeing a church marquee that read: Avoid Truth Decay, Brush up on your Bible. We are emerging into an era of “truth decay.” A post-truth era that includes now familiar phrases such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” and “phony science.” We used to say, well, here is my opinion. Now we play hard and fast with facts, which is scary.

We live in an era of climate change deniers, birthers, and anti-vaxxers; history revisionists and internet trolls who talk on Facebook about fake Americans; even Facebook “likes” (thumbs up) are robot generated. Websites that present false facts about candidates in elections.

This has been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies us with customized news feeds that reinforce our preconceptions, allowing us to live in our increasingly narrow silos. Why do ads keep popping up on my computer for Pepto-Bismol and reissues of old Beatle albums? Because they know who I am and what I want!

I love my Google search and my Wikipedia. The democratization of information is quite appealing. But there is a danger in replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” blurring the lines between fact and opinion, between informed argument and blustering speculation. Oh yes, I am a big fan of the internet, but let’s remember: The internet is supposed to reflect and transmit reality, not create it!

What does it take to get something taken offline these days?

My brother and sister-in-law are therapists in Newtown, Connecticut and lived through two horrific years following Sandy Hook, consoling and counseling the bereft families. Alex Jones, the perverse bombastic radio personality who called Sandy Hook an invented political scam and who publically listed the address of a family he claims never lost their child, is only now finally losing his radio sponsors and stands to get yanked off the air once and for all.

Mark Zuckerberg, maybe the most influential businessman of his generation with 2.3 billion Facebook followers, refusing to take down posted Holocaust denial messages because their lies may not have been “intentional.” What’s that about? Why does it take a court case and the biggest-ever one day stock market nose dive to have something like that taken down off the net?

Our Jewish tradition encourages healthy dialogue. Vikuach, or argumentation, is actually a mitzvah. Maybe that is why Jews are such excellent doubters, skeptics, critics, and kvetches. These are legitimate parts of our faith. But competing facts? No.

Should we be concerned when those holding the highest positions in the land of the free are spewing baseless venom that is gobbled up by haters? Hannah Arendt notably wrote in 1951: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but (ordinary) people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, between true and false, no longer exists.”

There are times when we just can’t handle the truth. But that doesn’t mean it should go away. There will always be a human attraction to false stories that soothe us in our ignorance, when the truth is too hard to swallow. It is human nature to do this!

This holiday of Yom Kippur is a holiday unlike any other in that it asks us to tell the truth about ourselves. To end the year-long embrace of fictions that let us get away with what we’ve done and said. Coming back every year, looking at our lives, stunned at how different we are from the year before. How we crafted stories and goals and dreams and how they didn’t come to fruition.

Over the years of my career I have given a few hundred eulogies, and every once in a great while someone will approach me after the service and say: “You know, that was a lovely eulogy… who were you talking about”? So I was comforted to read that in the Talmud one of the occasions you are permitted to lie is when you are writing a eulogy.

Why would that be? I think it’s because at the end of our life we want someone to tell a really good story about our years on this planet. We want our true lives to be about caring, and generosity and integrity. We want to inspire others who will come after us with things we actually said and did.

A year ago at this time we really had hopes to write a better story for ourselves, and then life got in the way… We made promises that were hard to keep. We said things to ourselves and to others that simply weren’t true. That’s the way we are wired.

On this holiday we want to go home again. To return to the land of our souls. I don’t know… maybe that is why it is such a colossal letdown at the end of the Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls down the curtain and behold, there is a crazy old man pulling ropes and talking into a voice modulator. We so wanted to believe we could gain a heart, that we grow a brain and become wiser, or finally gain courage, or just get back to Kansas… And it turns out some snake oil salesman was lying to us the whole time.

Let’s not be snake oil salesmen to ourselves.

On Yom Kippur we are not allowed to play loose with the facts. The truth is not always easy to swallow, but it beats the heck out of living in a world of lies that masquerade as the truth. We have gone down that rabbit hole before, and it’s dangerous.

This world is a real place, and there are verifiable facts out there. We need to be seekers of that truth, about ourselves, about each other, about our nation, about the physical planet.

Our official credo is Shma Yisrael – listen oh Israel. Maybe our words this year should also be: “You know, I could be wrong.” Or: “maybe I should rethink that…” or “you make a good point!” Or, “wait, who just published that fact?”

The word for truth itself spans the entire Hebrew alphabet – Alef, the first letter, mem – dead center – and taf – the last letter – together spell emet.

We are a people of language. We are the people of the book. We are Supreme Court justices, peddlers, bankers, woodchoppers and water drawers, speech writers, physicians and advertisers, scientists and poets. But above all things, let us be truth seekers.

It may be a more difficult task in the coming years than ever before, but this is a quest that should never cease.

And that’s a fact.