Among the values that Pirkei Avot promotes, none Is hammered home more powerfully than truth. At Avot 1:18 Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel classes it with peace and justice as one of the three values upon which life on Earth depends. Acceptance of the truth is one of the signs of someone who is not a golem (Avot 5:9), and acknowledging the truth is listed as one of the 48 qualities demanded of anyone who wishes to acquire Torah (Avot 6:6).
Why should we need to emphasize the value of truth? In an ideal world this exercise should be unnecessary. Any group of humans that depends upon cooperation also depends on trust, and the establishment of trust itself depends on reciprocity. If there is no mutuality of trust, there is no basis on which to opt for collective behaviour and the division of responsibility within that group. However, we know that—at least on a short-term basis—in any group where truth is respected and mutual trust is established, an individual can obtain an advantage through not respecting the truth. This is the business model for fraudsters, confidence tricksters, cheating spouses and others. And it is this sort of deviation from the truth that Avot 1:18 in particular seems to be addressing.
Now, however, there is another threat to the universality of
the acceptance of the value of truth: this comes in the form of the creation of
so-called alternative narratives and conspiracy theories that are not based on the
provability of facts but on the plausibility or attractiveness of the narrative
itself. If anyone has yet to be
persuaded of the power of these creations, they should read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger,
a contemporary account of how political and social pressure can be conjured almost
out of nowhere by the persuasive power of an appealing alternative narrative.
It struck me this week that our perplexed reaction on
confronting these “alternative realities” and our struggle to live in a society
based upon a palpable fiction has been described in almost prophetic detail by
Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass. In these two remarkable works we find the protagonist,
Alice, grappling with Humpty Dumpty's proposition:
“When I use a word, it means just
what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less".
This places the meaning of all vocabulary—the tool of
communication—in the realm of the entirely subjective and deprives
well-accepted terms of their shared meaning. Where is no shared understanding
of meaning, there can be no meaningful debate.
Elsewhere in Carroll’s stories Alice’s perceptions of
justice and fairness, authority and status, law and order are so firmly contradicted
that she struggles to maintain them. She is forced to question her own identity—and
even her own existence. This is pretty well how we live in today’s world, where
basic human values and assumptions have ceased to be normative.
So far as Pirkei Avot is concerned, truth is a key value—and
the essence of truth is that it establishes what is real and what is not. But
there is no teaching in Avot that the concept of “reality”. There isn’t even a
word in Mishnaic Hebrew that accurately describes the term as we understand it
today. Does any mishnah or baraita in Avot talk about how we are to accept the
reality as it is, particularly when our Sages themselves question the
concept? The Gemara (Pesachim 50a) suggests
that the world we see before our very eyes, our perceived reality, is just an
upside-down version of the real reality. Where does this lead us? Any
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