The Search for Truth

Yesh koneh olamo b’sha’ah ehat, “There are those,” explains the Talmud, “who acquire eternity in a single hour.” (Avodah Zarah 17a). For Pope Benedict XVI, now Pope Emeritus, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, that hour occurred on April 19, 2005. The College of Cardinals gathered to hear him speak in the hours preceding the conclave that would ultimately designate him as Pope. But more than serving as an important step in his own ascension, his homily that day bequeathed to the world language with which to characterize what he, and so many others, understood to be the pathology of our age. I believe that it will be this homily, specifically his coining of the phrase “the dictatorship of relativism,” that will be forever associated with his legacy. “How many winds of doctrine” he wrote, “we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking …” Tossed about like a small boat on waves …“thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth.” For the then Cardinal Ratzinger, only the clear, unwavering and unimpeachable creed of the Church could provide stability in this storm-tossed age, in which one is “swept along by every wind of teaching.” “We are,” he preached, “moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

This weekend, as he retreats to Castel Gandolfo for retirement, I thought it would behoove us to reflect on the Pope’s clear and passionate concerns regarding the dangers of moral relativism. Our age, perhaps more than any age, suffers from, to adapt Walter Lippman’s language, the kinds of “acids of modernity,” which cause the truths of any one moment to suffer a continuous process of corrosion, withering in the face of the ever-changing claims and counterclaims of the age. We live in a social-media-driven world in which ideological shifts occur with a spontaneity and rapidity unimaginable in a previous era. But the assault on truth comes not merely from the challenge of Facebook or a 24-hour news cycle. There is a greater challenge – an older if not ageless challenge – to seekers of truth. Namely, to live in an age, as described by the book of Judges, where “everybody does what is right in their own eyes.” A Lance Armstrong era in which the greatest threat to objective truth does not come from the outside world, but from within us – our own humanity! That ever-supple muscle of self-justification, which allows our failings and shortcomings, no matter the degree, to be excused, mitigated, softened and justified. Wrongs made right by the most powerful dictators of relativism of all – you and me. In fact, my only quibble with the Pope’s words is the contention that the condition he described is new at all. Ever since the Garden itself, ever since the first sin – have we not always sought to relativize our failings? I imagine this is why our own late great rabbi, Milton Steinberg, z”l, entitled one of his sermon book collections Only Human – the Eternal Alibi. We are and have always been masterful moral contortionists. Yeah, we fell short, but was it really so bad? Isn’t it all a little gray? Isn’t morality more of an art than a science? Is there ever really an objective Truth?

It may come as a surprise to you to learn that when it comes to the search for truth, our own tradition takes a far more modest approach than Cardinal Ratzinger. According to Leora Batnitzky in her book Idolatry and Representation, it was Moses Mendelssohn who asserted that one of Judaism's principal contributions to the world was its ban on idolatry. Idolatry represents the dangerous need for absolutes, the drive to give permanent substance to the certitudes that lie beyond our grasp. Understandable as this craving may be, such a demand is idolatrous, for it seeks to concretize and then elevate that which can never and should never be given full expression.

Which is what this week’s story of the Golden Calf is all about. In what is understood to be the low point of the wanderings in the wilderness, the children of Israel wait for Moses to return from the mountain with God’s commandments. Left at the base of the mountain for a bit too long, they begin to crave security, or as Ibn Ezra notes, to actualize “the divine presence in physical form.” (32:1) As grave as the sin of the Golden Calf may have been, the most telling scene actually occurs as Moses returns down the mountain, beholds the sight of Israel’s idolatry and hurls the two tablets onto the ground. Why, commentator after commentator has asked, would Moses commit such an act? A spontaneous act of uncontrollable rage? Maybe, like an angry parent, a dramatic deed to shock Israel out of their misconduct? The most intriguing and convincing explanation I found was that of the Meshech Hochma, Rabbi Meir Simcha Hacohen of Dvinsk, who connected the smashing of the tablets with the sin of the Golden Calf itself. It was at that moment, as Moses watched the Israelites praying to the idol, that he understood their need for certainty, to give material form to truth, and he feared that the Israelites would deify the tablets just as they had done the calf. It wasn’t out of rage or for dramatic effect that Moses broke the tablets, rather he broke the tablets to teach Israel that truth and certainty belong to God and God alone. Truth does not reside anywhere else, definitely not in the Golden Calf, and not even in the tablets inscribed by God .

Contrary to a variety of other faith traditions and philosophies, Judaism has always contended that as commendable as it may be to seek truth and certainty, it is ultimately not the provenance of human beings. In fact, depending on how you look at it, the smashing of the tablets was neither the first nor the last time that truth was thrown to the ground. According to a fascinating midrash told of the creation of the world, as God was about to create the first human being, the angels, each one representing a particular attribute, began to argue whether humanity should be created at all. Mercy said yes, because humanity would perform acts of mercy. Truth said no, because humanity would undoubtedly perform acts of falsehood. Righteousness said yes, because humanity would perform acts of righteousness. On and on this went, until God took Truth and threw it to the ground – the message of the story being that in order for humanity to exist, truth itself had to be sacrificed. Contrary to Cardinal Ratzinger, this midrash, and others like it, has far more modest expectations when it comes to the acquisition of truth. Like the curve of an asymptote, Truth may be approached and approximated but never fully achieved. Our very existence is born out of, and contingent upon, a less than full grasp of the Truth.

All of which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. Because if the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know everything, then how exactly are we supposed to assert a moral code? How do we distinguish between right and wrong and hold ourselves and others morally accountable?

Let me raise a small, but local example. Last week I was in dialogue with some teenagers in our community who were telling me about what goes on in some competitive high schools. They told me about the abuse of Ritalin and other prescription medications, prescriptions meant for ADHD or other disorders, but taken by some teens, even with parental knowledge, for additional focus and edge. And as eye-popping and depressing as it was for me to hear these stories, it was fascinating to listen to the teens argue about where, if anywhere, the line is between right and wrong. Why is this different from drinking several cups of coffee to stay awake? And if it is OK to drink coffee for caffeine, then what about caffeine pills to stay awake? And by the way, who is to say who does and doesn’t genuinely deserve medication? I sat there listening to them debate among themselves, trying to put moral order to their universe, struggling to parse out a moral code in a world where the road to relativism is so readily available to all. While it is easy to pick on teenagers to make the point, I imagine that for the adults in this room, these questions occur with equal if not greater frequency. If you have ever taken a shortcut, ever chosen a lesser evil for a greater good, ever forwarded an email to another without the knowledge of the original sender, ever told a policeman that you were just going with the flow of traffic, doing what everyone else does – then you, my friend, like those teens, are living on that slippery slope, figuring out a way to manage the gray area, just like the rest of us.

So what’s the answer? I have no idea. But as the tradition teaches, sh’elat haham – hatzi teshuvah. Sometimes a wise question is half the answer. If every one of us allowed for the possibility that none of us are in possession of the whole truth, there is no doubt in my mind that we would all get along better. It is not just a matter of “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” though that is a big part of it. It means that we allow ourselves to function in this world without demanding that for you to be right, someone else needs to be wrong. As Niels Bohr famously stated, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.” Be it the debates of Hillel and Shammai, or those in our own day, we would all do well to remember that it when it comes to assertions of truth, it is the presence of humility, not certainty, that serves to bolster our claims.

As we steer between the Scylla of relativism and Charybdis of absolutism – perhaps the most important muscle group of all is what is called in Hebrew zehirut, vigilance or watchfulness. Each and every one of us must, according to Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzatto, be watchful of our conduct, scrutinize our actions and habits, be ever-vigilant as to whether we are doing right or wrong. (Mesillat Yesharim, Chp 2) Even with the best of intentions, pride, ego, inertia and hubris blind us from seeing and doing what is right. Moral vigilance is a lifetime project and it doesn’t matter if your garb is clerical or laic. Traps and temptation lie in wait for us all. Which is exactly why, if we live our lives always aspiring for truth, but ever aware that it is not ours to claim fully, in other words, reflectively, with caution and watchfulness, we may just be lucky enough to avoid the pitfalls that come with being human.

Some two hundred years before Ratzinger, another German writer, Gotthold Lessing, counseled, “It is not the truth which someone possesses or believes he possesses, but the honest effort he has made to get at that truth [which] constitutes a human being’s worth.” Indeed, in a refrain later repeated by Solomon Schechter, Lessing pondered aloud, “If God held fast in his right hand the whole of truth and in his left hand the ever-active quest for truth, albeit with the proviso that I should constantly and eternally err, and said to me: ‘Choose!’ I would humbly fall upon his left hand and say: ‘Father, give! For pure truth is for you alone!’”

Not Moses, not any of us, is ever offered a full view of what we seek. At best it is through the cleft of the rock that we see this world in which we live. Nevertheless, with caution and care, we must step forward slowly on our path, each one of us aspiring towards truth, ever seeking to do what is right and good in the eye of the Lord.