Telling the Truth to Others
Kol Nidre : October 12, 2005/5766
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

In one of the commentaries on the Talmud, the rabbis ask: What’s the worst kind of stealing you can do? Would it be stealing a person’s tools so they can’t learn a living? Stealing a person’s food so they go hungry? No. According to the rabbis, it’s neither of these kinds of theft. The rabbis say that the worst kind of stealing is stealing a person’s thoughts, deceiving them, not telling them the truth, because when you deceive another person, it undermines your connection with them and shakes the very foundations of community (Tosaphot to Baba Kamma, 7.8).

Last year a student came into my office, clearly upset and disturbed. He said, “I thought I could do it. I thought I could pull it off but this is definitely not working.” He went on to tell a familiar story. He left for college while his serious girlfriend was finishing her senior year in high school. Over the year, he met someone at school and while he never intended it to work out this way, there he was, mid-way through his first year at college, with two serious girlfriends. (For those of you who have never been there, that’s the wrong number of serious girlfriends…) Needless to say, they didn’t know about one another. When I saw how upset he was, I asked, “What happened? Did one of them find out?” He said, “No. It’s worse that that. I found out. I found out that when I was lying to them both, I had nothing. I thought that I was buying some time to figure out what I wanted but I’ve been messing up both relationships. And it’s even worse than that because I think I really love this person here at school but how can you fix it once you’ve been living a lie?”

I was always taught that there are two reasons to tell the truth. The first reason is because it’s the right thing to do. The second reason is because if you don’t, at some point, you will always get caught. But this Kol Nidre, a time when we do everything possible to connect and reconcile with the people important to us, to bring more meaning and integrity into our lives, I want to explore a third reason why we should tell the truth: telling the truth is the only way to build real relationships in our lives.

Tonight, I want to take a closer look at telling the truth. A number of years ago, I spoke about the subject of truth, in a more general, philosophical way. But this evening, I want to move in and get more up-close and personal.

I know you are familiar with the rabbis’ teaching that the High Holidays are a time to consider and address things that you have done wrong (“ben adam l’havero”) between you and other people. If we have hurt, or wronged or lied to another person, we have to set that right before our prayers for forgiveness and atonement can be effective. We can learn a lot about how the rabbis understood our connection between people by the language they chose for this category. Now, the rabbis could have said “sins between people,” or “sins between neighbors,” but they don’t. They use the Hebrew word haver, friend, which comes from the root l’haber, to join with, to bond with something else. The word haver underscores the fact that in friendship, you are held together by certain bonds. On a deep level, those bonds between people are built on truth, the foundation of every real relationship.

Let’s start with a very small example. You meet some at a party and he seems really nice and interesting. You talk, he talks. He/she seems worldly and well traveled, and it’s only natural that you want her to think the same of you. So, before you know it, the trip you took with your family to France a couple of years ago becomes “When I was last in Paris…” Somehow the family vacation part of it has disappeared, and forget the fact that it was the only time you have been in Paris… The internship you did in Washington, where you really became intimately acquainted with how to collate copies on a Xerox machine, becomes, “When I was in Washington, organizing the conference on environmental justice…” Now, I’m not saying that this is the worst thing in the world and in fact, if the great conversation ends up as nothing more than that, and you don’t see the person again, no huge harm has been done. But …what if this is a person who you are meant to have a relationship with, whether as just a friend or something more serious? Then these little untruths are bugs in the program and they impact the foundation of the relationship. On one level, there’s just the discomfort of worrying that the person might find out from your friends and family that things are different than you presented. On a deeper level, you worry, would this person like me for who I really am or for the somewhat embellished picture I have drawn of myself? In the Talmud, the rabbis give the following direction: “Let your ears hear what your mouth speak” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Berachot, 2.4). If we want to build real relationships, we need to critically consider how we present ourselves to others.

Now, we all know that we should tell the truth. That’s not what I’d call deep spiritual wisdom. But the rabbis are trying to teach something else here. Too often, when we think about telling the truth, we think about the impact our words have on another person, the person we are talking to. I think the rabbis are trying to teach us that just as important, or possibly more important, is the impact untrue words have on the teller, not the listener. The rabbis teach that God has many names: Adonai, Elohim, HaRacham, and one of God’s names is Emet, Truth. Why would Emet, truth, be one of the very names of God? I think that the answer is that the rabbis essentially understood God as being about Oneness, Adonai Ehad, God is about unity. If we want to establish sound, real relationships with our friends, with our family, with people in our community, those relationships have to be based on truth. We can’t bond, l’haber, with another if they don’t really know who we are. If we don’t tell the truth, we are not only hurting another person, we are robbing ourselves of the possibility of having a real relationship with them.

I believe that this is true whether a friendship is in active formation, or whether it’s one we have had all of our lives. It’s no accident that so many of the stories we read and discuss during the holidays have to do with parents and children: Abraham and Isaac, Ishmael and Hagar, Sarah and Ishmael. It’s almost as if the rabbis were saying, “You want to enter the New Year? Well, you’d better stop and think about how things are going with your parents (and for parents here, it’s important to think about how things are going with your children as well.) The rabbis understood how complicated the relationship is between parents and children but I’ll say one thing for certain: if that relationship doesn’t eventually become grounded in truth, both you and your parents lose.

There are lots of true stories I could tell at this point. I’ll tell the one about John (not his real name) who came into Tufts as a bio major and is now, actually, a successful and happy musician. John came into Tufts as premed. His father was a doctor and he was excited about becoming a doctor too. It so happened that John was also an amazing guitar player (I know this because I played with him.) Now, this isn’t a story about “His parents wanted him to be a doctor but he had to follow his heart and play the blues…” This is a story about what happens when you stop talking to the people you love about what’s really important to you.

John played in a band at Tufts and over his four years at school, the band just kept getting better and better. His parents were proud that he was multi-talented but not enthusiastic about him becoming a professional musician. John dealt with this by progressively withdrawing from his family. Oh, they would visit and talk about this and that, but the things he was really excited about, the directions his band was taking, the new music he was writing, he pretty much kept to himself. John and I were talking one time and he made a passing comment about what a drag it was to visit home. It used to be really nice to see his folks; now it had changed. It was stressful and superficial and boring. Now, the John I knew was interesting and passionate about his music, but he wasn’t sharing any of that with his family. He was trying to be the good kid he was back in high school. Not only did his parents not know who he really was, but he didn’t even recognize himself when he visited home.

The rabbis teach that the foundation of the world is truth. If you have a good foundation, then your world stands firm, grounded in real connection. If you’re going to go home and present some smiling image of yourself, with only the parts that you think your parents want to see, there are two ways for them to react. One, they will respond to the you who you are presenting, not the you who you are, and the whole quality of your relationship will be compromised, or, if they are perceptive people, they will know you are shutting them out and you lose the possibility for a deeper connection with people who know you and who care about you deeply.

And while this is primarily a “congregation” made of children, not parents, my advice to parents is the same. If you are not honest with your children, about your own passions and goals and failures, if you don’t make the transition from seeing them as children who need your care and attention every moment to seeing them as adults, who will make their own thoughtful decisions, if you don’t trust that they have heard the lessons you want to teach them, then you’ll never be able to take the next wonderful step of appreciating and enjoying your children as the adults they have become. What’s fascinating about the very difficult story of Abraham and Isaac that we read on Rosh Hashana, and I don’t think I ever noticed before this year, is that throughout this difficult story, Abraham never lies to Isaac. Abraham always tells Isaac the truth. As they walk together to the mountain where God has told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Isaac asks, “Where is the sheep for the sacrifice?” Abraham says, “God will provide the sheep,” which God does. Abraham stands with Isaac and tells his servants, the two of us will go up and worship and both of us will return – which, even though they return separately, is true. Even though “the binding of Isaac” is difficult and problematic, there’s an element of truth which undergirds the story. The recurring phrase about Abraham and Isaac is “v’yalchu s’neyhem yachdav,” “the two of them walked together.” When parents and children are truthful with one another, together they can make it through difficult, trying circumstances.

And sometimes, telling the truth is as much about saying good things, those things that are true but difficult to say, telling our friends how much they mean to us, telling our brothers and sisters, our parents, our children, our spouses, how much we love them, how much we appreciate all they do for us. That precious truth binds us together as well.

Yom Kippur presents us with a wonderful possibility. We can assess how we have acted in the past year and we can readjust, turn towards a new direction. We can decide to bring more truth and integrity into our lives, for our own sake and for the sake of the people who mean so much to us. This will be the year, even stronger and better than the good years before. May you be sealed for a year of health and blessing in the book of life.