Truth so often is nothing more than a perception, a subjective reckoning that has nothing to do with how a thing actually is. One of the reasons that our people suffers the pains of anti-Semitism from people who have never known a Jew is the result of a subjective understanding of what people think the truth is. How else can you explain the horns that Michelangelo included in his statute of Moses? How else can you explain the fear of black people that is so endemic in Europe? How else can you explain the existence of a slave trade in America that exited from before independence until the Civil War? And how can you explain the ideas of separate but equal in other than subjective perceptions of the truth?
Our world suffers a lack of truth, or at least a paucity of people who seek the truth. We are willing to bet our lives on hunches and dogmas and ideas that are out-dated or just plain wrong. Given a choice to decide what truth will be, we often bend to our fears. Much that is stalled in the peace process in Israel and in every country that fears war is false perceptions, taken as the truth, of imagined dangers.
In the Torah portion that we read this week, we again speak of the spies who quietly entered the Promised Land and brought back reports of fear and danger. When they found large fruit, they imagined only large men who were warriors and who would certainly defeat Israel. When the looked around at the land flowing with milk and honey, they only saw graveyards for their people. They looked at the world through eyeglasses shaped according to their perceptions of the world. They had an inability to see the world as it really was. They had an inability to see possibilities. Wherever they looked, they could only see problems.
In the end, they were punished for their view of the world, for their determination that settling Israel would be harmful to them. They were punished because for them, the proverbial glass was always half empty, when they could have described the glass as half filled. They were punished because they refused to form a positive approach to truth, as they understood it.
We may see the world in black and white, but in truth all is in many grades of gray. There hardly is any clear truth without exception. Any man at any moment has the capacity to see the curse and the blessing in any group of circumstances. Any man has the capacity to find good where others find evil, to find opportunity where others find despair. Everyman has the ability to put a positive spin on his conception of truth.
Indeed, the Jew has an obligation to find what is positive in the world, or to change the world to a positive direction when all looks bleak.
In the Torah, the End of Days is beyond our ken, but as a people we must continue to try to get there. In the Torah we never reach the Promised Land, but Torah is about getting there. For us the Messiah has not yet arrived, but we wait daily for his coming.