Monday, September 23, 2024

Trust, Truth and Trump (and Netanyahu) (TOI)

Trust, Truth and Trump (and Netanyahu)

Among the myriad norms shattered by Donald Trump’s decade in presidential politics, the one that seems most damaging and counter to Jewish ethical standards is his degradation of truth.  Even more than his disdain for the stranger, his divisiveness, his war on women and his crusade against democracy, there are the lies, because the lies stand at the root of every other transgression.  So many lies.

When I heard Trump’s debate-night rant about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating dogs and cats, I laughed until I cried. Having heard this completely baseless rumor – this new iteration of the racist Great Replacement Theory – being juiced up pre-debate by JD Vance, I wondered whether Trump would be sinister (or crazy) enough to go there.

He went there.

Add to this lie Vance’s brazen admission to CNN that “created” the story to gain media attention, and the Wall Street Journal report that Vance ran with the story even after having been told unequivocally that it wasn’t true.

But none of this should surprise us.  Daniel Dale of CNN listed last week 12 completely fictional stories Trump has told in the last month. Among them are these whoppers:

  • Kamala Harris is thinking of bringing back the military draft
  • Trump was named “Man of the Year” in Michigan, an award that doesn’t appear to exist.
  • How “the Congo” has deliberately emptied prisons to somehow get its criminals to come to the United States. It’s not true and there is no country called “the Congo.”

Vance, Trump and Trumpism  thrive in the world of cloudy, conflicting narratives, outlandish lies and “alternative facts.”  As Timothy Snyder, the doyen of modern tyranny, has taught repeatedly since Trump first came to power, “Post-truth is pre-fascism…to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” Considering that Trump’s lies totaled 30,573 over the four years of his presidency, as counted by the Washington Post, it is miraculous that American democracy has stood up to the unrelenting pressure as well as it has.

And Trump’s deliberate degradation of truth is one of the many Jewish disqualifiers for this candidate for the highest office in the land.

The Talmud states that the commandment “Do not steal” includes the prohibition against stealing a person’s trust with misleading words.  It’s called G’nayvat Da’at.  The sages delineated seven types of thieves, and the theft of truth and trust was considered the worst. While shading the truth is sometimes acceptable for the sake of peace (as in when complimenting a loved one’s appearance), that is clearly the exception to the rule. Long before it became a pillar of democracy and governance, truth telling was already a pillar in sustaining relationships, and the rabbis understood that.

Trump has perverted truth through his distortion of words.

According to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God lives in a word.” Judaism understands words to be bearers of holiness. We joke about Trump-invented words like “covfefe,” but it is no laughing matter that under Trump, words have taken a battering.  Bigly.   Trump’s Orwellian attack on truth has taken a terrible toll on words like “patriot,” “freedom,” “free and fair elections” and “religion.”  He turns seditious rioters into “freedom fighters,” and victims of racism into “racists.”  “Facts” were virally infected when the word “alternative,” was allowed to get within six feet, as it did early on.

When truth is lost, trust in our institutions erodes.

Trust and trust are inextricably linked.  In the evening service, the prayer just after the Sh’ma begins with those two words, interlocked, “Emet V’Emunah,” “truth and trust,” in Hebrew. They go hand in hand.  The Talmud (Berachot 12a) notes that the word Emunah is included in the evening service in particular, because, in the words of Psalm 92, “It is good to give thanks unto God and to declare your trustworthiness at night (emunatecha balaylot).”  When things are dark and murky, after the sun has gone down, the truth is much more difficult to discern.  At times like that, when things are not so black and white, we have to rely on trust. The autocrat knows that once trust in government becomes muddy, trust in a single human being can fill that vacuum.

As an aside, Prime Minister Netanyahu is also not trusted because of his history of being less than forthcoming. He is not trusted, by Israelis and Americans alike.

Pew survey from last spring indicates that if Netanyahu wants to maximize buy-in for the current campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, the best thing he could do would be to back away and allow others, particularly Defense Minister Gallant, who has earned a far greater degree of trust, to be the spokesmen.  In wartime especially, trust in our institutions and their leaders is everything.  I know that as the High Holidays and October 7 approach, with American Jews are more keenly focused on Israel while the war expands, Israel will need all the friends it can get – and will do itself a huge favor by keeping the Prime Minister away from American cameras.

Meanwhile, for those supporters of democracy in America looking for a glimmer of hope, I can offer two glimmers, one from the real world of politics the other from sacred text:

  • Kamala Harris is human, and she is not immune to fact checking.  But an embrace of truth is part of her core value system.  As she writes in her autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, “The job of an elected official is not to sing a lullaby and soothe the country into a sense of complacency. The job is to speak truth, even in a moment that does not welcome or invite its utterance.”
  • And here’s a biblical verse, Proverbs 12:19, that offers some assurance that Donald Trump’s impact on this world will be fleeting.

    Quote courtesy of Sefaria

For those aching for a return to normalcy over the coming weeks, to a world where up is up and down is down, let that verse be your mantra. Inscribe it the doorposts of your homes, upon your gates, on your front lawns and behind your goal posts, alongside your neighbor’s dusty John 3:16 sign.

This verse is so central to Jewish life that one of the pillars of 19th century Hasidism, Rebbe Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger, took the first two Hebrew words, “Sfat Emet” as the title of his monumental Torah commentary.  His truths, like the Hebrew Bible’s, have stood the test of time.

Donald Trump’s lies will not.

And the importance Jewish sources have always placed on trust and truth are a good part of the reason around three quarters of American Jews will not side with Trump this November – along with his baiting and threatening us.

The only question is how much damage those lies will continue to do before they are, at long last, vanquished.

If you don’t have enough space on your lawn sign for that entire verse from Proverbs, try out Exodus 23:7 – “Mid’var sheker yirchak,” “From a lying word, stay far away.”

The beauty of Hebrew is that, without changing a single letter, the line can also read, “Midaber sheker yirchak,” “From the speaker of lies, stay far away.”

Seems like the Torah is trying to tell us something.

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