“Political
language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
— George Orwell
1984,
the dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime, is experiencing a
resurgence in popularity today.[i] George Orwell’s seminal work introduced us to a
post-truth society of “Newspeak,” the
official language of the fictional “Oceania.” Newspeak, by design, restricts
grammar and vocabulary (think: tweets), thereby limiting people’s capacity to
express intellectual ideas, and particularly opposition to the regime. Newspeak
makes it possible for leaders to assert its slogan: “War is peace. Freedom is
slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Orwell well understood the danger of
totalitarianism in a modern, media-saturated world: “The very concept of
objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
When Stephen Colbert first introduced “truthiness” it
seemed funny (video here). As time goes on and we live it more and more, it seems decreasingly
funny.
Does truthfulness matter? Do facts matter?
In parshat B’Shallach, the Israelites have escaped
Egypt—almost.
Pharaoh and his courtiers had a
change of heart about the people and said “What is this we have done, releasing
Israel from our service?” [Pharaoh] ordered his chariot and took his men with
him; he took six hundred of his picked chariots, and the rest of the chariots
of Egypt, with officers in all of them. (Exodus 14:5–7)
The Egyptians pursued the Israelites to the shore
of the Reed Sea. Before them are the roiling waters; behind them the chariots
approach at breakneck speed.
In an extraordinary display of redemptive might,
the waters of the Reed Sea parted.
Moses held out his arm over the sea
and Adonai drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night and turned
the sea into dry ground. The waters were split, and the Israelites went
into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right
and on their left. (Exodus 14:21–22)
Again in Exodus 14:29, the Torah tells us, The Israelites had marched through
the sea on dry ground…
Certainly, from the standpoint of the 21st century,
we could say: This is an ancient story of the origins of the Jewish nations
told in hyperbolic and mythical language. There is no evidence it happened as
described, and every reason to believe that whatever historical kernel (if any)
is exaggerated and embellished to add layers of religious meaning. As Rabbi
David Wolpe famously said in a sermon in 2001[ii]: There is no reliable archaeological evidence that
the Exodus took place in the way the Torah describes—and it doesn’t matter.
That said, we can enter the world of the story, itself, and the Rabbis’ midrashic
commentary on it, which comprise a religious important conversation on crucial
matters of life, ethics, politics, purpose, and meaning.
When we accept the story on its own terms—without
getting stuck in the rut of “Did it happen that way?”—we are open to
understanding a subtle point made in a stunning midrashic comment. The
Rabbis imagine the conversation of two
people who are among the 600,000 (men) crossing the Reed Sea. “Reuven” and “Shimon”
are not characters known to us; this is the Rabbis’ way of saying, “Tom, Dick,
and Harry.”
When [Israel] descended into the Sea,
they found that it was full of clay, because it was still wet from the water
and so it formed a kind of clay… Reuben said to Shimon, “In Egypt we had clay,
and now in the sea again clay. In Egypt we had mortar and bricks, and now in
the sea again mortar and bricks,” hence But they were rebellious at the sea,
even at the Reed Sea (Psalm 106:7). (Exodus Rabbah 24:1)
Clay in the seabed? Mortar and bricks in the
seabed? Reuven and Shimon’s claims fly in the face of what Torah has told us
twice: the seabed was dry. While still standing in the dry seabed, Reuven and
Shimon were already constructing “alternative facts” that lessened God’s
miracle and cast a negative light on the redemption they were experiencing
at that very moment.
Reuven and Shimon were engaged in an ancient
twitter war of lies to steer the Israelites away from believing the reality of
God’s redemption that they had seen and experienced, and toward an “alternative
reality” in which slavery in Egypt was preferable to freedom in the wilderness.
Within three days, the Israelites grumble to Moses about water, having
forgotten what God did for them only three days earlier. Within two months, the
twitter masters among them convinced the people that life was far better in
Egypt.
In the wilderness, the whole
Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said them,
“If only we had died by the hand of Adonai in the land of Egypt, when we sat by
the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread! For you have brought us out into
this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death. (Exodus 16:2–3)
God rains down quail in the evening and manna in
the morning, but the grumblings continued. The Book of Numbers
elaborates and in its telling we see just how far the gap between reality and
distortions is.
The riffraff in their midst felt a
gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat
to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers,
and melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are
shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!” Now the
manna was like coriander seed, and in color it was like bdellium. The people
would go about and gather it, grind it between millstones or pound it in a
mortar, boil it in a pot, and make it into cakes. It tasted like rich cream.
(Numbers 11:4–8)
Torah presents this as a lack of trust in God. At
the core, however, are the nefarious lies that were told by Reuven and Shimon
and their ilk, which stuck in people’s minds and colored their thinking. It
distracted them from reality and from their mission, it undermined their trust
in God, and it planted seeds of distrust in their relationship with Moses and
Aaron.
Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal
with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream… When we are
overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty
quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It’s
called cognitive load[iv]—our limited cognitive resources are overburdened.
It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them,
and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it,
our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true.[v]
The sheer volume and repetition of lies propagated
by Reuven, Shimon, and their growing number of followers overwhelmed the minds
of the Israelites, convincing them of that life in Egypt had been better, that “freedom
is slavery” and “ignorance is strength.”
Reading 1984 in high school, Orwell’s
warnings not feel prescient. I lived in a country with a robust media and an
intellectual ethos promoting investigation and truth-telling.
And now? We live in a country in which the occupant
of the White House and his close advisors and surrogates lie continually. One
could glibly assert that all politicians lie, but the frequency and magnitude
of the administration’s lies is unprecedented — and exceedingly dangerous.
Politico fact-checked Mr. Trump’s campaign
statements and found that 70% were false.[vi] Since the election, we’ve been subjected to a
litany of egregious lies. Below are just the highlights.
• 1/18/2017: Trump tweeted about
writing his inaugural address (Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon wrote much of it[vii])
• 1/25/17: Two people being shot
and killed in Chicago during President Obama’s farewell speech (Chicago police
confirmed no one was shot on Jan. 10).[xi]
• 1/26/17: Mexican president
Enrique Pena Nieto agreed to cancel their meeting (Nieto cancelled).[xii]
Does President Trump believe everything he says? Do
his surrogates? Are the falsehoods, misrepresentations, and downright lies a
reflection of the president and his staff’s disregard for truth? Are they part
of a larger and insidious strategy to distract us?
And on the other side of the equation—because for
lies to become imbedded and effective, we have to believe them—do they reflect
our waning interest in truth and facts, in favor of Americans’ solipsistic
indulgence in feelings of anger, hatred, and resentment?
The midrash (Exodus 24:1, cited above) terms Reuven
and Shimon’s conversation a “rebellion.” And indeed, ultimately there was a
rebellion against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. It was led by Korach and
his minions. The seeds were planted not by principle disagreements and cogent
arguments, but by lies that were told and retold and absorbed by many people
experiencing cognitive overload. R. Elazar warns that lies can be tantamount to
idolatry. He cites Jacob’s collaboration in his mother’s plan to deceive Isaac
(Genesis 27:11). (BT Sanhedrin 92a) The deceit of Jacob, like the deceit in
which the current administration is daily engaged, is deeply wrong and
dangerous to us all, leading to a resurgence of bigotry and discrimination, a
frightening disregard for science and reason, and potential assaults on public
education and civil rights.
The erosion of the principles of truth and transparence
may be the most dangerous outcome of all because it has the potential to
facilitate, over time, the unraveling of our democracy.
Rebellion can also be righteous. Orwell said: “In a
time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” He further asserted:
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they
do not want to hear.” R. Shimon b. Chalafta (also in the midrash cited above)
considering the damage done by a mere Reuven and Shimon, said, “If a strong
person is below and a very weak one on the top, [the strong one] will prevail;
how much more so if the strong one is on top and the weak below?” His teaching
would strongly resonate with Orwell. It should ring warning bells for us.
Penguin is printing more copies of 1984[xiv] to accommodate the recent surge in demand. It’s
time to reread this classic.
© Rabbi Amy
Scheinerman
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[i] 1984 reached No. 1 on
Amazon’s sales reports. A stage adaptation is scheduled to arrive on Broadway
this coming June following its successful run in the U.K. and Los Angeles. See,
for example, http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/25/media/george-orwell-1984-best-seller/
[ii] http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/judaism/2004/12/did-the-exodus-really-happen.aspx
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/02/us/religion-journal-a-rabbi-s-look-at-archaeology-touches-a-nerve.html.
[iv] “Cognitive load” is
a term from cognitive psychology that was developed by John Sweller in the late
1980s in his studies of problem solving and applied to instructional design.
Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental exertion used in working memory,
i.e., the effort a certain topic or ask requires.
[v] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658. Konnikova notes, “False
beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies
constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may
end up swaying far more than they think possible. It’s little wonder that
authoritarian regimes with sophisticated propaganda operations can warp the
worldviews of entire populations. ‘You are annihilated, exhausted, you can’t
control yourself or remember what you said two minutes before. You feel that
all is lost,’ as one man who had been subject to Mao Zedong’s ‘reeducation’
campaign in China put it to the psychiatrist Robert Lifton. ‘You accept
anything he says.’”
[viii] Sean Spicer, after
berating the press in his first press conference, announced: “This was the
largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” David A. Graham, in The Atlantic. termed this one a “big
whopper” and noted that, “Spicer’s statement required dismissing all
available evidence: ridership count, eyewitness testimony, independent
crowd-counts, and Nielsen television ratings” — not to mention the photographs
disseminated by the National Park Service. Spicer refused to take questions
during this press conference.
[ix] On Meet the Press the Sunday following the
inauguration, Chuck Todd asked Kellyanne Conway why President Trump sent his
press secretary out to announce a demonstrable untrue claim about the size of
the inaugural crowd. Conway demurred that crowd size is less important than
accomplishments. Todd then asked why Spicer lied, and Conway famously declared,
“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave
alternative facts.”
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