Truth on the Mind

^{24 Cheshvan 5779 | November 2, 2018}

Parshat Chayei Sarah

Rabbi Dr. Wendy Zierler

Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track - Class of 2021

These days, truth is constantly on my mind. The more talk I hear of “Fake News,” “Alternative Facts,” and other such mind-muddling concepts, the more I find myself reaching for some overarching understanding of truth, especially in Jewish sources. It is for this reason that my HUC-JIR colleague, Dr. Joshua Garroway and I have been hard at work for more than a year organizing a two-day Symposium called “These Truths We Hold: Judaism in the Age of Truthiness,” which will take place next week in Los Angeles (November 11-12) at Stephen Wise Temple. Likewise, it is for this reason, that I recently took down my copy of Israeli novelist and Bible enthusiast Meir Shalev’s Reishit (Am Oved 2008), a collection of brilliant literary close readings of various biblical “firsts,” to see if Shalev’s book might possibly include a treatment of the first biblical mention of emet, the Hebrew word for truth. Alas, no such luck; I would have to compose my own account and analysis of this foundational first.

As it turns out, the first instance of the word “emet” in the Bible occurs in this week’s parasha, “Hayei Sarah,” in the somewhat unlikely context of Abraham sending his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac. I refer to this as an unlikely context in part because of the many gaps in knowledge and relation that characterize the servant’s errand. Instead of Abraham carrying out this important task himself, he commits it secondhand to a servant. Not just that: in dispatching his servant, Abraham offers precious little instruction as to whom exactly to select as a wife, other than to say that the bride should hail from his birthplace and must be willing to follow the servant back to Canaan to marry Isaac. With this scant guidance, the servant petitions Abraham’s God to work with him providentially to make things happen (“hakreh na”) according to the servant’s seemingly arbitrary design:

It is worth noting the centrality of the word hesed and its function as an organizing principle or leitmotif in this extremely long biblical chapter. Israeli journalist and scholar Yoel Rappel notes in his essay on Hayei Sarah in his book, Al haparashah; iyyunim vera’ayonot befarshat hashavua, that the story of the choice of Rebecca as wife for Isaac begins with a request for hesed from God and culminates with a request of hesed from the young woman’s family, suggesting the importance of acts of lovingkindness in the formation of this founding biblical family and the society meant to ensue from it. It is important to note, however, that when the servant apprehends that God has answered his request, he repeatedly thanks God not just for hesed but also for emet, thereby furnishing the first occasion of the word emet in the Bible:

Later in his recapitulation of this moment for Betuel and family, he also adds the word “emet” to his description of his path to their house:

He then follows this account of his miraculous, divinely guided meeting with Rebecca, with a request that they do him the kindness and truth (hesed ve’emet) of telling him outright whether Rebecca will follow him back to Canaan to marry his master’s son (24:49) In verse 50, Rebecca’s brother and father, Laban and Betuel, answer in a manner both affirmative and non-committal-- the very opposite, as it were, of emet. Indeed, following their seeming acquiescence to the servant’s plan, both Laban and Rebecca’s unnamed mother attempt to stall the servant, pointing to a corrupt desire to accept the gifts proffered to them but not actually to part with Rebecca. In the end, they decide to ask Rebecca whether she’ll go with this (strange) man, most likely assuming that there is no way she’ll agree to go. Instead, Rebecca compensates for her brother’s lack of straightforwardness with a laconic and definitive אלך -- I shall go. (24:58).

To be sure, the word emet occurs in many places in the Bible, as do various other permutations of the root אמן, which classical exegetes and philologists alike believe to be the root of אמת. The first actual appearance of this verb root is in Genesis 15, where God promises progeny to the still childless Abram; Abram counters that he currently has no heir other than Eliezer of Damascus; God responds by showing Abram a vision of the stars as a measure of how many descendants he will eventually have, all of which is followed by the ambiguous line: והאמן בה'; ויחשבה לו צדקה-- And he believed in the Eternal; and God/he counted it to him for righteousness. I say ambiguous, because while it is clear from the text who is doing the believing, it is not at all clear who considers or counts all of this as righteousness -- God or Abram. In any case, the mention of Abraham’s servant Eliezer in this earlier scene establishes an interesting connection between Genesis 15, an early instance of Abraham yearning for descendants, and Genesis 24, where Abraham sends his servant off to secure these descendants by finding his son a wife. And it frames all of this under the sign of emet not as a kind of juridical or empirical fact but as form of faithfulness or steadfastness.

What I mean by this distinction is that the usage of emet in Genesis 24, both as a partner term with hesed, as in verses 27 and 49, and as a stand-alone modifier (derekh emet) in verse 49, is noticeably different than other instances in the Bible, where it often appears together with the modifier נכון and with the noun דבר, to connote a verifiable fact. In Deuteronomy 13, for example, in the case of base leaders influencing the dwellers of a particular to worship idols, the people are enjoined to seek out the facts before they take action against the city:

Interestingly, this connotation of emet as fact rather than faith is indirectly intimated in our chapter, too, in Laban and Betuel’s hedging response to the servant’s request for a straightforward yes or no on the proposal of a match. On the one hand Laban and Betuel seem to concede the divine provenance of this whole episode -- מה' יצא הדבר -- and on that basis, instruct the servant take Rebecca and go back to Canaan. On the other hand, they smuggle in a cagey equivocation—לא נוכל לדבר אליך רע או טוב -- “We cannot speak unto you evil or good,” suggesting an unwillingness to to draw or speak of any juridical or verifiable conclusion on the basis of the servant’s davar. Laban and Betuel don’t buy into the idea of God’s operation in their world, either as a matter of fact or faith, despite the servant’s elaborate attempts to stage and recount a proof thereof. The servant, who stands open-mouthed and astounded (mishta’eh, verse 21) as God brings Rebecca to him gratefully does, hence his repeated use of hesed and emet in his prayers and thanks. We don’t quite know what Rebecca believes, but her immediate willingness to act kindly to the servant and to follow him back to Canaan, strongly suggests a similar, faithful disposition.

What does one make of the fact that the first usages of the word “emet” in the Bible come in the form of faith rather than fact? In these truth-challenged times, does all of this muddy or clarify the well-waters of truth? Or does it establish a basic ground for all of our truths in the notion of a kind, loving, faithful God who rewards those willing to act faithfully on behalf of the dissemination and generational transmission of God’s truth?

Seizing on the fact that the word emet begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and ends with the last, BT Shabbat 55a teaches:

According to this teaching, what makes truth divine and what allows it to be embodied in human beings is a comprehensive attention and faithful fulfillment of the entire Torah. Transported into the marital and familial context of our chapter, emet connotes a faithfulness for the long haul, over spans of time and distance, a posture of attentiveness, care and love. I specifically mention love here, because the long and winding story of Genesis 24 closes with the second appearance of the verb a.h.v. in the Bible--the first in the context of marital relations--as the Bible describes Isaac taking Rebecca as wife -- ויאהבה -- and he loved her. The first appearance of the verb to love in the Bible appears at the very beginning of the Akeidah story with God’s commandment to Abraham to take his son, his only son, the one he loved--an episode that culminates under the sign of fear rather than love, as the word love disappears from the previous description of the son-- עתה ידעצי כי-ירא אלוקים אתה, ולא חשכת את-בנך את-יחידך, ממני, Now I know that you are a God-fearing man seeing that you did not withhold your son, your only son, from Me.

Our chapter, however, which introduces emet, also restores love, all in the framework of seeking out the next mother in the Abrahamic line. Given all of this, it is worth calling attention to the relationship, as scholar Deena Aranoff observes, “between the most common meaning of the Hebrew root ‘amen [אמן] faithfulness and constancy, and its less common meaning: to rear or nurse a child.” If the Akeidah was a spiritual exercise of detachment from earthly, familial bonds in order to attach to an utterly transcendent inscrutable God, this chapter suggests a countervailing model of divine truth as fidelity and constancy that can be modeled and replicated within the interpersonally attached and committed context of family. As Aranoff argues, the linguistic “link between childcare and faithfulness recovers continuities between household life and the religious imagination and the ways in which maternal activity provided the vocabulary for more abstract theological concepts.” Our first encounter with divine truth occurs, then, in the context of imagining a God as parent and loving partner. It is not an accident, I would argue, that our current American crisis of truth is also accompanied by lurid stories of familial infidelity, with accounts of children being taken away by their parents at the border, and with unspeakable acts of violence. In the Bible, at least, the notion of emet begins with constancy and fidelity: to God, our partners, our children, and our communities. From thence, I would argue, spring other notions and epistemologies of truth.