Vayeḥi ויחי
With Vayehi, the book of Genesis, full of conflicts within the family, comes to a serene end. Jacob, reunited with his beloved Joseph, sees his grandsons, the only such scene in the Torah. He blesses them, then, on his death-bed, blesses his twelve sons. He dies and is buried in the cave of Makhpelah with his parents and grandparents. Joseph forgives his brothers a second time, and he himself dies, having assured his brothers that God will eventually bring the family back to the Promised Land. The long patriarchal narrative is at an end and a new period – the birth of Israel as a nation – is about to begin.
The first of the following essays looks at the values of truth and peace in Judaism, and which takes priority when they clash. The second analyzes the names of Joseph’s sons and what they tell us about his state of mind when he named them. The third looks at the paradoxical idea that, through teshuva, we can change the past. The fourth shows how forgiveness is an essential part of the life of freedom, for it alone liberates us from being held captive by memory and resentment. Jewish time, defined by repentance and forgiveness, is the defeat of tragedy in the name of hope.
The White Lie
Keep far from falsehood” warns the Torah in Exodus (23:7), and throughout the ages, the complex of issues surrounding truth and falsehood have raised important ethical questions. Is it permitted to tell a white lie? If a murderer is at large, brandishing a gun, and his intended victim takes refuge in your house, are you obligated to tell the truth when the would-be killer knocks on your door and asks, “Is he here?” Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of modern times, said Yes. We should always tell the truth, whatever the consequences.1.Immanuel Kant, “On a supposed right to lie from altruistic motives,” Berliner Blätter, September 1797; English translation in Sisela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 267–72.
For Kant, morality is a matter of universal rules that apply in all circumstances, so that permitting a lie in one case would involve permitting it in all cases, which would rob all communication of trustworthiness. Judaism says No. Not only is it permitted to tell a white lie to save a life, it is also permitted to do so for the sake of peace.
The sages derived this from two episodes, one in Parashat Vayeḥi. Jacob has died. The brothers fear that Joseph will now take revenge for the fact that they sold him into slavery. They devise a stratagem:
And they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father left these instructions before he died: ‘This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly.’ Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father.” When their message came to him, Joseph wept. (50:16–17)
There is no evidence that Jacob ever said these words attributed to him. The sages therefore assume that what the brothers said was in fact a lie. They conclude: “It is permitted to change [i.e. to tell a white lie] for the sake of peace.”2.Yevamot 65b.
They find evidence for this principle in a second source as well. When three visitors come to Abraham in his old age and announce that in a year’s time Sarah will bear a child, Sarah laughs, saying to herself: “After I am worn out, will I now have pleasure, and my husband is old?” (18:12). God tells Abraham that Sarah disbelieves, but tactfully leaves out part of her reasoning: “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’” (18:13). There is no reference to Sarah’s remark about her husband being old. Thus, the sages conclude that even God Himself may “change [the truth]” for the sake of peace.
Both sources are necessary. If we only had the evidence of Joseph’s brothers, we could not infer that what they did was correct: Perhaps they were wrong to lie. And if we only had the evidence of God’s words to Abraham, we could only infer that a half-truth is permitted, not an actual lie: God does not say anything false – He merely omits some of Sarah’s words. Both together serve to establish the rule. Peace takes precedence over truth.
To understand a civilization, it is necessary not only to know the values and virtues it embraces, but also the order of priority among them. Many cultures value freedom and equality. The difficult question is: which takes precedence? Communism values equality more than freedom. Laissez-faire capitalism values freedom more than equality. They share the same ideals, but because they assign them different places in the ethical hierarchy, they result in completely different societies.
Truth and truthfulness are fundamental values in Judaism. We call the Torah “the law of truth” (Malachi 2:6). The sages define truth as the signature of God.3.Shabbat 55a.
Yet truth is not the highest value in Judaism. Peace is.
The reasons for this are twofold. First is the extraordinary value Judaism attributes to peace. The nineteenth-century historian, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, said: “War is as old as mankind. Peace is a modern invention.”4.Cited at the beginning of Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (London: Profile, 2001).
He had much evidence to support him. Virtually every culture until modern times was militaristic. Heroes were mighty men of valour who fought and often died on the field of battle. Legends were about great victories in war. Conflict – whether between the gods, the elements, or the children of light against the children of darkness – was written into the human script.
Against this backdrop, the prophets of ancient Israel were the first in history to see peace as an ideal. That is why the words of Isaiah, echoed by Micah, have never lost their power:
He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. (Isaiah 2:2–4)
This vision of a world at peace was not centuries but millennia ahead of its time.
At the same time, Judaism took a more subtle view of truth than did the philosophers of antiquity. In logic, a sentence is either true or false. There is no third alternative. In Judaism, by contrast, truth is many-faceted and elusive. Of the disputes between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, the Talmud says, “These and those are the words of the living God.”5.Eruvin 13b.
Indeed, some believe that, though now the law is in accord with the school of Hillel, in the Messianic Age it will follow the view of Shammai.6.This idea was generally maintained by the sixteenth-century exponents of Lurianic Kabbala. The rulings of the school of Shammai were generally stricter than those of the school of Hillel. Hence, the law follows Hillel in the present age when spirituality is weak; it will follow the more demanding rules of Shammai when the spirit has won its victory over physical instincts in the Messianic Age.
Ultimate truth forever eludes us. God, the ultimate reality, is “beyond our understanding.”7.Job 36:26.
Maimonides held that we can only know what God is not; not what He is.
There is such a thing as truth in the eye of the beholder. The school of Hillel held that one should always say at a wedding, “The bride is beautiful and gracious.” But what if she isn’t, asked Shammai? Will you tell a lie? In the eyes of her husband, she is beautiful, answered Hillel.8.Ketubot 17a.
There is a remarkable midrash that speaks about the creation of humankind:
Rabbi Shimon said: When the Holy One, blessed be He, came to create Adam, the ministering angels formed themselves into groups and parties, some of them saying, “Let him be created,” whilst others urged, “let him not be created.” Thus it is written, Love and Truth fought together, Righteousness and Peace combated each other (Psalms 85; 11): Love said, Let him be created, because he will dispense acts of love; Truth said, Let him not be created, because he is compounded of falsehood; Righteousness said, Let him be created, because he will perform righteous deeds; Peace said, Let him not be created, because he is full of strife. What did the Lord do? He took Truth and cast it to the ground. Said the ministering angels before the Holy One, blessed be He, Sovereign of the Universe! Why do You despise Your seal? Let Truth arise from the earth! Hence it is written, “Let truth spring up from the earth.” (ibid. 12)9.Bereshit Raba 8:5.
Human beings, said the angels, are a mixture of faults and virtues. They do good deeds of loving-kindness and righteousness. But they are also prone to conflict and violence, and all too often they tell lies. Thus the angels were divided – two against two – as to whether human beings should be created at all. God, according to the midrash, decided the case by disregarding the objection of the angel of truth: He “cast it to the ground.” Nonetheless, God did not abandon the claim of truth. He said “Let truth spring up from the earth.”
The midrash, in the deceptively simple way that it teaches its deepest and most subtle insights, is suggesting that truth on earth can never aspire to the pristine clarity of truth in heaven. We see “as through a glass, darkly.”10.In Aramaic, Be’ispaklaria she’einah me’ira: Yevamot 49b, Sanhedrin 97b. This seems to be the source of the famous phrase used by Paul in i Corinthians 13:12.
We see from one perspective, not all. Often our judgments are clouded by emotion. At times our limited understanding leads us to think we have understood all there is to understand. It takes courage and imagination, as well as humility, to admit how little we know. So, by casting truth to the ground, God was in effect saying: Let us not judge human beings as if they were angels. Enough that they aspire to truth and search for it. That is what it means for truth to “spring up from the earth.”
Perhaps, though, the midrash is suggesting something deeper as well, for it speaks of God casting down truth, not peace. Yet the angel of peace, like the angel of truth, objected to the creation of humankind. How then was the claim of peace answered? Perhaps the divine response to truth also constituted an answer to the complaint of peace. It is when human beings believe that they possess absolute truth – truth as it is in heaven – that they fight their most savage wars. Crusades and jihads were waged in the name of truth. So were the terrors that followed the French Revolution and the brutalities of Stalinist Russia. Isaiah Berlin devoted much of his intellectual energy to arguing that “Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups…that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth.”11.Isaiah Berlin Liberty, (Oxford: University Press, 2002), 345.
The way to peace is to realise that our grasp of truth is partial, fragmentary, incomplete. That is the human condition. Truth matters, but peace matters more. That is Judaism’s considered judgement. Many of the greatest crimes in history were committed by those who believed they were in possession of the truth while their opponents were sunk in error. To make peace between husband and wife (Abraham and Sarah) and between brothers (Joseph and Jacob’s other sons), the Torah sanctions a statement that is less than the whole truth. Dishonesty? No. Tact, sensitivity, discretion? Yes. That is an idea both eminently sensible and humane.