I started with the Judah Goldin translation, which I am starting to regret, but here it is:\n
Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel says: By three things is the world sustained: By justice, by truth<\/strong>, and by peace, as it is said, Truth and justice and peace judge ye in your gates <\/i>(Zechariah 8:16)<\/a>.<\/blockquote>\nI’m not sure why Mr. Goldin changed the order of the tripod’s legs. In the Hebrew, the first is emet<\/I>, truth. Also in the Zechariah quote, the first of the three words is emet<\/i>. So that’s what I’m looking at first. And as long as I’m looking at translation issues, it seems that Simeon ben Gamaliel’s translation of Zechariah (well, actually Judah Goldin’s) doesn’t line up with most of the other translations. But we’ll get into the difference in the next leg, I think. The word emet<\/i> is the same, so let’s start with truth.\n
Joseph ben Judah ibn Aknin says that truth in this context means Truth, that is, the Divine, for one of the aspects of the Divine is Truth. It is “knowing that it is Gd, may He be exalted on high, Who brings into being all creatures” (Mr. Goldin’s translation again) that sustains the world as one of the three legs. Simeon ben Zemah Duran disagrees: “By truth is meant, literally, speaking the truth to one’s fellow.” I am in agreement with the Duran, here; given the context, I think it ruins the verse to say that emet<\/I> is here referring to the Divine.\n
But does that get us very far? I mean, I think there has to be a difference between simply saying that truth is a good thing and saying on the other hand that truth is one of three things that sustain the world. And surely as practical advice, it’s not helpful to suggest that all truth be told all the time. For one thing, one doesn’t always know all the truth, and for another, despite our traditional propensity for loquaciousness and disputation, there has to be some limit. Last week we were told that nothing was better than silence, and this week that truth sustains the world. Surely truth and silence are not entirely compatible? And truth is not simply the absence of lies (as silence could be said to be: there is the old saying the fewer words, the fewer lies<\/i>) but something more positive.\n
I know I’m speaking from my own biases, here, but I think truth<\/i> here is something like a commitment to empirical observation. Let me defend that: remember that I am taking this verse with verse two of the same chapter, where another Simeon talks about Torah, worship and lovingkindness; this verse is about truth, justice and peace. Now, it’s true that Torah, worship and lovingkindness are all things of this world; all of Judaism, really, is about the things of this world, even when they are about the World to Come as well. But they are not matters of empirical observation. They are not concrete. They express themselves in concrete manners. Torah is expressed through concretely following the law, worship through concretely following the liturgy, lovingkindness through concretely helping others. And empirical observation is involved as well. But in themselves, they are matters of, if you will, faith rather than works.\n
Truth, justice and peace, on the other hand, I am reading in this context as matters of observation, of reason and test and examination. Not Truth, but truth. Finding things out. Finding out whether the things that you found out are true. Expanding your knowledge. Being accurate. Testing models against results. The Scriptures are full of the use of truth\n
I am very comfortable with saying that the world—this world, ha’olam ha-zeh<\/i> rests on that kind of truth, and that without that kind of truth, there would be collapse into chaos and catastrophe. And further, I think that it is a powerful ethical statement to make: the world rests on truth.\n
But is it plausible to take that kind of meaning from Simeon ben Gamaliel? Well, the word emet<\/I>, like the word true<\/i>, has a lot of meanings in a lot of contexts. In the Scripture, it is more likely to mean loyal<\/I> than accurate<\/i>, more like a true love than like a true story. Not always, though. The Queen of Sheba says to Solomon that the reports of his wisdom and his acts were true reports; she has tested them empirically and found them to be true. And in Jeremiah, truth is contrasted with deception and lies. And further: Jeremiah (28:9<\/a>) says that you shall know a prophet is a true prophet when the word of the prophet shall come to pass, that is, by empirical test. So although probably, when Simeon ben Gamaliel used the word emet<\/I>, he usually meant either righteousness or fidelity, he would have also presumably used it to mean accuracy, in this sense. And I think it’s reasonable in the context of the saying to take it in that sense. And I think it’s reasonable in the context of his times to talk about the importance of truth<\/i> in a modern, western, scientific and empirical sense. The dangers of believing what you want to believe and ignoring the world around you must have been evident in Jerusalem under the Romans, and I think the fervor that gripped that generation, the cults and wonder workers, the zealots and the messiahs, were very likely visible to Simeon ben Gamaliel, who surely saw the world shaking, even if he did not survive to see the Temple fall.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger asks what is truth, anyway? No, seriously, what is it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-11988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture","tag-pirkeavot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18721,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11988\/revisions\/18721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}