The Biblical Meaning of Truth

In Knowledge through Ritual, the theologian Dru Johnson argues that people come to true knowledge through deeds rather than through reflection. To ground this argument in the Bible, he cites Yoram Hazony’s understanding of the Hebrew word emet, usually translated as “truth.” Peter Leithart writes:

Johnson points out that, in the Bible, the word “truth” can apply to actions such as treatment of a servant, anointing, or walking; to statements; and to things like tent pegs, roads, and seeds. A concept that covers so much diverges from our normal understandings of truth. . . .

For the Hebrew Bible . . . truth is primarily “reliability”: “A true cut (or maintaining a true course in a ship) is one that reliably ‘is what it ought to be.’” Quoting Hazony, [Johnson] adds that “in the Hebrew Bible, that which is true is that which proves, in the face of time and circumstance, to be what it ought; whereas that which is false is that which fails . . . to be what it ought.”

This is quite a striking definition, [according to which truth] is evident only over time, as true things prove themselves against the ravages of circumstance. . . . A tent peg is true because it’s reliable over time, just as a statement is true. . . .

As Hazony puts it: “On the biblical conception . . . it would seem that the truth or falsity of the spoken word . . . cannot be known until it has proved itself reliable in the course of investigation, which is to say, in the course of time.”

Read more at First Things

More about: Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Bible, Religion & Holidays

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society