Truth

There is today a shift away from truth as a cherished value or an essential for societal decision making. Gov. Sam Brownback came to this conclusion way before me, and perhaps is its best exemplar. He lies about education funding, the state budget, caring for the poor, providing health benefits for the infirm, not wanting to rely on "uncertain Federal money" to fund Medicaid expansion, and voter fraud, and despite his many lies the people voted him a second term anyway. Ideology now trumps truth for many people.

Ideology cannot coerce nature or balance budgets where income does not match expenditures, but it disguises crevices in thinking so that people make allowances. In a world where truthiness is good enough, we substitute desire for fact until the world collapses around us. Then we will blame the perceived enemy.

Thomas Kuhn's landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 proved to the world that thought structures reality rather than the reverse. In the section of Torah we are currently reading, termed The Holiness Code, we  witness that the Bible perceives the world as divided between that which is holy and that which is profane. A hallmark of modernity, the last 300 years of Western history, has been that we no longer consider history as holy. It's now just time, and all time is the same.

What we lost, and this is subtle, is the wherewithal to consider certain ideas and actions as holy, as the embodiment of everything that is absolutely good and worthwhile in our world. Your choices may not be my choices, we often hear, but who am I to condemn or select for you? You live your own life, and I'll live mine. We abhor absolutisms, and leave them for the "fundamentalists." We neither discern nor support any hierarchy of values, no absolute holiness to life. All choices are strictly personal, and ultimately have the same value. The result is that all life becomes banal, devoid of ultimate meaning, of holiness.

The Holiness Code in Leviticus stresses that certain times are holy, that's why we call them holiday, "holy days." The Bible asserts that God infuses certain times as special, above the mundane, times in which we are connected differently with the ultimacy. I support the "holiness" concept of history, even while I reject the fundamentalist interpretation of such values.

Holiness demands that certain values reign above others, like "Love your neighbor as yourself," (Leviticus 19:18) or "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," (Leviticus 25:10 and The Liberty Bell).

Sadly, rejecting holiness as the ground of our being, modern people put their ultimate faith not in values but in the self. But if we have learned anything in the last century and from our own lives, it is that the self is quixotic and unreliable.  

The true religious struggle is not whether there is ultimacy, but discovering in what we can place our absolute faith, and creating a community of believers with whom we can share our beliefts and our actions. These are the challenges of modern religion: not whether there is a God, but determining what God authentically requires of us and how we can create a fellowship to turn God's presence into human reality.