A requiem for Truth

• Date: 26 May 2021
• Author: Rabbi Yehoshua Mizrachi
• Published date: 26 May 2021
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

Can you tell me where he's gone?

He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young

You know I just looked around and he's gone."

With apologies to Dion...

I'm so naïve. Silly me, I understood scholarship to be a passionate quest to reveal Objective Truth, of working to build the collective body of knowledge about ourselves and the universe we inhabit. The academic disciplines - mathematics, the sciences, literature, history, languages, music, art, theology, philosophy - although perhaps speaking different languages, all are different approaches towards understanding the same Grand Truth. Like the many facets of a single large diamond, each discipline contributes a piece to the broader understanding of that Truth. The purpose of a liberal arts education, then, is to cultivate and sharpen the critical thinking skills indispensable in making reasoned assessments of that which fits in to the Greater Truth and that which does not.

But apparently I got that all wrong. Today we are told that Objective Truth is passe. Along with good and evil, the natural corollaries of Truth, Objective Truth has been replaced by subjective narratives. Someone please say a kaddish.

In our uber-sophisticated post-modern culture, everyone has a narrative, every interest group has a narrative. Narratives can be riddled with historical inaccuracies, distortions and outright lies, but no matter - the narrative is true to them and that makes it valid. After all, who's to know what's REALLY true? What can we really know, anyway? Edward Said could invent out of whole cloth a Palestinian Arab culture based on oral narratives - not a shred of documentary evidence to his fairy tale - and the salons of Manhattan swooned - what a narrative!

Forward thinking ethicists have abandoned the concepts of good and evil, and instead are reduced to functioning as mere referees, mitigating disputes between conflicting narratives.

It follows, then, that scholarship is no longer a quest for Truth, it should rest in peace, but a marshalling of evidence for this narrative or the other - witness the bad science used to push the Global Warming agenda.

So Hamas has a narrative, and the Jews have a narrative. Neither is right or wrong, each one's narrative is true - for them. CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and all the other corrupt media aren't lying [if there's no truth, naturally there can be no lies], they're merely relating Hamas' narrative - journalism at its most noble. The IDF's Purity of Arms...