#you can accept your past without disavowing it i promise you it's better in the long run

[cgspirl]

you all say that you hate your past selves but in truth i think you hate the fact you embraced 'cringe' things with an absolute lack of shame. you were open. you were willing. you wanted to fall in to something that made you feel alive and then when too many people told you it was wrong or that thing got horrible and bad that shame grew in like a kudzu in the vines of your soul.

and now, in your 'old age' (you're fucking 20 not 6-fuckin'-5) you let that kudzu suffocate whatever was left and now all that stands is an untamed, unchecked garden of elitist disapproval that you've made your goal to spread to every single fucking person involved in that thing you once loved and cherished with all your heart.

now, i beg of you the question: are you actually happy? or would you rather keep pretending you are; suffocate in your misery because accepting that you were just a kid that didn't know any better and that you're wrong about your view of your past self and the things they loved to try and kill them ? to stifle that realization, that new growth?

would be too much for your shallow pride to handle?

the kudzu is thick. too thick to cut, to shave, to slice- tear- rip- break- you let it curl and crush you, suffocate the life out of you because living is an admittance of shame and admitting shame isn't something mature people do. mature people deny. they deny wrong was done and condemn those that engage with the horrible thing because they're wrong and deserve it. they die in the kudzu, become apart of it.

in front of you, a single lighter. it's within reach, practically empty, but a slight shake reveals enough fluid for just one last light. and now you have a choice:

drop the lighter. why not let the kudzu take you, become another soul caught in its throng, ready to pull another hapless soul down in with you? misery does love company, after all.

or you could light it. it's never too late to change, even if the voices of those in the kudzu around you say otherwise. the kudzu will burn, along with whatever stifled growths that suffocated under its evertight grip.

but in the charred ashes of it all, you'll be free. not cringe, not based, not basic, not fake, not whatever-other-fuckoff-lingo there is.

you'll be free.

you'll be you, and you'll be free.

but it's your choice.

i just hope you'll make the right one.

[criticalrolo]

Hey Hope you're doing okay It's a really random question (feel free to ignore it) but it just happened and I saw your ex-mormon tag My cousin who grew up in a very strict mormon family and got married at nineteen and had two kids very young Just came out as a lesbian and left her ex husband As someone who was in this religion, do you think she can stay in it and will be accepted? Like is there lgbt space there ? And even if there is what's the general view on the inside ?

Short answer: no

Longer answer: Mormons will talk about how they “love” lgbt people but you have to know that this is pretty much. just a straight up lie when you compare their beliefs and practices to how they want to be perceived as loving Everyone No Matter What. 

In mormonism, it is required that gay people stay completely celibate for their whole lives until they die and God “sorts things out” in heaven, meaning that a gay man would be “given” a wife or a lesbian would be “given” to a husband. And by celibacy, they mean no having any sort of romantic inclinations ever. All gay thoughts must be repressed, no holding hands, no kissing, CERTAINLY no marriage. They are required to just stick out being alone in this life until God can make you straight in the afterlife. Hopefully I don’t have to explain to anyone that telling gay people “everything will be better and God will fix you once you die” is. not great.

The additional problem with this is, Mormons believe in an “Eternal Plan of Happiness” which necessitates marriage in the mormon temple for someone to be truly happy. Other kinds of marriage/living together without being married outside of mormonism (referenced specifically in a gay way lmao) aren’t “real” marriages.

Iconic quote from a church apostle Jeffrey Holland:

“Can you see the moral schizophrenia that comes from pretending you are one [in marriage], pretending you have made solemn promises before God, sharing the physical symbols and the physical intimacy of your counterfeit union but then fleeing, retreating, severing all such other aspects of what was meant to be a total obligation?” (Ensign, 1998, pg. 76-77)

From 2015-2019, it was mormon doctrine that if a gay person got married, they would be automatically excommunicated and their children would not be allowed to join the church until they were 18, no longer lived with their gay parents, and specifically disavowed their parents’ marriage. Making being gay a more heavily punished sin than murder/rape/etc.! If your parent commits a crime in mormonism, then you personally are not judged or restricted at all. If your parents are gay, then you have to take specific steps to distance yourself from them. From a church that thinks that the only way to be truly happy is to be Mormon and take all the necessary steps in mormonism such as baptism and being sealed in marriage you can see why this is such a huge deal to them to deny it to people! (This policy was reversed in 2019, which makes it kind wild to think that god apparently changed his mind about how severely to punish gay people within a span of four years. don’t worry now gay marriage is just equivalent to murder/rape instead of being worse)

The church has been staunchly opposed to every form of progress for lgbt rights for decades. In 2008 they advocated heavily for prop 8 in california, which would deny lgbt people the right to marry. They’ve also been vocally anti-gay marriage in their own sermons and addresses to the mormon population in a service called General Conference. As a lesbian who was mormon until I turned 18, I can tell you without any doubt that an anti-gay message was worked into nearly EVERY lesson/sermon/etc. It’s been their THING for the past 20 years or so, once everyone called them out on being racist and they had to try to stop that. (the insanely racist aspects of mormonism is ANOTHER post for another time)

Let’s go through some of my favorite anti “same sex attracted” quotes from the past couple of years!

“Our knowledge of God’s revealed plan of salvation requires us to oppose many of the current social and legal pressures to retreat from traditional marriage or to make changes that confuse or alter gender or homogenize the differences between men and women,” Oaks said in an address to the church's General Conference in October. Those pressures, he said, come from none other than Satan, who “seeks to confuse gender, to distort marriage, and to discourage childbearing, especially by parents who will raise children in truth.” -Dallan H. Oaks, General Conference Oct. 2018

“There are no homosexual members of the church.” David A. Bednar, Feb. 23, 2016

pretty much anything Boyd K. Packer ever said, fuck this guy for real

more boyd again I hate this man

“There are some men who entice young men to join them in these immoral acts. If you are ever approached to participate in anything like that, it is time to vigorously resist. While I was in a mission on one occasion, a missionary said he had something to confess. I was very worried because he just could not get himself to tell me what he had done. After patient encouragement he finally blurted out, 'I hit my companion.' 'Oh, is that all,' I said in great relief. 'But I floored him,' he said. After learning a little more, my response was 'Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn't be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.' I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.“ - Boyd K. Packer, 1976

There’s about a million more, but a good summary exists here on wikipedia about the church’s changing homophobic stances. Including all the electroshock therapy at BYU! good times.

Here are some good videos that explain why mormons trying to say they’re not homophobic are Complete Bullshit

On a more personal level, I can tell you that my experience with homophobia in the mormon church has been pretty devastatingly awful and I’m still experiencing the repercussions of being raised in an environment that actively told me what a horrible thing I was for Being Gay. Not all experiences are universal of course, but I can pretty much guarantee that any lgbt people still in the church are experiencing some major cognitive dissonance in order to justify their treatment there and keep believing that this is what God wants for them.

The homophobia usually isn’t outwardly violent and obvious -- it’s always couched in “language of love” while still conveying the meaning that gay people are inherently bad and will be better off once they die. Some people are still trying to change the church’s general opinion about this, especially the younger generation. The fact is, though, that the mormon church is inherently homophobic and that its doctrine cannot be separated from that. So, your cousin might know some good people who will do their best to accept her in spite of their mormon beliefs. Just know that those people will also probably be believing all the above things I’ve stated as absolute truth/doctrine at the same time. 

[10oclockdot]

10 New Babbles

1. In Steven Pinker's old lecture "The Language of Swearing," he points out that taboo words in our society are not limited to that Carlin-popularized list of seven dirty words. Though he starts there, he soon finds his way to the example of an obituary column which writes that someone "passed away after a long illness." The words "die" and "cancer," Pinker explains, are deemed too painful, too blunt, to be spoken without the veil of euphemism in that context. And seeing this I thought about my own life and realized that for many of my loved ones and close friends, those seven dirty words are far from the most offensive thing I could say in their presence. To some, I'd just have to defend Hillary Clinton. To others, I'd just have to make a joke about cancer. To others, I could attack some vulnerable aspect of their personal appearance. And so on. We know that language can function as a weapon, and that's why we speak of "loaded" language and "trigger" words, but how often do we really consider how relatively unoffensive those seven dirty words are, at least compared to some of the other things we could say in their place. I therefore offer this suggestion to any screenwriters reading this: figure out those most offensive things for each of your characters. What sequence of syllables would cause them to snap, to attack someone, to storm out of the room? We all have something that could do it us. Often we don't know what it is, and it hits us one day by surprise. Ages ago, I was in the middle of a public argument with my girlfriend when she, smilingly, viciously, asserted that teaching cinema isn't a real job and offers nothing of value to society (but she said it in other words, worse words, which I probably blocked the moment I heard them). With a reserve of malice that still surprises me, I erupted. Thinking back, I never expected that the worthlessness of my profession would be my darkest trigger, the most taboo idea.

2. Why is it that sometimes we think we’re in post, living in the malaise of aftermath, and that other times we’re sure we’re in pre, living in the anticipation of disaster? Shortly after 9/11, I had the idea that we always thought of ourselves as living in post, because we couldn’t see the disaster coming until it was already in the past. But the Trump election has given me and so many others the sense that a collapse is very near. And looking back, I can see that many groups of people throughout history have been certain that the end was just around the corner. What, then, causes us to sometimes feel post and other times feel pre? Does this go in a predictable cycle? 

3. Donald Trump is a man prone to extravagant promises with no path (short of miracles) toward achieving them (health care will be easy, you'll pay at lot less and your care will be better, and we'll build the wall and make Mexico pay for it, and I know how to make all the manufacturers bring jobs back, etc). His supporters defend him in spite of every ignorance and gaffe, claiming that Trump is far cleverer than anyone supposes, that he's playing a deeper game of mass psychological manipulation of expectation, and that he speaks truths of the heart rather than the rote facts of the bean-counters. Is it possible that Christians were so willing to vote for Trump, despite his manifestly anti-Christian actions and background, because they've been primed all their lives to believe in God's promises without evidence (and in spite of a preponderance of evidence refuting them), to accept on faith that there's a master plan at work behind everything ("the Lord works in mysterious ways"), and to trust in "transcendant" truths rather than material reality?

4. Matisse said, "Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium." I've gone back to that quote for years but never recognized its implications until now. What it means is that all art is constrained art. All writing is constrained writing. When we think of traditional examples of constrained writing, like the lipogram (a text that doesn't use any words with a certain letter, like e) or the palindrome, we don't realize that these are just sub-mediums within a medium which is itself also constrained, albeit with much less constraint. The glory of the lipogram consists in demonstrating to the gobsmacked reader that writing was possible at all (Christian Bok’s Eunoia, which limits itself to a single vowel per chapter, is particularly glorious in this respect). And the glory of writing in general consists in getting the reader to think of these characters, which were never more than words, as if they were people. The same thing with trompe l’oeil painting: the glory of it is when it fools you from across the room. And then you step closer, scrutinize the individual brush strokes, and marvel that it was possible. Clement Greenberg wrote in 1940: "The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium." Meaning: the project of the avant-garde consisted in coming to terms with the fact that painting is a matter of smearing colored goop on a flat canvas. And the glory of painting, throughout history, has been in how much those basic materials could express, whether they disavowed or avowed their materiality. And again, artists fight back against these constraints, turning impasto positively sculptural (Jay DeFeo's The Rose, 1958-66, a painting a foot thick with paint weighing over a ton), cutting through the canvas (Lucio Fontana's Spatial Concept series), or attaching another object to the painting (Rauschenberg's combines, or Eva Hesse's Hang Up). But in all these cases, a new hybrid medium is created. This attempt to hybridize to the point of engulfing all media goes back at least to Wagner (opera as gesamtkunstwerk, total work of art, encompassing music and theater and painting and architecture, et al). And this hybridization produces a certain kind of glory, but holding yourself to the native constraints of the medium produces a different, perhaps greater, kind of glory. All these thoughts occurred to me while I was watching a ballet and realized that as a material, the human body is a magnificent constraint. Sure, you could potentially create mechanical dancers which could leap higher, bend further, and rotate joints 360 degrees... but what would be the glory in that? The glory of the ballet consists in the constrained human body fighting against its limits.

5. By the way, why isn't studio film production, an enterprise positively crippled by product specifications from the money-men, considered a form of constrained filmmaking?

6. When we look at the rise of populist parties, led by the likes of Trump or Berlusconi or Le Pen or Le Pen, and treat them as some disastrous undermining of democracy or of status-quo values, we forget that every mainstream party's core policy positions were once fringe ideas. Consider, for instance, both pro-choice Democrats and vehemently anti-abortion Republicans. In the early 70's, few besides Catholics cared about abortion enough to oppose it with present-day furor. And of course when the left first decided that abortion-on-demand should be legal nationwide, that was a fringe idea too (not to mention originally one borne out of racist eugenics). Each time period produces its own epistemic oppositions, which could not have existed in that form earlier, and as those oppositions begin to crystallize, both positions seem radical.

--------------------------------------

7a. Imagine you are standing in a room looking through an open doorway. Between you and the doorway is a number line that tells you how many feet you are from the door. This number line extends an infinite distance behind you.

7b. Now imagine that through that open doorway you see a building, some distance away. If you walk either toward or away from the doorway, you can get the sides of the building to line up with the frame of the door. That is, there's a place where you can stand where the building and the doorway subtend the same angle with respect to your eye. Here’s a bird’s-eye-view diagram:

7c. If the building is very wide, or very near the doorway, you might have to walk very close to the doorway (1 or 2 feet away) to get the edges of the door and the building to line up. If the building is very narrow, or very far from the doorway, you might have to back up a great distance from the doorway (50 or 100 feet or more) to get the edges of the door and the building to line up. But regardless, as long as the building is wider than the doorway (as most buildings are), there's a point you can stand where the edges line up.

7d. But what if the building and the door are EXACTLY the same width? You'd have to back up forever -- 1000, a million, a billion feet and more -- and you'd never get them to *quite* line up.

7e. And what if the building is, somehow, NARROWER than the doorway? Backing up to infinity wouldn't do it. You'd have to go beyond that. In fact, you'd have to back up so far that you were, in effect, on the OTHER SIDE of the building -- somewhere through the door, in the negative numbers on that number line drawn on the ground. Because unless the door and the building are exactly the same width, there's always a point where lines drawn from the edges of the building through the edges of the door converge. If the building is bigger than the doorway, then that point is somewhere in the room you're standing in. But if the doorway is bigger than the building, then that point of convergence is on the other side of the building.

7f. Put another way, if the lines diverge in the positive numbers, they converge in the negative numbers.

7g. And as soon as I stumbled upon this geometric insight, it made perfect sense to me why the sum of all the natural numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 ...) is a negative number (see this video).

--------------------------------------

8. Right before you die, what if you received a list of dates indicating the last time you saw each of your Facebook friends in person?

9. How often does philosophy turn into metaphilosophy? Does every conversation, given enough time and commitment, necessarily shift into self-analysis? I was having a discussion with an old friend of mine, a Catholic, about the correct distribution of the onus of responsibility on the Church for its various scandals, most especially priests raping kids and cardinals covering it up. We tussled over whether these cases constituted "bad apples" within the Church, or whether the whole organization was a "bad tree" that naturally functioned to produce and harbor these rapists, regardless of who's in power. Unable to find common ground, we soon slipped into analysis of the question. We asked: by what metric or process can we ever declare when it's the institution's fault and when it's the individual's fault? We brought up plenty of other examples, but none of them helped. So we slipped into meta-meta-analysis: is this question of institution or individual rationally decidable at all, or does the nature of the question hobble the possibility of rational analysis? That is, is it human nature to defend institutions that you believe in, regardless of the evidence? Does a "rational middle ground" even exist in a situation where belief or non-belief is involved? And as we chatted about this, I thought back over the course of our discussion and wondered in the back of my mind, "Wow... how often does philosophy turn into meta-philosophy?"

10. We need a new discipline called "fatigue studies." It will analyze how one stays active as a thinker, a scholar, an activist, when so much around us suppresses thought, suppresses truth, and suppresses reality to the point of throw-up-your-hands exhaustion. I think contemporary life fatigues us, physically, emotionally, spiritually, in a way that other eras never did. What's new about this moment? Why can't we even? Is it that contemporary life offers us no space of rest any longer? Is it that the ease of life online arrests the development of more robust mental musculature? Is it that the world, finally, is much too vast for any of us to comprehend or pretend to know, leaving us either to believe in overwhelming conspiracies or to just give up? Is it that the promises of neoliberal capitalism are finally, ultimately, crumbling, with nothing to replace them? Is it the inescapable hamster-wheel of hyper-indebtedness? Has the earth declared, by some unimaginably complex system of feedback loops, that human life is no longer necessary or desirable, and we've all, from the rust belt outward, begun to feel the encroaching haze of uselessness?

[bethagain]

Ok, um.

I disavow all responsibility for this.

Except that, I did make that New Year’s resolution and...

Well. And somebody out there asked for Luke/reader fluff. You know who you are.

p.s. Yes, it does indeed involve ice cream.

Sparkler rockets are reflecting off the windows of the tall buildings all around you, brightly colored signs of celebration on this planet that’s no longer controlled by the Empire. You’re watching from a balcony high above the laughing, shouting crowds in the city square. Luke’s behind you, arms around your waist, the warmth from his body helping to block out the evening chill.

He’s trying to tell you the plans for a formal ceremony in the morning, where the two of you will be expected to join the other Alliance leaders in turning the government back over to the people. The pain in your ankle is making it hard to focus.

You shift your weight, trying to take the pressure off the injured side.

Luke notices right away.

“What’s wrong?”

You sigh, irritated with yourself. “I must have sprained it worse than I thought.” It was a stupid way to get hurt, not even in battle. You’d landed first, gone running up to Luke as he climbed out of the cockpit of his own X-wing, and tripped over a messenger droid. He’d caught you before you hit the ground and lifted you up to spin you around in a hug--but you’d already twisted your ankle. You were able to keep walking on it, make it through the debriefing, get up to this luxurious loft that the local Senator insisted the two of you accept.

But it hurts, and standing here--even though you want to watch the fireworks--is making it worse.

Luke immediately lets go of your waist and scoops you up into his arms. “Is this better?”

It is, much better. Not only is the weight off your ankle, now you’re snuggled up against him. It’s warmer that way, too. But you know he’s tired. It was a long battle today. And a long month of fighting against the Imperial occupation. It feels like you’ve been awake and on high alert for weeks. And now it’s finally over, and every muscle in your body is calling for sleep.

“How about if we just head for bed?”

“That sounds good,” he says.

“I can walk,” you offer, shifting to hop down to the floor.

“No way,” he says. “I love flying with you, but I’ve hardly seen you on the ground in weeks. I’m not letting go until morning.”

You wake up alone in the huge bed. Soft sheets feel amazing against your skin. For the past month you’ve been sleeping in briefing rooms, on cots in makeshift barracks, in the cockpit of your starfighter. You think about just staying here the rest of the day. But where did Luke get to? He said he wasn’t letting go til morning!

“It’s morning,” he says from the bedroom doorway. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of soft flannel pajama bottoms. He takes a bite out of something in his hand, then stands there smiling at you. “See?” he gestures at the window, and you can see that he’s holding an ice cream treat on a stick. “It’s getting light. Morning.”

“And you’re eating ice cream for breakfast?”

“The conservator’s stocked full of it. Apparently ice cream is a big part of celebrations here. The Senator didn’t want us to go without.” Luke crosses to the end of the bed and climbs onto it, crawling his way up your body and then snuggling in beside you. He offers you a bite of ice cream. It’s cold on your lips and it tastes delicious after weeks of military rations. “How’s the ankle?”

“I don’t know,” you sigh, thinking about the ceremony you’re supposed to go to. “Can I pretend I can’t walk on it? I think I need to stay in bed today.”

Luke’s thoughtful for a moment, biting off a bit of chocolate coating. Then he hands you what’s left of the ice cream, jumps up from the bed, and disappears through the doorway.

He’s back a few minutes later, a new ice cream bar in his hand. “I got the Senator on the radio. I told her you’re injured and we can’t possibly make it to the ceremony.”

“Luke!” You’re mortified. After the Senator’s been so kind to put you up in this lovely apartment, invite you to a celebration, stock the ‘servator with ice cream?

He grins. “She laughed at me. Asked if we needed any more chocolate freezes.”

“Oh. I guess that’s all right then.” Ice cream is starting to drip down your hand. You catch it with your mouth, licking up the sweet vanilla stickiness, before taking the last bite and setting the stick on the table beside the bed. “So, what shall we do today?”

Luke tilts his head, watching you. “Want to practice?”

“Depends on what,” you say. You have a few ideas. Although the thing at the top of your mind, you’re both already pretty good at.

He laughs, catching your thought. “That too,” he says. “Definitely. But you did promise me when we had time…”

He’s right, you did promise. And you do want to learn. As a child, you’d always imagined what it would be like to be in touch with the Force, to be able to do the magical things that the Jedi Knights could do. You never imagined you’d actually be able to do any of it.

But when you and Luke first met, he’d stared at you like you were the answer to a mystery he’d been studying for years. And you’d been astonished to sense his astonishment.  

And now, he’s come over to sit cross-legged beside you in bed, sunbleached hair standing up every which way, blue eyes crinkled with laughter as a half-eaten ice cream bar levitates from his hand to your lips.

“Go ahead,” he says, and you’re laughing too as you try to take a bite. The ice cream bar bobs away from you.

“Stop that!”

“You catch it then,” he says, continuing to float the ice cream slowly toward the end of the bed.

You take a breath, force yourself to stop laughing, to steady your mind. Slowly, the ice cream bar begins to move back toward you, until it’s hovering beside Luke’s head. “Your turn,” you say.

He tries to catch it with his teeth but you don’t have great control yet and it winds up hitting him just below his left eye. He leans back quickly, smiling as he lifts a hand to wipe at his face, and you shakily float the bar after him. It makes a few wobbly darts in the right direction, and then your eyes catch on his mouth, on the way his lips move--and the ice cream drops out of the air, landing on his chest and leaving a line of chocolate down his belly until it lands in his lap.

Luke jumps up with a yelp. “That’s COLD!”

He’s standing beside you, covered in chocolate ice cream, eyes sparkling, and there is no way you’re going to be able to concentrate now.

“Come on,” you say, picking up the melting treat and sucking up some of the soft ice cream from the top. “I’ll warm you back up.”

“I better go get cleaned up first,” he says.

“I’ll take care of that too,” you say, reaching for his hand and pulling him back into bed.

[jewishandmore]

Truth, God, and Community

Truth, God, and Community Erev Yom Kippur - Kol Nidrei 5780 Tuesday, October 8, 2019 Temple Beth Zion, Buffalo, New York

by Rabbi Jonathan Freirich

A dark moonless night near a small, Jewish village, somewhere in Eastern Europe, sometime in the 1500’s.

The Jewish villagers were restless and worried. They heard from their cousins nearby that a mob in an anti-Semitic fury had been rampaging through the countryside. They had seen this before and worried that their village would be next.

The rabbi from the village, desperate to protect the people, worked on the banks of the river, in the dark. Fashioning a rough statue of person from the mud, turning it into a clay imitation of a person, the rabbi said a prayer and then a mystical formula. In the dim light of dawn, the rabbi inscribed three Hebrew letters into the forehead of the statue, writing the word “EMeT”, truth. Once completed, the word sunk deeply into the clay and transformed the statue into a Golem, a nearly indestructible magical creation that would defend the Jews of the town. The Golem would fight without tiring and would save our ancestors from the mob, from another pogrom.

The word that animated the Golem is “truth”.

Truth brings life. Truth protects us.

What is truth and what is true?

There is the scientific perspective. Truth is measurable and observable. A thing is or is not, it is this thing or that thing. This is Hydrogen and that is Helium. The temperature can be measured and is described as truly seventy degrees, no matter how it feels. A color can be measured as a wavelength, and is thus one thing or another. A fact, is a thing that is observable and measurable, and used to be something that most of us could agree upon. We used to be able to say: this is true, and that is the truth.

Now we can argue about everything.

Remember way back when, four years ago, when we were arguing over the colors of a washed out photo of a dress on the internet? Was it blue and black or white and gold? Turns out that the actual dress was in fact blue and black in a clearer photo, a surprise to me, I could have sworn it was white and gold, but this accelerated the idea that all truth is debatable.

While we may see colors as different based on our eyes and our brains, there are in fact “true” colors. They are measured in wavelengths. They can be described mathematically. There are objective truths to color that we rely upon, just as there are objective truths to everything around us that we must agree upon in order to do anything.

Truth is taking a beating.

Science is no longer accepted as reliable. Statistics are used merely to make a point and seldom to describe anything in a way that we can all agree about. Everything has become a matter of opinion.

We regularly validate our own perspectives as if they cannot be reconciled with someone else’s. Bias, individual brain chemistry, different ways of seeing blue and black and white and gold - we separate ourselves out from each other the more we think we can’t see eye to eye about anything.

We are in total agreement about a number of things that are only true because we agree about them.

Take time. We accept time as a standard that we create and uphold together. It is an agreed upon “fiction”. There is no objective nine o’clock. There is only the one that we say is nine o’clock, whether it is “Verizon Standard Time” or Jewish Standard Time - we have to agree upon when in order to all be there at the same time. I had a running group in Cleveland that met at 5:50 AM. They would say, “if you’re there, you’re there”. If I was late, I would be running fast to catch up. We set 5:50 AM by Verizon’s time on our phones.

Truth is the source of life.

And truth is dangerous.

After the Golem saved the small town, it eventually got out of control. A nearly indestructible protector become trouble-maker. When the rabbi admitted defeat at trying to make the Golem work after the crisis, the rabbi erased one letter from the Hebrew word for “Truth”. Rubbing out the ‘alef’ the word “truth” is transformed from “EMeT” into “MeiT”, “death”, and the Golem fell to dust.

Like the Golem, there can be too much truth. We can say too much, share too much of our feelings, and destroy the people around us by being overly truthful and lacking in compassion and kindness. Revealing things that need to be kept concealed can harm people, communities, and nations. Concealing too much that needs to be out in the open can do the same. Truth is like fire - the right amount warms, too much burns, and without it we are left in the dark, defenseless.

A seventh grade class once argued that all religion is just an opinion. Since it can be argued it can’t be a fact.

I asked them whether or not laws were facts or opinions?

Is “Thou Shall not Kill” only an opinion?

Eventually they were convinced that when we agree to hold something as truth - like a law, or an ethic, or a teaching, then it becomes truth, that is it is more than just an opinion.

That we can agree to make truth as a community means that we can agree to unmake it too.

Truth is fragile. Erasing only one letter erases it entirely.

When we attack the truth, claiming that there is no truth, we begin to destroy the common area that we hold together as a community. When that place between you and me comes under attack we not only stop sharing truth, we stop sharing common cause. We need that “true” place in the middle. This “truth” is not so simple.

In this shared space, we need to be kind and caring and we need to figure out how to tell the truth and how to preserve a relationship at the same time. No relationship can handle everything that we think, every truth that we observe. We must filter our thoughts and emotions so that we can get along, so that our relationships will survive and thrive.

The great Jewish sages Hillel and Shammai argued about truth. They argued about what we should say to a bride at her wedding.

Shammai was a stickler for the truth and insisted that we should describe her as she is - truth must prevail and anything else would be lying.

Hillel countered, that we must always say that the bride is beautiful.

The rabbis almost always agree with Hillel and remind us that we should always be sympathetic - meaning that we should say that a bride is beautiful.

[Babylonian Talmud, 17a-b, adapted]

Judaism teaches that a bride, and a groom, are beautiful because that is what defines them on that day. To get married is to be beautiful and our sympathy for the couple helps determine our presentation of the truth.

Truth is important and getting along with people is as well. We can even create a truth that we all agree on for the sake of getting along better. And yet we can destroy truth so easily that it will also destroy any sense that we have sympathy, that we are connected at all, with other people. We show our love for one another by calling all babies beautiful - it is absolute truth that there are no ugly babies. Who will argue with that?

And here we stand, on the evening of Yom Kippur, baring our souls before God, stripping away all of the filters all of the trappings so that we can be true to ourselves, true to our Creator, and then, hopefully, true to each other.

We declare truth a vital and central Jewish idea every time we recite Sh’ma and V’ahavta.

Most of you are familiar with these paragraphs that start: “Listen up Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One!”

What then follows is the commandment to love God and all the things that will help us behave in ways that show how we love God. We are supposed to make all the teachings of Judaism into everyday parts of our lives, speaking about them in our homes and when we are traveling, teaching them to our children, writing them on the doorposts of our houses. V’ahavta tells us that we do this so that we will always remember the place of God in our lives, to do the things that show that we love God, that elevate our behavior and our thoughts, that remind us that God brought us out of Egypt, and then we conclude with the statement, “Adonai Eloheichem Emet”, three words that we can translate as, “Adonai your God is truth.”

We tie the mandate to behave well with the idea that God and truth are the same. We come together to understand what God asks of us and we come together to declare truth to be a shared idea and value.

Good conduct, ethical behavior, and truth, are linked in our prayers, and linked in reality. We must agree upon truth in order to get along.

When we allow our conversations with each other to devolve into a debate about whether or not something is true we have left behind civil discourse. Without a reasonable agreement to talk about things in an area of agreed upon truth we are competing bullies, yelling at each other because the louder person wins since they must have a stronger feeling about their own sense of truth.

In the heat of the moment, I feel all sorts of things are true. If I give heed to these feelings then I might be both unkind and disrespectful to the shared space in which we decide upon truth together.

I want to be a good person all the time even when I don’t feel that way. I want to be kind and loving even when I am occasionally, admittedly, tired and irritable. So which is true?

I am what I do.

I practice the truth that I want to live.

I try to build habits that create a “me” that is truer to the person I want to be.

This evening, Kol Nidrei, when we disavow the promises that we made to ourselves that we haven’t kept, when we confess our flaws and mistakes out loud, to our selves, to our families, to our community, this is our moment of truth. When we strip away all that we have aimed at over the past year and missed, we find the core of our beings, all those values that we work so hard to uphold, and we return to that place of truth within ourselves. 

In that place of truth we begin again.

From this evening we start again on our true selves.

I must work on my truth, my sense of truth, refine my true self, and try again by putting it out there, better than last year. Both more loyal to the truth and kinder than before.

Remember the truths we share - from time, to wedding couples, to babies. This is easier than we think.

Truth is the source of life for the Golem, and it is the source of life in Jeremiah, who wrote:

Adonai, God is truth, the God of life… [Jeremiah 10:10] 

And truth can burn too brightly, too hot, and destroy as well.

Are we ready for the truth?

We come here tonight to find out.

The true self within each of us longs to evolve, to get better, to be the better person that Judaism and God asks of us, that we ask of ourselves.

Will we hold ourselves to a higher standard, a more truthful and more compassionate standard, a shared standard that lives in the intersection between our inner convictions about right and wrong and the communal lives that we must build together?

Can we set down the burdens of the past year? Can we leave behind the things that we thought were true that turned out not to be? Can we set down our pride in arguments offered in passion, and our self-interest, and admit that there is truth to be found between where we stood then, and where we might go together tomorrow?

The truth is out there and in here, in our hearts and minds and souls, and most importantly in the immense places in between you and me. Between us is something bigger and better than either of us could only do by ourselves. Between us is God who is truth. God who is asking us to love the world by doing with our best selves.

As we do at every Kol Nidrei, we start tonight, united as seekers of what is good and what is kind and what is true, together to uncover truth and build a better tomorrow.