While social media is, generally speaking, a wasteland of toxic drek, there are still some moments when its original hopeful potential glimmers beneath the surface. One such moment occurred for me in recent weeks, as I began to engage with an old acquaintance from my youth whose politics are pretty different from mine. He had posted something about the hypocrisy of political leaders. I couldn’t understand what he was getting at with his post, and, genuinely trying to practice curiosity rather than conviction, I reached out to him privately to ask him to explain it to me.
We had a couple of rounds of exchange, all of which were friendly. (A good lesson here is to do this kind of work in private messages, rather than in public comments.) What I came to understand through our conversation was this issue of hypocrisy was really important to him. He recognized a tendency of conventional political leaders to engage in what he viewed as hypocritical speech, and that really seemed to touch a nerve in him. Like many other Americans, he sees the current president as someone who does not engage in the hypocrisies of conventional political leaders—someone who speaks plainly and says what he means. In my friend’s view, the rest of the political class are phonies, while Trump is authentic.
While I imagine some readers identifying with that view, I suspect the vast majority probably don’t. And if you find yourself gasping for a moment—”But what about… ?!”—I would ask you, in my best meditation teacher voice, to set down your judgment and conviction for a moment, and try to practice open curiosity. (If you’re anything like me, you can, and almost certainly will, come back to the judgment later.)
I found this new learning to be tremendously helpful, because it gave me insight into how someone I know to be a good and decent person could hold political positions I frequently find to be anathema. It caused me to reflect on how I relate to authenticity and hypocrisy, and to consider what my own deepest motivations are in supporting leaders, parties, or policies.
Because of course authenticity is something we think about a lot in Jewish mindfulness practice. So many people find this Torah in a search for healing and wholeness, often brought about by a feeling that their insides and outsides are not in alignment, that they weren’t being true to who they really were meant to be. They (perhaps you) are trying to live a life that looks like the Holy Ark described in last week’s Torah portion: our golden insides match our golden outsides.
Yet I don’t get as worked up about hypocrisy from political leaders. Maybe that’s because I’ve long internalized the leadership theorist Ron Heifetz’s observation that “leadership is letting people down at a rate they can absorb.” Or it’s because I’ve come to believe that no two human beings can ever fully understand each other; only God can fully understand us. Or it’s because I’ve been married for a long time, and somewhere along the way I realized that if I told my spouse everything I was thinking in the moment I was thinking it, I probably wouldn’t stay married for very long. Is that hypocrisy? If so, I’m happy to be called a hypocrite.
Or perhaps I want to be called a peace-maker. “Hillel taught: Be like the students of Aaron: Love peace and pursue peace; bring peace between one person and another, and between a married couple; love all people and bring them closer to Torah” (Avot d’Rebbe Natan 12:1). Aaron, who is the central character of Parashat Tetzaveh—the only Torah portion from Exodus onwards that does not mention the name of his brother Moses—is our tradition’s paradigm for peace-making.
Whereas Moses’s watchword is emet (truth), Aaron’s is shalom (peace). In associating the brothers with these two virtues, the tradition seems to acknowledge a tension that exists between them. If we’re really serious about it, it can be profoundly difficult to arrive at a shared understanding of truth. And yet our ability to live peacefully with one another—whether within the walls of a home or the borders of a nation—depends on both the degree to which we share a version of truth, and on the degree to which we are willing and able to tolerate the reality that the truth we know might be slightly different than the truth of our spouse, our neighbor, or our political opponent.
I hope this isn’t misunderstood as a call for moral relativism. That’s not what I’m trying to suggest. Rather, I’m seeking to invite you and me and my friend on social media to do some serious inner reflection on what we understand to be true and how we hold it: tightly, lightly, something else?
Because that question of how we hold it—that, I believe, is a key to navigating this built-in human tension between truth and peace. I’ll have more to say about that next week. In the meantime, I hope all of us can lean into our practices to help us to both discern what is true and, without sacrificing truth, be disciples of Aaron: lovers and seekers of peace.