Open Letter to My Students 48: Truths or Ideas? 

A funny thing happened on the way to Truth: I discovered Ideas.

I still admire truth: everyday truths, on which we depend; moral truths, without which we are lost; and scientific truths about which I am constantly amazed. We never run out of truths to tell, to hear, and to ponder. Like the universe they describe, truths are ever expanding – and intoxicating.

But when it came to engaging people’s hearts and minds, there is nothing like ideas. 

The beauty of truths is that they are “true.” They are necessarily contingent – as knowledge grows, our truths can change — but until proven otherwise, we can count on them. 

By itself, however, truth is uncreative: it is just the way the world is. Creativity requires imagination, and with imagination come ideas, not the way the world is but the way it just might be.

Ideas can be forthright: suggestions on seeing or behaving differently. “What if we treat the speed of light as a constant?” (Einstein); “What if we went for a chocolate picnic?” (me). These ideas can eventually become truths. The chocolate picnic gives rise retrospectively to the trivial truth that we had it. The invariable speed of light became the basis of relativity. 

But forthright ideas are just the most obvious kind. Less obvious, are the artistic variety inherent in speaking differently. “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, 2:7); “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy  walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud” (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 48). People don’t usually speak like that, so when someone does, we take notice. There is truth, we sense, in both examples, but not the kind of truth that is scientifically demonstrable, and in fact, taken literally, both statements are wrong. 

Ideas matter, then, because they capture our attention; they intrigue us: “The historian is a prophet facing backwards” (Friedrich Schlegel); Newton “destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism” (John Keats); but also the opposite, seeing science as a delightful “appetite for wonder” rather than “the anaesthetic of familiarity” (Richard Dawkins). Although there is obviously some truth lurking behind ideas, the ideas themselves are not so much true or false as they are fruitful or fallow. They express more than they inform. They are not the end of an investigation; they are the beginning of one. 

Because truths and ideas sound alike, we risk confusing them, especially when it comes to religion: “The soul is eternal”; “Thy Kingdom come” (from both the Christian Lord’s Prayer and the Jewish Kaddish [v’yamlikh malkhuteih]). It makes little sense to ask if these are true. They may be, but how would we even know? We are better off treating them as ideas and asking how the poetic insights they contain can enhance life; help us through hard times; give us purpose; engender kindness and care.

Treating religious ideas as truths has dangerous consequences, because we think of truth as a zero-sum game: if we are right, then they are wrong – hence, the sorry record of religious warfare through the ages. Ideas, by contrast, picture states of affairs by which we choose to live because they enhance our humanity. When theological beliefs collide (“Jesus is / is not the son of God”; “the Torah is / is not true for all time”), until one or the other is proven  true – and such statements never are – different people can entertain alternative ideas without having to go to war against one another.

Most ideas are salutary. But others are destructive to ourselves or hurtful to others. Take the title idea of an 1864 hymn, “Onward Christian soldiers.” It has quite a pedigree: Winston Churchill found it inspiring in his fight against the Nazis; and it was sung at the funeral of President Eisenhower. But picturing Christians as soldiers evokes a tawdry historical record: medieval Crusaders slaughtering  non-believers; and, in modern times, subjugating (and even eradicating) native peoples in the name of one “true” religion.

In like fashion, Jews should rethink the idea that we are the (meaning the only) chosen people. Do we really believe that God has chosen just us “from among all peoples,” as we say several times in our prayers? Mordecai Kaplan, the outstanding America theologian of the 20^th century, changed it to “with all peoples.” 

Similarly, a standard concluding prayer for Jews, Alenu, begins with the stirring reminder of a single God for all the earth; but then vitiates that claim by saying, “[God] did not make us like [other] peoples of the lands, and did not place us like [other] families of the earth.” The prayer’s underlying intent is clear from a following line that (fortunately) was once excised by censors but (unfortunately) has been restored in some Orthodox circles: “They [the other peoples, unlike us] bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who cannot save.” 

Under medieval conditions, such exclusive exceptionalism was understandable. But does Judaism have to depend on our being “better”?

Bad ideas can always be explained away. The Alenu’s claim, we Jews might say, is just a statement of fact. It doesn’t actually say we are “better”; and our historical destiny really has been unique. Similarly, Christians will say that the Christian soldiers are marching to share in the world’s suffering (2 Timothy 2:3) or to fight the forces of evil (Ephesians 6:11-17). But however true these justifications may sound to believers, to the world at large it “sounds” like Christians are celebrating militaristic religious conquest – just as it “sounds” like Jews think we are chosen and others aren’t; that we are, that is, better.

Bad ideas have a habit of just being bad: militarizing religion or exceptionalizing it at the expense of others is hurtful, and on that account, wrong. If we did not (mistakenly) confuse these ideas with truths, we might more easily abandon them on moral grounds alone. But because we like them and want to keep them, we delude ourselves into thinking that they don’t mean what everyone else thinks they do. 

Ideas are the gift of human imagination overlaid upon raw reality, to stimulate, excite and move us. But imagination by itself is neutral; its ideas can be sacred – or demonic. What we need are more of the sacred sort and fewer of the demonic ones.