In an episode of the TV program “Blue Bloods,” Tom Selleck in the role of New York Police Commissioner Frank Reagan must confront a good friend on the force who is anxious for a promotion and who once saved his life but has been cooking the books in order to improve the violent crime statistics in his precinct.
In a painful exchange, the commissioner reminds his former friend that “in the end all we really have is our word.”
It is a moral exhortation that can be generalized onto so many of the landscapes we inhabit in life. The matter of truth telling and its sorry absence has become especially manifest of late in the in the aftermath of the Madoff scandal and other gross misrepresentations of key information that deeply impact the commonweal.
In addition to financial scandals that have marred the marketplace, there has been a great deal of controversy recently over the flexibility with truth manifested by Brian Williams of NBC News, and repercussions are still being felt from misleading research on the part of a British scientist who posited a correlation between vaccination and autism, a claim that has caused many parents to forgo this well-documented means of preventing deadly childhood diseases.
The issue at hand is how people in positions of influence intentionally subvert and supplant the truth. Such actions not only stain the fields of scientific inquiry, investment banking, and journalism, they also shake the fundamental value of trust – which, when broken, is mighty hard to regain.
If one looks to our time-honored biblical foundations, one core factor emerges, the absence of which seems to undergird such egregious behavior. When Leviticus (19:14) tells us that “one should not place a stumbling block before the blind,” it is hardly speaking of placing a boulder in front of someone walking with a cane. Rather, it is laying down in no uncertain terms an injunction against providing bad advice to an unsuspecting person, particularly if the person dispensing the advice stands to benefit from the other person’s error.
Jewish law refers to any behavior that misleads or misrepresents the facts as “g’neivat da’at” –literally misappropriating knowledge – and by extension sees it as an abdication of the moral imperative for “honest weights and measures.” We can only lament how little currency is given today to these key concepts.
Why and how have we become a society rife with lies and deceit? Could it be that we are reaping the results of an absence form our schools, especially in the formative years, of a good dose of moral education? Significantly more focus is placed on “teaching to the test” than on the textures of life’s landscape and the challenges of moral rectitude. We score students on standardized tests but not on standards for just living.
Great emphasis is placed on the STEM subjects, which no doubt are necessary if our society is going to successfully compete for and in global markets. But what of the ROOT values of Responsibility and Obligation toward others, Oversight of society’s moral compass, and Trust through truthfulness?
It may sound naïve to expect such altruism and selflessness. But isn’t there something refreshing, even uplifting, in simple acts of grace and goodness?
Consider the following lessons from Ming and Manny. Ming is a waiter at a kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens and Manny, an immigrant from El Salvador, is a parking garage attendant in lower Manhattan. Both work for modest wages. When someone gave Ming a tip equal to half the total tab, he returned a good portion of it, insisting it’s wrong to take advantage of unusual generosity. And when I tried to tip Manny twice for both taking and later bringing back my car, he refused the second portion, citing lessons he learned in church.