One thing that bothers me to no end is when people exaggerate. I find it a cheap and unethical way of getting people’s attention and a dirty trick when competing against those of us who would never think of doing so. The Jewish tradition seems to say that I am right… but also that I am wrong.
In this week’s parsha, Moshe uses a phrase (9:1) that accordingly concerned the Sages (Chullin 90b and see Rashi there). Telling the Jews that God will allow them to conquer the formidable nations in the land of Canaan, he borrows the wording that he earlier (1:28) claims to have been the people’s fearful response to the infamous report of the spies about the Land of Israel – that the cities they were meant to conquer were “great (or large) and fortified to the skies.”
Though some would like to pretend otherwise, the Rabbis were very grounded in reality and frequently objected when they heard one of their colleagues say something that their knowledge and experience told them was impossible. And towers in the skies (shamayim, generally understood as the realm above the earth’s immediate atmosphere) struck them precisely in that way. However, in this case, they had a more serious problem since the claim was not just from one of their own, but rather from the Torah itself.
(It is not clear whether the discussion in the Talmud is about 1:28 or 9:1. Yet we feel confident in following R. Baruch HaLevi Epstein in Torah Temimah, who points out that the Sages would not really be concerned if this were only a quote of the Jewish people. Granted, even the second mention is actually Moshe speaking and not God, so we might also have less of a problem. That said, God approved Moshe’s words for wholesale inclusion in the Torah specifically because he had reached such an incredibly high level in his own speech, such that the Sages would rightfully be perplexed by Moshe using such an implausible phrase.)
Though the Rabbis’ discussion in the Talmud is obviously based on their discomfort, they actually turn their question into a statement, pointing out that we find other great people using these types of exaggerations to get a point across. That may well be. But as R Yosef Chaim (Ben Ish Chai) perceptively asks in Chullin, was this really the only way to get the message across? Rephrasing our concerns, shouldn’t Moshe have been more concerned about the literal truth of his words than telling a good story? Apparently, however, the Talmud is telling us that something would have been lost had Moshe tried to communicate the idea with a greater concern for the exact truth and that, in some cases, the greater impact that can be accomplished by exaggeration cannot be sacrificed at all.
This is far from a blanket dispensation to exaggerate whenever we feel like it. After all, the Sages sound as if they are saying that there is only one example of it in the entire Torah (even as there are other possible candidates – see Torah Temimah on 1:28). Truth is a very important moral quality, and we must be very careful before deviating from it. The problem is that we can also turn it into an idol and forget that the ends are sometimes more important than the means, even when it comes to truth.
True, there are the rare means that can never be violated. But, as important as it may be, telling the truth is not one of them. (The Rabbis famously point out, for example, that shalom bayit, domestic peace, routinely pushes it to the side.)
Such an approach would also work well with Abarbanel’s explanation of the beginning of the book of Devarim. Like many other commentators, he notes that Moshe’s report of the story of the spies deviates greatly from what we read in Bemidbar. He answers that Moshe, however, was not interested in telling the new generation an objective account of what happened here but rather in motivating them to cross the Jordan and conquer the land. The critical nature of these goals led Moshe to resort to something that, in lesser circumstances, would have been unacceptable.
The Rabbis’ discomfort with deviation from the literal truth mentioned above signals that the default remains telling the exact literal truth. Those who would act footloose and fancy-free in this regard lack both wisdom and understanding. And yet, though we must be very careful in deliberating when certain values should be put aside, the Torah reminds us here never to lose sight of the goal.
