I just noticed yesterday that the 2020(?) Olympics are about to begin Friday. The Olympics have always been important in our household. Mine and my wife’s first summer together was during the 1996 Atlanta games and ever since we’ve rolled out the TV and for two weeks enjoyed the games. We root, we jump up […]

The Mysterious Benedict Society is now a miniseries on Disney Plus. Nobody will be surprised to learn the book is better.

The title is actually the title of the entire series, too, which now includes five books–the original, three sequels, and a prequel. Of the five, the original is clearly the best, a modern classic. The others books are just “fun reads”, written for pre-teens. I may be biased, but I think the original book is worth reading as an adult.

The book is wholesome, with clear lines drawn between good and evil both in the external world and within individual characters. It cannot be called a conservative book, because it doesn’t have an underlying message. Rather, it explores themes. It does not attempt to indoctrinate, but it’s the kind of book that makes kids think about questions and allows them to make up their own minds.

With that being said, I think the book was quite prescient regarding one particular aspect in the modern state of the world. (It was published in 2007). This may have been intended as a bit of commentary on something that was happening then, but it’s spot on regarding the situation we have gotten ourselves into during 2021.

Watching the miniseries has reminded me of this a bit. There is a bit of softening and blurring of the themes, and one particular line was changed in a way that irritated me because it diluted what had been a clear moral statement. But the elements that made the book prescient and excellent are there, buried underneath the weirdness that happens when a book is adapted for television.

I have always felt that children’s fiction and middle grade novels have more space to be genuine than genres written for teenagers and adults. Young Adult literature, in particular, often feels like a vehicle for sappy romance. C.S. Lewis argues that adults never really outgrow fairy tails, and I feel this way about The Mysterious Benedict Society, although it’s not quite a fairy tale.

There is much waxing nostalgic about the heights of American ideals in the recent past that clouds our judgment and decisions applied to the present and the future. Humans have a natural tendency to look to back on preceding eras as the hallmark of an idyllic time with an aim of its return. Drifting through the ether of the here-and-now with its ever-present doomsayers, political weaponizing, and unrealized dreams and ambitions of succeeding generations, idolizing the past has come to be a coping mechanism for present failures. It is time to stop the cycle. The America of the present is not an irredeemable sinner that must be destroyed because of its transgressions. Nor is it a martyr for a higher cause whose valor can only be proven by falling on its own honorable sword – a suicide for a cause that never was.

The July/August issue of Vanity Fair contains a profile of the quintessential Mid-Century Modern home – The Stahl House – the family that continues to occupy it, and its inextricable link to that post-war time. It is an essay supplemented with rich photographs of seemingly model figures in a model home. The picturesqueness implores the reader to place himself in that time and place – one free from the urgent madness and chaos of the present time. It is the same as our wonted habit of using nostalgia as the miracle salve for the complex world we occupy today. But it’s a mistake to conflate sentimental longings with concrete solutions for present problems. For conservatives, we often revert to the William F. Buckley, Jr. battle cry against the tyranny of progressivism to “Stand athwart history, yelling STOP”. Or waxing nostalgic for stern, Reaganesque rhetoric of the type that bound a nation together in a successful effort to defeat Communism. Just as we can’t place ourselves in the idealized pictures of the Stahl House, we cannot place ourselves in a foregone time to overcome our current crises.

It traps the mind in a perpetual state of adolescent immaturity to ape the slogans of the past. It is a dangerous path that leads to a political and cultural atrophy leaving conservatives unprepared to fight the evolving war of progressive policies that already has a head-start in schools, government, and private institutions. The undercurrent of discontent that catapulted President Trump to office in 2016 was widely seen as a complete surprise to the political machine that had been riding on the coattails of a Cold-War mentality for decades. Zombie Reaganism became the moniker of a Republican Party disjointed from the realities of the middle and working class Americans who felt betrayed by decision makers whose decision involved exclusive disregard for their base’s interests and problems. At the same time, conservatives gave away their naming-rights to an increasingly radical left. Allowing past stigmas as such as anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-science, bigot, prude, “put them back in chains” to perpetuate without forceful pushback alienated potential supporters who felt a party wallowing in its own milquetoast mentality would never stand up for the traditional values that were being unfairly threatened.

Even now, after what could be termed a Trump-Revolution there is a stubbornness of a certain order within the conservative movement that won’t acknowledge the failings of disengaging from the culture wars that led to such an outcome. It doesn’t mean there needs to be total recalibration of principles, nor that the path forward means closing our eyes to a changing media, socioeconomic, and demographic environment and plow blindly through the political desert hoping we find the oasis of the 1980s is our salvation. It doesn’t exist. But we can use those lessons that we often look at fondly as a golden era of conservatism and apply them to the challenges we face today. The opportunity is ripe for a conservative movement to make strides with the American people just as the progressive left is caught in the tar-pit of its own revisionist nostalgia.

Conservatives dip into a nostalgic view of the past in an attempt to frame America as a Rockwellian ideal. It’s not what the left likes to label as a “whitewashing” of history, or willful ignorance of our past sins and national struggles, or stifling legitimate grievances by identity groups to maintain “The Patriarchy”. Rather, it harkens back to an America that seemed closer to a national cohesiveness than the present tumultuous and divisive time. Americans had a self-awareness that allowed for the inherent meritocratic opportunity simply by their choice to be American.

Conservatives can legitimately look to the past as a model from which to build on principles that created the greatest nation in the world – conserving an enduring and objective moral order, adhering to custom and continuity of knowledge, prudence in enacting change, upholding property rights, individual liberty, and the freedom of thought that comes with a limited government and centuries of trial and sacrifice that came out of the past to better serve and sustain a prosperous, liberty-centric future. But we should be wary of becoming so mired in sentimentality for what we imagined that ideal to have been that we become paralyzed, stunting any progress to carry those principles forward in a dynamic, hyper-political ecosystem.

While conservatives would be sensible to harness the tools of the past to fight current battles, the progressive left is regressing to a historical bait-and-switch, romanticizing a time when they envisioned disruption, disorder, and civil upheaval as a noble cause and themselves the virtuous warriors of self-sacrifice. The underground counterculture of the 1960s gave way to the radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s and ushered in a new era of Great Society government monopoly on social justice, racial divisions, and economic disparities. The Make Love, Not War peaceniks whose visions of communal utopias reached their Timothy Leary-zenith by way of Wavy Gravy and his Hog Farm turned violent through groups like the Weather Underground, New Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, groups that were the models for today’s Antifa militants. Today we see these same geriatric activists who live in an idealized, glamorized past as heroes of their own revisionist story. People like Delores Huerta who co-founded with Cesar Chavez the National Farmworkers Association (later to become the United Farm Workers) in the 1960s, who now laud the Texas State Democrats as cut of the same cloth of activist to enact “real change” and be the hero voices of the oppressed minorities in a racially damaged America.

The left beats the protest drum, insisting American icons like Martin Luther King, Jr., would never externalize as plausible his own famous words that children “will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.” Or denying the inherent value of the unborn when they insist on the abortion euphemism as “healthcare” or “women’s rights”. They think they’re carrying on a legacy of “Fighting the Man” when, sometime in the midst of President Carter’s sweater changes, they became the man. Anti-FBI and anti-war marches gave way to yuppie endeavors to perpetuate war for profit and use the government to silence nonconformists and dissenters seeking individual liberty, forcing the hand of social media companies to do their censorship bidding. The shouts of “Hell No, We Won’t Go” and oil-barrel bra-burners now think sacrifice is washing their bras in the porcelain sinks of Washington, D.C. hotels and chartering private planes to escape responsibility prosecution. They treat Cuba’s decades of oppression as the utopia of their dreams, but there is no line forming for milk-jug boat-trips to the collapsing island. It’s a crazy, mixed-up world, and no amount of “turn on, tune in, drop out” will erase the left’s legacy of upending traditional norms and glorifying violence in exchange for canonization in the halls of radicalism.

Nostalgia is a wistful practice in sentimentality, a bittersweet remembrance of how we wish to remember our past. It is taking a tour through the Stahl House, seeing in our minds’ eye a past as unspoiled as the view from the cantilevered balcony. But conservatives can’t fight the wars of the past with antiquated weapons, hoping the future is based on previous experiences. That is simply speculating for the sake of unpreparedness in a world that changes exponentially with each political cycle. We can use the lessons of the past – how we succeeded and how we utilized the tools at hand – to defeat a foe that insists on its own ignobility through a romanticized activism that is as much a solid foundation for reality as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nostalgia, W. Somerset Maugham said

Is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

I have created a Group to take up the challenge by @garyrobbins about the treatment of the “insurrectionists”. There is a website that Gary linked that contains information about who was arrested, charges made, and dispositions: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/IV0h3/23/ and https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/J2rPI/11/. I welcome Group Members assistance in slicing and dicing the data. As of this post 581 […]

Either this picture is of President Biden visiting the Disney Hall of Presidents, or Disney’s version of Biden will be the most similar to the living man of any of the presidents in their display. Perhaps President Biden’s hair and makeup team could take some tips from the Disney artists, to make the real President Biden look more lifelike…

When the uproar started about Black Rifle Coffee Company’s CEO supposedly badmouthing conservatives, I thought it smelled like a typical false flag operation designed to tear down a conservative company or institution. Now it seems that the NY Times interview of CEO Evan Hafer was selectively edited to change the context of his words…surprise, surprise.

The interviewer got Hafer talking about when he was personally attacked for having a Jewish-sounding last name, and then used his words to make it seem Hafer was talking about conservatives in general.

When are we going to learn? Robert Heinlein wrote about exactly this sort of stuff in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for crying out loud.

This is how it is in the United States of America in 2021: Dozens of Americans held in a Washington D.C. jail have been incarcerated for months awaiting trials that aren’t scheduled to begin until next year. Joe Biden’s Justice Department has repeatedly sought pre-trial detention for Americans who, on January 6, protested Biden’s election…. […]

I am currently reading (actually listening to) the abridged version of the Gulag Archipelago. What inspired me to do so? Frankly, it was to fill in some much-needed knowledge about what we could be facing in this country if one-party rule is realized. Does this sound alarmist? It does, including to me. I don’t want it to be true, I don’t want to think that people who occupy this country in the same way I have, natural-born and public educated, will become the oppressors of their fell0w-citizens. Can I even say “citizen” anymore? Is it an approved designation? After all, words (and thus thoughts) are in flux.

As I have contemplated the description by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Stalin’s gulags, I have been particularly struck by how “crimes” were assigned and “confessions” were obtained. Solzhenitsyn offers a detailed tutorial of how everyone is broken — no matter how strong and resistant, no matter how righteous your thoughts and actions, no matter how innocent your behavior. Gulag is an unremitting story of a society completely corrupted and in which no one is safe.

As I listened to the description of various interrogation techniques employed I was struck with how many are currently employed by law enforcement. You say, “whoa there, steady on, don’t go Through the Looking Glass!” I am not being critical of law enforcement. And let me quickly state that not all of the interrogation techniques described by Solzhenitsyn involve torture, brutality, and barbarism. Many are psychological. And they are employed by law enforcement because they work.

But here is the important part: These techniques work whether or not there is anything to confess. Although not pervasive there are a number of cases where false confessions have been coerced. And five of the techniques described in the Gulag Archipelago have been used in those cases: lying by interrogators (to include false promises or false evidence), lengthy interrogations that physically and emotionally exhaust the interrogated, “good cop” “bad cop” approaches, no assistance of counsel, isolation within a windowless room depriving the interrogated with a sense of the passage of time and creating a sense of dependency on the interrogator. An important safeguard against false confession in law enforcement is that there be independent corroborating evidence of the truth of the confession. In Gulag, no such protections existed because the object of the process was to convict, fill the labor camps and terrorize everyone else into submission to State control.

With this in mind consider the fate of those arrested and incarcerated for alleged crimes at the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021: How have they been treated in contrast to BLM rioters and looters? Have they had effective assistance of counsel? Has solitary confinement “softened them up” for confessing to something they did not do? What independent corroborating evidence exists for anything to which they might confess? Do we even know who they are? Yes, we know of some, but how many are there, and what exactly was their involvement in intentional criminal activity?

Most importantly, does the United States have political prisoners? For many decades, probably throughout the history of the country (recall the Sedition Act under President John Adams), there have been persons jailed for opposition to the government. When that opposition has been through violence most people accept that their jailing is due to the violence and not their political positions. Conflating acts of violence with “free speech” is dangerous. And thus it was particularly disingenuous of Chris Cuomo in defense of the “mostly peaceful protests” to ask on his CNN show last summer “Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful”. Using the Cuomo standard why was anyone arrested at the Capitol Building on January 6? Why have so many been detained without bail?

The first sentence for participation in the Capitol Building riot has been handed down:

Paul Hodgkins, a 38-year-old Floridian, is now the first Capitol rioter convicted of a felony to be sentenced. He pleaded guilty last month to obstructing congressional proceedings — specifically, the counting of the electoral votes, which he helped delay on January 6. He spent about 15 minutes inside the Senate chamber, wearing a Donald Trump shirt and carrying a Trump flag.

Eight months for Hodgkins for helping delay the counting of votes, while charges are dropped against BLM arsonists and rioters. Your business and livelihood can be completely destroyed, peasant, and your life ruined, but no jail time for those responsible. But if a legislator is inconvenienced and maybe a bit frightened, eight months and probably more for the perpetrators.

As the Gulag Archipelago recounts, when the prosecution is political, legal protections disappear. And our courts have become increasingly unreliable in ensuring that civil liberties are protected and that there is equal justice under the law. The FISA abuses remain unaddressed. The courts are denying standing to states suing other states trying to enforce the constitutional system of federal electors. Chief Justice John Roberts justified a fictional reason for declaring Obamacare to be constitutional because elections have consequences. Well then, by G-d, the courts need to make sure that elections are free and fair, the rules adopted in a constitutional manner, that laws are faithfully executed, and that persons who object to government acting outside of constitutional processes have equal protection of the law. Otherwise, we are entering a period when the following may become true for us:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

And

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

And

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions…
Ideology—that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

LeBron James is the most prominent athlete in the NBA – a multi-national organization that generates billions in revenue.  The NBA entertains sports fans all over the world, and is a powerful force in the world of entertainment and sports.  Mr. James is widely considered to be one of the best players of all time.  He has also become very outspoken in the realms of politics, social justice, economic equity, and so on.  Some have questioned why his ability to play basketball would lead him to view himself as qualified to speak on other matters that have nothing to do with sports.  Mr. James responds to his critics, “I will not just shut up and dribble … I get to sit up here and talk about what’s really important.”

While it may be true that basketball is not as important as the topics of worldly significance that he often speaks on, this does not mean that he has any particular expertise in these fields.  But he continues to share his views on the matters of the day.  He clearly views himself as above his occupation (playing basketball), and above the organization that made him famous (the NBA).  He apparently believes that his brilliance on the basketball court translates into brilliance in many and varied other unrelated fields.

Prince Harry is one of the most prominent members of the British Royal Family – an organization of enormous historical significance that is closely followed by millions of people all over the world.  He has been world-famous since the day he was born, and his membership in this exclusive club, due simply to his birth, has given him opportunities that most people could only dream of.  He has also become very outspoken in the realms of politics, social justice, economic equity, and so on.  Some have questioned why his royal birth would lead him to view himself as qualified to speak on other matters that have nothing to do with, um, with his area of expertise.  Whatever that is.  Prince Harry recently announced that he is writing his memoirs, which may seem odd for a 36-year-old who has done little in his life other than be rich and privileged.  But he explains:

“I’m writing this not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become. I’ve worn many hats over the years, both literally and figuratively, and my hope is that in telling my story—the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learned—I can help show that no matter where we come from, we have more in common than we think,” he said in a press release. “I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned over the course of my life so far and excited for people to read a firsthand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful.”

So humanity will soon be blessed with the insight of a 36-year-old English Prince.  He clearly views himself as above his occupation (being a prince), and above the organization that made him famous (the British Royal Family).  He apparently believes that his birthright as a prince translates into insights that are worth sharing with people around the world.

Pope Francis is the leader of one of the most historically important organizations on the planet – The Catholic Church.  He has also become very outspoken in the realms of politics, social justice, climate science, economic equity, and so on.  Some have questioned why his occupation as a religious leader would lead him to view himself as qualified to speak on other matters that have nothing to do with Christianity.  But he continues to use his position to promote leftist politics.

He speaks on religion too but spends an extraordinary amount of time on topics that would seem to be beyond his job in The Catholic Church.  He clearly views himself as above his occupation (Pope of The Catholic Church), and above the organization that made him famous (The Catholic Church).  He apparently believes that his position as a religious leader translates into brilliance in many and varied other unrelated fields.

A basketball player, a prince, and a Pope would seem to have little in common.  But these three have one prominent quality in common – they are all devout leftists.

Many leftists seem to believe that they have a deep understanding of topics on which they have little apparent expertise.  PJ O’Rourke touched on this topic with the great quote, “I’m not a liberal, so I have a poor grasp of stuff I don’t know anything about.”

This really does seem to be a common trait among leftists.  LeBron James.  Prince Harry.  Pope Francis.  Greta Thunberg.  John Kerry.  David Hogg.  Al Gore.  AOC.  Nikole Hannah-Jones.  Leonardo DiCaprio.  And on and on and on.

This says a lot about leftist leaders.

But I think it says more about leftist voters.  If you listen to basketball players, teenagers, actors, and so on as voices of authority on, well, on anything at all, then you must be a leftist.

And you must be a fool.

Empathy, “the capacity to place oneself in another’s position,” is one of the hardest things for anyone to achieve. It is almost impossible to change someone’s mind unless you first understand how they think, what makes them tick.

One of the hardest things in the world to do is to set our own perspective aside, and see things from someone else’s point of view. A true friend is someone who listens. A great salesman is someone who knows what you want – even need – to hear. A writer can be great if they can truly get inside the mind of the reader, and pre-emptively understand how their words will be read.

A failure to communicate stems from the failure to have empathy. Engineers usually do not fall short because they are bad at engineering; they fail when they cannot put themselves in the minds of their audience to understand how their words and PowerPoint presentations will be received. An engineer who cannot communicate effectively is worse than useless.

Rabbi David Fohrman offers a brilliant analysis of our foremothers Rachel and Leah. He explains that Rachel’s greatness is found when her sister rebuffs childless Rachel’s request to share in a precious moment when a child comes home with flowers for his mommy. Leah fires back: “You first took my husband, and now you take my son’s flowers?”

Rachel replies: “Therefore he shall lie with you tonight, in return for your son’s flowers.”

What’s going on here? Fohrman explains that Rachel, who was obsessed with the fact that she had no children, and that her sister seemed to be getting all the good things in life, was immediately struck by an epiphany: from her sister’s perspective, it is Leah, not Rachel, who is the victim in the relationship. In contrast to Leah, Rachel was shapely and beautiful. It was Leah who had to pretend to be someone else on her own wedding night. It was Leah who had to be married to a man who hated her, a man who openly preferred her sister.

But in that moment, Rachel managed to flip her perspective, and see it from her sister‘s point of view instead of her own viewpoint, barren and bitter that it was. Fohrman puts words in her mouth: “How could I ask you to share the joy of your child, without me sharing in return with you?”  She declared a truce and gave her husband to her sister in return for the flowers. Rachel gave Leah and Jacob a do-over for the wedding night.  The child that was conceived that night is named for “reward” – the reward both sisters get for that moment of empathy, for that truce between them.

It is the first act of empathy in the Torah. And it tells us a lot about much more than this. The entire episode is a validation that BOTH sisters have valid points of view. There is no single “truth” of the matter, and anyone who has empathy has to be able to validate someone else’s point of view, complete with different notions of what is important in life, and even of the facts themselves. To even ask which version is “true” would be to miss the entire point.

In every human interaction, there is a clash of perspectives, of different versions of what is true or accurate. The Torah does more than accept this: it endorses it. It is through understanding other people that we learn to grow. Having empathy does not invalidate your own version of reality, your own truth. But it tempers it with the knowledge that there are other valid ways of looking at a situation.

Every proper marriage is an ongoing test in this regard: marriage forces us to wrestle with trying to come to grips with a different point of view. No good marriage can be built on a perfunctory dismissal of your spouse’s way of seeing things. And it is why the High Priest had to be married – if we are not confronted with the challenge of understanding the perspective of a wife, we have no chance at being able to understand the perspective of G-d Almighty. This is not because G-d necessarily sees things as a woman does, but because G-d sees things differently than we do, forcing us to question our perspectives in order to wrestle with the divine.

The Torah is full of examples of different facts emerging. Jacob names a place – but the Torah takes pains to tell us what other people name that same place (e.g. Gen. 28:19 – “Bet-El” versus “Luz”; Gen 31:47 “Jegar-sahadutha” versus “Galeed.” Both names exist and are used. A similar thing happens when Rachel names her son “Ben-Oni”, and Jacob renames him “Benjamin.”  Neither name is “true” – each perspective is validated.  The names are the way in which we choose to label our world, the prism through which we see it.  And if we use different names, then we have accepted that each person has their own version, their own truth. The Torah seems to be telling us that this is perfectly fine.

The text goes much farther than merely different names for places and people, though. The entire last book of the Five Books of Moses, the text I refer to as “The Torah,” is a radical departure from the earlier texts. Deuteronomy is, except for a few verses at the end, a set of speeches given by Moses.  These speeches are radical for a very simple reason: the version of events described in them can be very different from how the same event is described earlier in the Torah. Deuteronomy contains Moses’ perspective, and he can present an entirely different set of facts.

Numbers 13:

And the Lord spoke to Moshe, saying, “Send thou men, that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall you send a man, every one a ruler among them.”

But in Deuteronomy (1:22), Moshe tells the people:

Then all of you came to me and said, “Let us send men ahead to reconnoiter the land for us and bring back word on the route we shall follow and the cities we shall come to.” I approved of the plan, and so I selected twelve of your men, one from each tribe.

See the enormous disconnect? In the first telling, the idea is G-d’s. In the second, the idea of sending the spies comes from the people!

I am well aware that one can try to square the circle and try to make both versions somehow true, though such an attempt flies in the face of the actual words. Nevertheless, that is not nearly as interesting as understanding why the text gives us an entirely incompatible set of explanations for who decided to spy out the land!

We can understand why Moses might have changed the story: he was not inclined to blame G-d, and he wanted the people to own their own history and be able to consciously grow past it. He wanted the Jewish people to take responsibility and grow even from their failures. Even if it did not really happen that way!

Yet however we parse it, we have the text with BOTH versions. This means that the Torah is teaching us, the readers, a very explicit lesson: It is OK to have different – even incompatible – versions of the same story. The purpose of the story is, after all, to grow connections and relationships, to help people make sense of their past, and find pathways into the future. One could even argue that the Torah’s purpose in telling us the story for a reason easily explains why different explanations of the origin of the world are offered by geologists, physicists, chemists, and, of course, founding religious texts for different religions. There can, thanks to the prism selected, indeed be a vast range of differing accounts of the creation of the world – with none of them necessarily being wrong.

And so the purist ideal of “one version,” or perhaps even “one true version,” becomes collateral damage, sacrificed when the purpose justifies it. We can – and should – customize the story for the listener, always seeking to find ways to constructively move forward. It is why it is good and right and proper to find ways to compliment others instead of insisting on “telling it as I see it.” The latter is an act of supreme selfishness and indifference, while the former shows sensitivity and consideration.

I fear this lesson is often missed by those who insist that there are somehow no inconsistencies in the Torah, that everything dovetails and aligns perfectly. I take the text seriously, so when there are differences within it, then we are to learn from those differences as well.

The lesson seems evident: there is a deep and inherent value in each person’s perspective. And the notion of a single “true” version of an event is antithetical to the purposes of the Torah. Empathy is a higher goal, because it allows us to build a common vision, an understanding between each other, and between man and G-d.

It is no accident that the Torah gives us different and contradictory versions of events. It is on purpose, to teach us that, as long as we act in good faith, validating different perspectives, names, and even events, it is an act of love, constructively building relationships. That is what we should be all about.