Toras Emes: Enough With School Shootings, Gender Dysphoria, and Penumbras

We stand before the great holiday of Shavuot – זמן מתו תורתינו – the day we finish preparing to receive the Torah.¹ The Torah is the central repository of our values.

כִּי הֵם חַיֵּינוּ וְאֹרֶךְ יָמֵינוּ

It is our very life and the length of our days

While the Torah is infinite, the most significant characteristic that we use to describe it is Toras Emes, “the Torah of Truth.”

Receiving the Torah could not come at a better time, as we live in a world that is dominated by Sheker (falsehood). Of course, the world outside of Torah has always contained elements of Sheker, but I don’t remember a time in my sixty-plus years that we have been bombarded by it on such a constant basis.

Here are a few of the more well-known and egregious examples:

1. Violence in Society – There is much handwringing, and many angry accusations were made over the terrible school shooting in Uvalde, TX. Many are convinced that the root of the problem is too much access to guns, others vociferously protest that guns are necessary to protect the innocent. However, both sides avoid the Truth – the real cause of so much violence in our society – which was revealed (if you were paying attention) a few weeks ago.

Do we not understand that after witnessing literally thousands of fights and killings and beatdowns, some kids will decide to solve their own problems this way?

At the time, the talk of the town concerned actor Will Smith, who publicly slapped Chris Rock after he made a joke about Smith’s wife at the Academy Awards show. The intelligentsia and exemplars of high morality of Hollywood were horrified and aghast at this terrible display of violence. “What have we come to? We must strip Smith of his awards and banish him from our midst for such a vile public act of mayhem!”

However, they conveniently forgot that the greatest purveyors of violence in our society are themselves – it is they who produce endless sick and brutal violence in virtually every movie and on most television shows. They are the ones who have fed violence to children throughout their lives: from cartoons at the earliest age, through movies aimed at kids, through grotesque amounts of violence in movies. (And I am not even speaking about horror movies whose only point is to show unbelievably sick and revolting murder, mayhem, and torture). Will Smith himself was, up to that point, celebrated for several movie roles in which he was a hitman, villain, killer, and purveyor of brutality – which was fine because it was only a movie.

Is there any real wonder why we have so many kids who decide to go into a school and start shooting? Do we not understand that after witnessing literally thousands of fights and killings and beatdowns, some kids will decide to solve their own problems this way?  I agree that it is terrible that eighteen-year-olds have legal access to assault weapons, but is that the source of the problem? It is clear as day that it is the constant diet of violence that kids constantly imbibe from the hypocrites in Hollywood that is the main cause of this sickness; not the availability of guns.

A meme that I saw circulating really makes the point.

The root of all this is pure Sheker – the opposite of what Toras Emes stands for.

2. Gender Dysphoria – is the fancy term used to provide credence to the notion that biological gender is irrelevant. One may choose one’s gender as either male or female (or neither) regardless of one’s physical body and chromosomes. While there have always been people of one gender who may have had some tendencies of the other, according to current thinking, gender is entirely fluid. It can be determined only by how the individual feels about themselves. (I hope that is the correct pronoun). It has gotten such that 

a. A middle school student was charged with sexual harassment for using the wrong pronoun 

b. A US Supreme Court nominee who was picked largely because of her gender, cannot define what a woman is.

c. Girls are subjected to having biological males share their bathrooms and locker rooms.

and there are many, many other ramifications, particularly for women’s sports.

Perhaps worst of all, utter confusion has been sown in business, academia, and governmental settings such that good and well-meaning people are afraid that any simple remark may subject them to lawsuits and being fired from their jobs.

Once again, the root of all this is pure Sheker– the opposite of what Toras Emes stands for

3. Roe v. Wade at Risk – There is endless noise going on about this potential decision; I have discussed it at length previously.  I mention it here only to make one point in this context. Those who say that the debate is about whether to outlaw abortions are engaging in Sheker. If Roe is overturned, not one abortion will automatically be outlawed.  Rather, it will then be up to the people's elected representatives, (in each State Legislature) to decide the public policy question of whether, and to what extent, abortions should be legal.  (The certain result will be that abortions will remain legal in very liberal states like New York and California and will be restricted in places like Missouri and Oklahoma.) 

The reason that passions are running so hot is because of what the debate is really about.  The issue is whether unelected judges may read their own political biases into interpreting the constitution or whether they must follow the words of the constitution and what those words meant when they were written. The fact is that the constitution says nothing at all about abortions and other cases that have been decided based on the manufactured constitutional "right of privacy".  The effort to overturn Roe is a protest against those who pretend that it does.

The constitution provides a mechanism for changing it, adding to it, or deleting parts of it, if a super-majority of the country agrees. That mechanism is called “Amendment”. The constitution has twenty-seven amendments enacted over the years – that is the only legitimate way to change it. Unfortunately, however, certain groups have gotten used to the idea that judges have the right to look into the “penumbra” of the constitution and rule that it says things that it does not. This is important to them for getting policies enshrined in the law that they were not successful in enacting through the legislature, by the shortcut of having judges pretend that the constitution says things that it does not.

That is the truth of this debate, as opposed to the pervasive Sheker that engulfs us.

I could bring many, many other examples of falsehood being promoted as the truth, such as “woke-ism” and “cancel culture”.  These are sufficient to bolster my contention that we are drowning in a world of Sheker, and we desperately need Emes in our lives.

 בָּרוּךְ אֱלקינוּ שֶׁבְּרָאָנוּ לִכְבודו

 ... וְנָתַן לָנוּ תּורַת אֱמֶת וְחַיֵּי עולָם נָטַע בְּתוכֵנוּ

Blessed is our God who created us for His glory …and gave us Toras Emes, and [thereby] implanted Eternal Life in us

Let us resolve to focus, this Shavuos, on accepting the Torah of Truth as our guide in life. We desperately need its light in the dark times in which we live

Happy Shavuos

Published in the Queens Jewish Link June 3, 2002

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1. The Torah was actually given on the seventh of Sivan.  Many commentaries deal with the obvious question - if it was given on the seventh, why do we celebrate the sixth of Sivan?  Rav SR Hirsch says that what is important about Shavuot is not that the Torah was given 3,500 years ago.  Rather, it marks the end of the period of Sefirat HaOmer, in which we prepare ourselves to receive the Torah.  That is what our Avodas Hayom is today as well.