The [Dis]Honest Truth – The Subjective Adjective Revisited

 

 

Author's Note - This post is a preface to an upcoming post about Dassi Erlich's soon-to-be-released autobiography.  As a background to this post, please see my August 2008 post: Lo Tosifu V'Lo Tigrau - The Objective of the Subjective Adjective.

 

Have you ever heard anyone say that “This is the honest truth”?

Doesn’t that come across as a little bit verbose? If it’s the truth, how can it be dishonest? Can the truth be dishonest?

Yes, it can. When the “truth” is stretched or shortened or bent out of shape (distorted), it may be a truthful report of facts, but is not telling a truthful story.

This is why witnesses are cautioned to tell, “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Firstly, the witness should not tell us anything that is not factual – it must be the truth. But this isn’t enough. The witness may be telling us a true account of only half the story, but the full story – the whole truth – says something else. So, we need him to also be sure to tell us the whole truth and not only some of it. Conversely, the witness may also “pad” the truth with some extra fluff which isn’t really true. But we want nothing extra. We want nothing but the truth.

So we see that there may be different types of “truth”. The honest truth and the dishonest truth. It goes without saying that the dishonest truth isn’t really true at all. It’s just that nobody can dispute the facts.

We get this from the Chofetz Chaim. In Hilchos Lashon Hara (10:2), Chofetz Chaim writes seven conditions for allowing one to say or write information that may be detrimental to another. Of course, it has to be absolutely true and first-hand knowledge and intended for a constructive purpose. Among the conditions, he writes (condition 4):

One may not inflate the infraction to appear to be any bigger than what it really is.

This means that whatever is stated cannot be overstated, overblown, exaggerated, or sensationalized for emphasis or “shock effect”.

In Be’er Mayim Chaim (clause 9) he expounds: 

It is elementary that this relegates it to a false report, and this constitutes motzi shem rah.

If it’s not the honest truth, it’s not the truth at all. But it makes for great propaganda.

This is the lesson I was trying to teach back in 2008 when I wrote the post: Lo Tosifu V’Lo Tigrau – The Objective of the Subjective Adjective.

Many times, the primary facts being reported are the real facts, but by adding some “subjective” detail or by omitting some “inconvenient” detail, it tells us a different story than the true story. It may technically be the truth but it’s not the honest truth.

In my 2008 post, I presented several examples of how adding a single unnecessary word or omitting a necessary one can make all the difference. For our purposes, I want to review three of the examples.

The first example is one of a transgression of “nothing but the truth”.

 

Example 1 - Added subjective adverb

This comes straight out of my book and it's on page 126. Here I am commenting on a story related by Noah Efron in his book, Real Jews:

 

Soon after the war, I flew El Al to the United States. I was squeezing back from the bathroom through a crowd of ultra-Orthodox Jews noisily praying in front of the emergency exit, when a flight attendant caught my eye and, smiling slyly, whispered in Hebrew, "You open the door, I'll push." I smiled back and found my seat.

 

Although it was not the focus of quoting the passage, I did comment in a footnote about one extra word. The word noisily. Here is what I wrote:

 

This adjective (Note - it is really an adverb; both I and my editors were sleeping on the job) is very telling. As it lends nothing to the story, it only serves to cast aspersions on the activity and, thus, to compromise Efron's claim to objectivity. I have both observed and participated in these "crowds" and I can attest to the fact that the participants typically make every effort not to raise their voices, that they can be barely heard above the din of the jet engines even at ground zero and that virtually no uninvolved passengers are even aware that the prayers are going on – unless they need the bathroom.

 

In this example, the adverb did not effect the story much, but, aside from its truthfulness being at issue, it betrays the sympathies of the teller and compromises his claims to objectivity.

 

What bothered me so much about his use of this adverb?

It is a term that can have a double meaning. At its pristine level, “noisily” means that it produces strong sound waves. But it is also used to characterize the event such as being wild, rowdy, and inconsiderate. In my eyes, the only reason to add this unnecessary adverb was to convey the added derogatory meaning which isn't really true. Hence, this is what Prof. Efron was trying to say to us. If so, I do not believe that this is the truth at all.

If you check out the original 2008 post, you may notice a commenter who calls himself “G”. G wanted to challenge my analysis and he asks, “Okay, why is your opinion of any more value than his?”

I don’t think G realized it, but he was really proving my point. Apparently, I have an opinion on whether the adverb “noisily” is appropriate, and Prof. Efron has an opinion on whether it is appropriate. It boils down to a matter of opinion. It seems that G concedes that this is an opinionated term. If one wants to tell the honest truth, there is no place for unneeded opinionated adverbs.

I think this is clearly what Chofetz Chaim meant in condition 4 about exaggerating the situation.

 

The second example was a transgression of not telling “the whole truth”.

Example 2 - Omitted adjective

Here is an example of the Lo Tigrau side of the coin. This comes out of Noah Efron's book as well but, as of yet, has not made it into mine. On page 60 of his book, Real Jews, he writes:

 

But the Jerusalem that produced Ginsburg is gone. To celebrate his wife's seventieth birthday, Ginsburg took her and several friends on a walking tour of the Jerusalem of her youth. When they went to visit her old school, a haredi vandal doused them with a bucket of water from the rooftop, because one of the women wore a sleeveless shirt. A couple in their seventies. They cannot even walk around what used to be their city. It is ruined.

 

Hmmm. Something doesn't seem right here. Where is there any indication that they cannot walk around what used to be their city? It seems there was a problem because somebody was sleeveless. If nobody was sleeveless, they can walk as much as they want. So, who says they can't walk in their city? They just can't walk sleeveless in their city. Efron seems to have forgotten to mention this one little detail. The fact that they are in their seventies he does not hesitate to remind us again. (BTW, Efron is a great great great nephew of the Bais HaLevi - the first RYBS- and is no total am haaretz. Why should he think there should be a cutoff date for tznius?) But in the course of that 5-word sentence, he forgets all about the sleeveless. And why is the Jerusalem that produced Ginsburg gone? Who says that she was able to walk around sleeveless 60 years ago? I tend to doubt it. Efron is wrong. Jerusalem is still here. It's Ginsburg that changed.

So let us rewrite his passage and insert this one little missing word:

 

They cannot even walk around sleeveless in what used to be their city. It is ruined.

 

Loses a bit its pizzaz, don't you think?

 

In this case, we can assume that all the facts of the story are absolutely true. No bending of the facts. We will assume that they really did walk around their old neighborhood, and they really did get doused by a chareidi vandal because one was sleeveless.

The problem isn’t in the main story, the problem is in the way Prof. Efron interprets the story for his readers in his follow-up comment. As I wrote in my post, leaving out one crucial detail makes his entire interpretation, and hence his point, totally false.

We don’t even need Chofetz Chaim for this one.

The third example is the one that is most relevant to the upcoming post. Once again it is a transgression of “nothing but the truth”. Here it is, slightly abridged:

 

Example 3 - Added subjective adverb

This example touches upon the issue of the Mehadrin bus lines and the commotion that has been stirred up over them. Believe it or not, I have not committed myself to declaring a firm position on the issue though my inclinations are quite obvious.

That said, I wish to comment on one of the news items that described one of the "celebrated" bus-brawl incidents. This is the Oct. 20, 2007 incident on the 497 Beit Shemesh bus as reported in the Jerusalem Post (link no longer available). The news item reads as follows (I italicized the keywords):

 

A haredi woman was attacked on a Beit Shemesh bus by five haredi youths Sunday for refusing to move to the back of the bus, police said.

 

The woman, who was seated at the front, asked an IAF soldier to sit next to her for protection. The attackers then turned on the soldier.

 

"They started beating me murderously," the soldier said in an interview.

 

The midday attack on the Egged 497 bus culminated in a clash between several dozen haredi men and police. During the melee, the suspects fled and the rioters were dispersed by police.

 

There were no injuries reported in the incident, but the tires of a police vehicle were punctured.

 

This article generated over 100 Talkbacks. As to be expected, most of them were comments suggesting all kinds of places the chareidim should "go back to". But two of them caught my attention, and, I must say that I am a bit ashamed that I did not notice this myself. These 2 Talkbacks relate to the quote from the IAF soldier about being beaten "murderously":

99. Hareidi Bashing Hzev - Israel 10/22/2007 10:52

 

I do Condemn the actions of these hooligans - but still stand astounded by the outpouring of hatred against chareidi world ! Reading the article it says : "There were no injuries reported in the incident" so how does that fit with the previous line "They started beating me murderously". This just serves as another example how some rare events - with no real injury - about chareidim can bring out all this hatred whereas the daily violence in the secular world can fill this website every day again

Here is another similar one:

81. No injuries were reported, Why Was a Haredi Woman Sitting With Men? Even weirder than the last hoax Efox - United States 10/21/2007 20:43

Yes the last one was a hoax with everyone else on the bus not noticing and the American Woman not being able to ID the men, but this one is different. This woman is supposedly Haredi but didn't act like one, yet there was clearly chaos when the police arrived, but no one was hurt? Just what kind of an attack leaves no one hurt?

I didn't write these Talkbacks, folks, and I am not claiming that any incident is a hoax. But they are valid points which do indeed indicate that these incidents do not always fit the print.

 

In both the first example of Prof. Efron and this third example of the Jerusalem Post, the subjective adverb was inserted to enhance the narrative. What makes the second one more egregious is that it is actually contradicted by another part of the narrative. Even my buddy G had no rebuttal to this one.

These types of distortions of the truth are commonplace. This is the way journalists slant the news. Especially the yellow ones. They constitute what we call propaganda. Theoretically, they also count as libel and defamation, although in practice, it may be hard to prove in court that a “true” statement is contextually false (or, perhaps, contextually false doesn’t count).

And, let’s not forget that, according to Chofetz Chaim, this changes the whole narrative to motzi shem rah. Dos is nisht emess un dos is nisht erlich!

News items come and go, but books are meant to be kept. When a book is written for the purpose of propaganda, the dishonest "truths" remain for posterity. If one really wants to write the honest truth, it is vitally important not to spice it up with unneeded subjective adjectives (or adverbs). Such a thing is a brutal betrayal of the truth.