Motel: (Bravely) Even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness -Fiddler on the Roof |
Mordcha: Why should I break my head about the |
There are certain areas in which you can seem to approach absolute truth. In recent years one of these seems to be translation.
However, in many other areas of life, truth seems to be quite elusive. It seems to depend a great deal on other issues.
Tevye, in the quotation above, was right. There are different points of view in many issues and they are right, they are correct, and they are honest. People can have more than one truth. The truth is not an absolute in most cases and it depends upon how different people see issues.
Of course, there are mistruths, there are lies, there are dishonesty, fibs, and there are people who say things that are not true. That's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about two people who say two different things and they're both true, each one from a different point of view.
Thus, a questioner, an interrogator, an individual seeking the truth, in many cases has to look deeper into the responses and determine which truth he will accept as the applicable truth in his particular case.
This is very much the case in Berurim before dating. Discuss the potential merits of a prospective date and you are likely to get wildly different responses and in many cases they are correct. The responses differ because of the person's outlook on the situation, his perspective, and possibly even based upon the persona of the person whom you might date. That person may act differently in different circumstances, in which case that person is actually creating different truths.
The World to Come is sometimes called the World of Truth (Olam HaEmet). We do not experience the World of Truth today and we do not experience Olam HaEmet in our present world. The contrast between our mortal world in which we do not really know what the truth really is. It's the world of questions, doubts, and uncertainties, and the World of Truth, which we will experience in the future might be one of the greatest contrasts between our world and that world.
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Keywords: Dating, Questions, Translation, Truth/lies
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