Noah: Which Story is "The Truth"?

Shabbat Shalom!

Years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an action movie called "True Lies," and while I long ago forgot the plot, I've never forgotten the title. How is it that something can be both true and untrue at the same time? Or put another way, what happens when we read or hear two versions of the same story, yet each one claims to be the truth?

That's the challenge we Jews faced last week when we read not one but two variant tellings of the Creation story. And again this week, we will read in adjacent passages of the Torah conflicting descriptions of how many animals Noah brought with him onto his amazing ark.

In the first version, he is commanded to bring aboard seven pairs of every pure animal, but only one pair of unpure animals. In the second version, which appears only a handful of verses later, Noah is commanded to bring one pair of both pure and unpure animals. So which version is right?

For the modern reader, the answer is there were once two stories about Noah and the ark and, in typical Torah fashion, rather than discard one version in favor of the other, both stories were retained. But to our Sages, who took such contradictions quite seriously, the two stories were not really different at all but were equally true. They merged the two and explained that Noah was actually commanded to bring one pair of all animals for the purpose of re-populating the world, but an additional six pairs of the pure animals to be sacrificed once the ark settled on dry land some 40 days later. Each story, in other words, was actually part of the same story looked at from a different perspective.

Two pairs? Six pairs? For most of us, this isn't so pressing an issue. But thousands of years later, our own ability to reconcile different truths in our own lives is a valuable skill that enables us to live, work and dialogue with people who see the world differently than we do. When we limit to ourselves the power to define what is true and see other versions of the same stories, events and issues as therefore lies, we create within ourselves an unfortunate and unfair worldview.

The radio commentator Paul Harvey used to broadcast an interesting true life story each day that always took something we thought we knew and then showed how much we really didn't know after all. Each show ended with the words "and that's the rest of the story." For the Sages, the different accounts of the same stories in the Torah didn't mean one was right and the others were lies, but that each version added something important for us to learn; each version gave us "more of the story."

If we can do that when it comes to politics, faith and people - if we can acknowledge that our versions of the "truth" may not be the only one - we will not only find ourselves freed from the burden of always having to be right, we will find our lives enriched and broadened in ways we might never have imagined.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Rosen