Recent media reports about the current and previous presidents provided me a new insight into a famous Gemara.
President Biden is famously gaffe-prone, and has been so throughout his political career. “Every once in a while I make a mistake,” he said in May 2022. “Like, well, once a speech.”
I can, from personal experience, relate to someone who’s suffered occasional brain-mouth disconnects. There isn’t, however, any evidence that the president’s judgment is impaired or that he suffers dementia, as some like to claim.
Earlier this month, such claimants gleefully circulated a video clip as Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida. It showed President Biden pleading with residents endangered by hurricanes to get vaccinated against COVID-19, as if that would protect them from the wind and rain.
“The COVID vaccine will help with Hurricane Ian… according to Joe Biden,” was one caption for the clip, from a September 27 Facebook post sharing it. “Do you think he’s crazy? Let us know in the comments!”
The video, though, was an old one, and its context was the president’s noting that since bad weather often leads to evacuations to often-crowded shelters, it made sense for the unvaccinated in hurricane-prone states to take the shot. “If you wind up having to… stay in a shelter, you don’t want to add COVID-19 to the list of dangers that you’re going to be confronting,” was Mr. Biden’s very next sentence, unshared, of course, by the videomongers.
Whatever one might feel about COVID shots or Mr. Biden’s seizing a chance to push them, the clip was no evidence of senility.
Former President Trump, too, has been the victim of those bent on offering context-free, misleading comments.
Just last week, he was blasted by numerous media for allegedly bigoted remarks about Jews.
A subheader in The New York Times last Thursday asserted that “Donald Trump made bigoted remarks about Jews and Persians at an event in 2021.”
The piece, by Trump nemesis Maggie Haberman, reported that Mr. Trump had used the phrase “good Jewish character,” described Persians as “very good salesmen” and complained that Israeli Jews favored him more than Jewish Americans. And it took pains to quote the former president’s earlier social media posting “in which he excoriated” (Ms. Haberman’s words) US Jews, saying that they needed to “get their act together before it’s too late.”
“Sounds like a threat,” said the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.
The “good Jewish character” remark, though, was a jocular one, made about documentarian Alex Holder in his presence, and carried no whiff of anti-Semitism. Neither did the “get their act together” one, which was simply a typical Trumpian grumble about the former president’s feeling that most American Jews don’t care about Israel enough to support him. It was a political gripe, not a bigoted slur. And the indictment of Persians being good salesmen? It was preceded by his assertion that Persians are “very smart,” not quite a hateful insult.
Whatever one might think of Mr. Trump’s judgment or character—or about his frustration with most American Jews’ Democratic Party leanings—comments like his recent ones have as much to do with anti-Semitic sentiments as they do with chopped liver.
The Gemara? It’s in Shabbos (104a) and notes how the letters of the word sheker are adjacent to one another in the Hebrew alphabet, and those of emes are as distant from one another as can be. One import of those facts is that while falsehood is easily found, truth is discovered only with great difficulty. Another is that sheker teeters on one foot (that of the kuf, which protrudes downward) while emes stands stably on bases that are wide, indicating truth’s staying power and falsehood’s ephemerality.
What occurred to me, prodded by the reports of Mr. Biden’s “dementia” and Mr. Trump’s “anti-Semitism,” was that perhaps there’s something else to glean from the respective distributions of the letters of emes and sheker. Namely, that perceiving the former word requires one to see the entire alef-beis, while the latter often appears, through tunnel-vision, as a bracketed bloc.
Which subtly telegraphs the idea that truth can only be perceived with a comprehensive, all-encompassing view, and is easily subverted by single-minded focus on isolated facts cleaved from their contexts.
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