Can Chronicles Help us Handle Fake News Better?

You know that famous parable about the people in the dark cave who encounter an elephant - each person touches another part of this huge animal and imagines a totally different creature based on what they touch - a massive leg, a trunk, ear or tail?

Even this story has very different versions and so it is with so many aspects of our lives - and so it is with our sacred stories.

Today the Muslim world celebrates Eid Al Adah - an important holiday commemorating the dedication and faith of Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his son, Ismail, to God, Allah.

But wait - which son, which God? The Jewish Torah, which came first, has another version than the later Muslim Koran - both include the patriarch Abraham willing to offer up his beloved son to an insecure or hard core deity - in a man’s world of fierce fidelity, tough fathers’ love, patriarchal reality that thankfully is no longer the only game in town.

Well yes, there are at least two versions of this story - with twists and turns that make one uniquely Muslim and the other a building block of the Jewish faith. On some level - the Christian core story of God sacrificing his own son on the cross is also related to the same mythic basis.

Is one version more real or holy than the others? Well - it depends who you ask. But if you ask me — it doesn’t matter. It’s an elephant and we are all holding different parts. As long as we don’t claim with certainty that our part is all there is and all the rest is fake - or heresy.

Somehow, inside our messy world, even the sacred stories co-exist, facts of fictions, mythic moments that matter to believers - telling the same tale of devotion, valuable for both its utter cruelty and the message of divine love of all for all that is hidden inside.

The response to righteous fundamentalists is - sorry, no, there IS another way to tell this tale and live this life.

There are competing facts and narratives, similar but different versions of the stories we tell even about the most sacred sources that you’d think are shared with certainty, agreed upon as truth, non-debatable foundational fact - but then you gotta think again.

Fake news is part of the algorithm of our lives, depending on our faiths or newsfeeds we are getting one part of the elephant - different data than even the person you are living with or working with -let alone across the world. It’s a lot of different kinds of elephants.. Or maybe it is just one really big creature with many parts..

It’s confusing. And during these difficult days of ongoing conflict and growing gaps of misinformation - this lack of shared agreement on what’s real and what matters is also a source of great suffering and pain on top of so much sorrow and stress.

But it turns out - this is nothing new and even fake news is not new under the sun. Perhaps this can help us deal better with the lack of objective truth?

On our Below the Bible Belt journey we just started reading the 24th and FINAL book of the Hebrew Bible - Chronicles - also known as the Book of What’s Missing. It’s basically revisionist history of what happened from the creation of the world - Cain and Abel are not mentioned, neither is our mother Eve — until the destruction of Judah by the Babylonian and tis rebuilding, a century later, under Persian rule. It includes a lot of names - who begat whom - mostly men but also some women — but also a lot of omissions. Chronicles has an agenda - political polemics and religious regulations that represents the Kingdom of Judah, only one voice among the many that is the choir of the ancient Hebraic world.

Chronicles claims to tell The Jewish history - yet the bias is obvious to critical eyes. It was likely written around the 2nd century BCE mid second temple period, in Jerusalem, with a heavy axe to grind against all other alternative expressions of what Jewish is about - esp the competing northern kingdom of Israel and its lingering lineage and ideologies.

Who doesn’t count? Who is not on the list?

That’s what makes for fascinating reading - if you like footnotes..and if you can stomach complexity and multiple narratives.

Today, there are those who will tell us that the Jewish story includes loyalty to simple one side story - us vs. them, this way or that. But actually, even from the Bible we can see that there are multiple ways of telling the story, and even though the editors of the Bible - around the same time as the authorship of Chronicles - wanted us to take away a single stand and minimize the others — enough evidence was left to piece together the alternatives and realize that there are many ways to celebrate our origin and heritage, beliefs and symbols, morals and values — not just the Judean, strict, and often hostile, separatist and violent narrative that makes some of us wonder and squirm with discomfort - how are we part of the same story?

Well the answer is - we both are and are not.

The question is - how do we deal with the fact that we come from different origin stories and must reconcile opposing ideologies, different parts of the elephant - as we struggle to co-exist in the same cave which is this current life?

Perhaps that’s where the essence of pluralism still demands our attention, and the awareness of more than one narrative’s existence helps us to at least discern the complexity and multiplicity of opinions even at the heart of our sacred texts and what you’d think be unshakable solid single storyline that none can doubt.

Well, think again.

Chronicles, just begun, will be our guideposts for the next few months as we make our way to the end of the Hebrew Bible on this journey.

I’m curious to see what alternative facts we dig up and how this helps us piece together the bigger puzzle of our diversity and differences - how we got here, who we are.

I hope that we will be able to recognize and respect each other’s truths and sacred stories, narratives and hopes, shared commitment to human dignity and worth, the right to live and the right to love -

Eid Mubarak - may there be happier holidays in the future with enough food and justice to go around — inshallah.

May peace prevail. May there be healing.

Thank you for joining me below the Bible Belt.

Shabbat Shalom