True Lies

Continued from page 2

3.)

. Story-telling is one of the most important ways we have of educating ourselves about right and wrong. Jewish traditional sources (Talmud, Midrash) are full of narratives and parables, some based on careful inferences from the text, but many quite fantastical. These stories are frequently given as interpretive asides within the Torah narrative itself. For example, in the Pentateuch's story of Moses' youth, there are many, many junctures where the narrative is unclear. Jewish tradition, which Jews believe was orally transmitted from the revelation at Mt. Sinai, steps in here, as everywhere in the Bible, to provide the connecting narratives that make sense of the scriptural text.

For example, when Moses kills a cruel Egyptian overseer who is beating a Jewish slave, the Midrash explains, based on an anomaly of diction in the text, that Moses killed him by pronouncing the secret and holy four-letter name of God, the Tetragrammaton.

Exactly where real history leaves off and pure parable begins is often impossible to discern. But what matters is the great moral truth that's conveyed-in this case, about the power of God's Name--much more than the nitpicking tiny truths concerning what this person did on this day and what he didn't do.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean that what the Talmud and Midrash relate about biblical characters didn't really happen. From a perspective of religious faith, as a Jew I don't always know what happened, and I have to be comfortable with that.

Perhaps I'm too comfortable. In my second book,

, I took certain liberties with the life of the first Hebrew patriarch. My book was the first to tell Abraham's life story at length, combining the very bare and cryptic scriptural text with the insights of secular historians and the often wild-sounding interpolations of the Talmud and Midrash.

The latter present Abraham as an occultist, astrologer, healer, and writer of esoteric texts whose home was a regular gathering place for angels. He was an androgynous figure born with an indeterminate sexual anatomy, a man who wrestled with an accusing spiritual force, the

. He may or may not have done something terrible to his son Isaac on a rock altar on a mountaintop. Jewish tradition hints that the binding of Isaac, contrary to what the Bible seems to say, did not end happily.

Is any of this history? I present it as such. So am I a fibber like James Frey?

I took a chance that this material was not merely parable but also that it happened. This is the presupposition of my book, and I admitted it there freely. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I took the chance because I thought that the story, told as a narrative about a real man who was born in 1812 B.C.E., bears certain moral meanings that would be lost if the stories about him remained as they were, scattered throughout the corpus of ancient Jewish traditional literature, or if they are told like naïve children's fables, which is often their fate in our ignorant age. I wanted to give readers an opportunity to appreciate Abraham as a full-bodied non-fictional character.

So, let's give James Frey the benefit of the doubt. Yes, there's much to doubt, but for all that his book may be faulted for its disgusting details of bodily functions, its vulgar language, and its patent untruths, I think he was trying to convey a moral message. And it's not a bad one.

In its exposé, The Smoking Gun admits this. "While claiming that he does not desire to become the poster boy for unconventional recovery, Frey has nonetheless emerged as a source of inspiration and guidance for countless substance abusers.Frey rejected the Twelve-Step approach and considers addiction a weakness, not a disease.Frey's reported post-Hazelden recovery was unorthodox, hinging on his ability to continually surmount temptation.

"For desperate people, there appears to be magic in his approach, though it really boils down to a familiar refrain: Just say 'No.' But since that phrase has long been tainted, Frey opts for the pithier: `Hold on.' "

Seeing your failings not as the product of a disease but rather of, well, failing, of being weak--where the solution is to seek strength and to "hold on" to moral resolutions you make--is not only a traditional but also a radical message. In our day, the reigning but often unacknowledged presupposition is that people, being animals, really have no power to make morally free decisions.

For his saying such a thing, I'm willing to forgive James Frey a lot. Indeed, as he withstands the media hurricane that can't abide his success in moving readers not only to tears but to contemplate their own lives and their own failings in a new light, I have a message for him. It is two words.

Hold on.

_Related Features

Are Lies Still A Big Deal? Confronting a Chronic Liar Lying as a Learned Behavior