In David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land, the life of the main character, Ora, is a web of lies, each one to protect herself, her family, and her lover. Yet when she is forced to lie for someone else, she becomes distraught and self-righteous. On a rainy winter evening she summons her Arab driver Sami to drive her to Tel Aviv to meet her ex-lover, a now destitute and broken man named Avrum. She will try to convince him to walk with her in the Galilee hills until her son returns safely from Lebanon. She has this idea that if she is not at home, she cannot be notified by the army of her son’s death and thus he cannot die. Sami picks her up in his taxi with a sick child from his Arab village who needs to get to Jaffa for medical care. Sami has Ora pose as the child’s relative as they pass by Israeli check points. He knows that without Ora he will be stopped and turned back. Ora holds the feverish child and resents Sami for implicating her in such a lie. But she owes Sami for a life of service to her and her family and so she acquiesces. The boy reaches his destination in Jaffa. He and Sami disappear.
But Ora’s lies run far deeper than Sami’s. Sami’s lie is understandable, perhaps. When you are under occupation, powerless, if you don’t lie, you may die. For the powerless lying is often about survival. Ask many of our relatives who lied to gain entry into this country: false documents, hiding illnesses, contrived marriages. Ellis Island was a house of lies. But without them I would not be here. I can only thank my grandparents for lying. But Ora’s lies are different. She hides the fact that her beloved son who she is trying to protect from harm is not the son of her husband but the love child of her and Avram while she was married to his best friend. And she hides the fact that she knows the sordid story of Avram’s capture and torture at the hands of the Egyptians in the Yom Kippur War, an episode that destroyed him as a human being. She knows of it because her husband, Avram’s closest friend, told her and swore her to secrecy. Her life is built on lying to the three most important people in her life: her husband, her son, and her lover. But we can easily say her lies were justified, either to save her son from knowing he is a mamzer (illegitimate child), or saving Avrum from the shame of his knowing she knows of his torture.
Ora claims to exercise a self-righteous lie. She is lying to be true to another, but of course, to the other she is also lying. She reveals her lie to Avrum hoping it will liberate her from the claws of secrecy. That it will set her free. But of course that too is a lie: the truth does not set her free. The more she tells the truth the more despondent she becomes, the more truth she injects into the lie that is her life, the more the lie marches on. Truth is literally suffocating her lie. She realizes by the end that the lie has becomes the truth and the truth, has thus become nothing more than a lie. She cannot rewrite the past. You cannot undo what has become true just because now you tell us it’s a lie. The last scene in the book has Ora sitting in a crevasse of a rock in the hills outside Jerusalem, perhaps gesturing to Song of Songs 2:14, “Oh my dove in the crevasse of the rocks, hidden by the cliff, Let me see your face, let me hear your voice.” As she sits there, nothing resolved, not knowing the fate of her son, not knowing what she will return to when or if, she return home, to her home of lies, she sadly, as if in resignation quietly says, “how thin is the crust of the earth.” With that the books ends. The rock, in Hebrew zur, is of course a reference to God, to truth, as the Psalmist says, “God is my rock and my savior.”
Grossman knows exactly what he is doing. In some way, this is Israel’s plight, maybe the plight of the Jews, maybe the plight of all humanity. We tell lies to get at the truth. We tell lies to make something true because the truth is too hard to bear. We tell lies to save our people, our story, to justify our existence. We tell lies to protect our children, our parents, ourselves. We tell ourselves when we lie to our children about our past, “Those were different times.” Were they? How so? Yes, times are always different, as much as they are always the same. We do aspire to be truth tellers. Not everything is a lie, but the truths we tell and lives we live contain small lies, thin lies, thin like the crust of the earth. We sit on the rock of our truths—or is it the rock of our lies—but, like Ora, in quiet moments we too realize, “how thin is the crust of the earth.” The truths we sit on are thin, made more so by the lies included therein.
This is an abbreviated adaptation of a sermon delivered at the Fire Island Synagogue, Fire Island, NY, on Yom Kippur Eve 2011
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