Are we liars? Most of us will say we are not. We aspire to be truth tellers. But aspirations are different than behaviors. There is an old Hungarian Jewish saying that defines Antisemites: “Antisemites are those that hate Jews more than usual.” Can we say something similar about liars? Liars are those who lie more than usual, those who lie habitually, or perhaps those who do so without remorse. While we aspire to tell the truth, there are all kinds of reasons why we don’t. And all sorts of excuses we make in order for those reasons to seem plausible. That doesn’t make us liars. It makes us aspiring truth tellers who periodically lie. Liars are those who lie more than usual.

Below I examine what happens to the lies of the truth teller, the lies that haunt the truth we aspire to uphold. The lies we tell may be lies of the truth teller, but those lies do not disappear. The fact that they are viewed as truth, by us and those we tell them to, make them even more precarious and, perhaps, more damaging.

I used to daven (pray) regularly in a small Hasidic shul (synagogue) in Boro Park Brooklyn. The shul was near the house where I was living with five other young baalei teshuva (newly religious) like myself. The rabbi was a gentle soul, tall and statuesque. He lived in a small apartment one flight up with his family where he used to invite us occasionally for Shabbat meals.

One unremarkable afternoon after the repetition of the silent prayer we were saying tahanun (supplication prayers) that include, according to Hasidic custom, the confession that begins “ashamu, bagadnu, gazalnu…” (“we are guilty, we have transgressed, we have stolen”) lightly beating our chests as we were taught. The rabbi walked up to my friend from behind and whispered in his ear, “Come on, Mordecai, you never really stole anything.” It was a confusing moment. The rabbi was a pleasant yet serious man not known for frivolity. He never mentioned the incident again and we never worked up the courage to confront him. In our youthful pious fervor we were easily drawn to every small detail of what we heard and what we did. Were we really guilty of the things we were confessing? Were we telling the truth?

Not surprisingly, he didn’t whisper, “Come on, Mordecai, you never really lied.” The reason is obvious. Of course Mordecai lied. We all lie in all kinds of ways (yes, I like your brisket; sure, you look good in that dress; I really enjoyed reading your essay!). We all exaggerate, stretch or bend the truth, or lie by omission. Such ways of speaking have become requisite for our participation in social life, a cultural etiquette of deception. People who say what they think no matter what are considered insufficiently socialized, maladroit. So while we confess “we have lied,” as if to say “and we will lie no more,” we are, in some way, already lying. Such a confession is a type of lie unless, of course, we don’t really mean it when we say it. Then it might be the truth.

When I taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC I used to attend the morning minyan in the main sanctuary there. The back window looks out onto the 1/9 train as it ascends from underground to travel above ground through Harlem. I used to put my tefillin (phylacteries) on in that spot overlooking the brick wall where the train comes over ground, setting them on the ledge of the window. One day as I was tying my tefillin around my arm I happened to notice some graffiti on the stone wall surrounding the tracks. The graffiti was a simple five word phrase, “the truth is a lie.” Well, I thought as I adjusted my tefillin, that’s a humbling thing to think about as one wears words of Torah on one’s arm and head. For a number of years I made sure that I put my tefillin on in that very spot so I could be reminded of those words, “the truth is a lie.” As one who trained rabbis in a tradition that regularly declares, “Moshe is truth and his Torah is truth,” it was a welcome if somewhat painful reminder for me, at the very least, enough to break any spell of comfort or certainty on my part.

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

I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed.
— Woody Guthrie, “Hard Traveling”

I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.
— Bob Dylan, “Song for Woody Guthrie”

In the summer of 1978, after planning and saving for years, my whole family packed into an Itasca motorhome and spent six weeks driving a loop around the country, heading south from the Boston area on I-95, then west on I-40 (or was it I-70?), out to California, then back on the northerly I-90. I was ten years old, and the trip was more than a touristic venture to me. It was discovery on multiple levels. It was, in some sense, “the quest,” a term that I would later find helpful when I watched The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers’ series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, on PBS. It was history and myth come alive as we drove, walked, and slept in places we’d heard and read about, inhabiting stories in a material way. It was the sense of freedom of movement, and freedom from abstract responsibilities beyond the practical needs of the day. It was a process of self-discovery in every encounter with people, things, sounds, smells, sights, ideas, and stories that had not otherwise figured directly in my daily life at home.

For years after that summer the highway figured strongly in my imagination. I dreamed of living in a motorhome or a van, something mobile with a sense of self-sufficiency. By the time I was in college the American highways’ promises of adventure and freedom took another tangible shape in the form of Grateful Dead concert tours. Here, thousands of relatively like-minded Deadheads pictured America as a network of roads connecting nodes of familiar gathering sites that were the regular seasonal stops of the band that gave them an identity that was simultaneously deeply American (and tied to an American mythos) and yet an alternative to the American mainstream. Dead shows were places of experimentation, expression, and learning with a particular emphasis on the relationship between individuality and community. The unusual form of Deadhead community—only coming together physically periodically and temporarily, and never the same in each case, while simultaneously imagined as stable and lasting over great distances—was, it seemed to me, much like the sense of America that I had formed in my earlier highway travels. Shared roads, shared landscapes, shared experiences, and the shared stories brought the disparate together into some form of unity—or perhaps what Victor Turner meant by “communitas.”

When I graduated from college, by then a veteran of Dead tours, I had one thing on my mind. I packed up my Volkswagen bus and headed out on the highway with no particular destination in mind. I lived in that bus for months, driving wherever my whims took me. I was discovering America, and in the process discovering myself. Or, more accurately, the America that I came to know and study and the self that I became were co-constituted by the highway.

Female Road Worker Directs Traffic During Repairs on the Overseas Highway Leading to Key West by Flip Schulke

On the road again –
Just can’t wait to get on the road again.
— Willie Nelson, “On the Road Again” (1980)

The highway, for me and for my fellow Deadheads, as well as for countless other individuals and communities, has been a quintessentially American spiritual technology of the twentieth century. As both symbol and concrete (or asphalt) reality, as metaphor and metonym, the highway has figured deeply as a space of freedom, transformation, discovery, individualism, danger, hope, and new beginnings. Though a twentieth-century development, the highway’s spiritual roots lie further back in the seafaring trajectories of the European pilgrims and entrepreneurs who saw in their westward movements and explorations the possibilities of fulfillment of purpose and discovery. Ever since, the frontier and pioneers have defined at least one vector of the American Dream. From Mormons to missionaries, speculators to homesteaders, natives to immigrants, movement across the American continent has been an essential element of the American soul.

A thorough study of highway spirituality would also have to include formative roots in Transcendentalism and the Romantic painters of the Hudson River School, among other American imaginaries that identified God in nature and, especially, in the abundant American landscape. The nation’s traditional tension between wilderness and technology, described aptly by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, finds a dialectic still point (or is it a monstrous energy?) in ribbons of asphalt upon which people drive to connect to the American land. In what amounts to a material form of Zen koan, highways are the connecting arteries between National Parks, which are sites of deep spiritual resonance for many who travel great distances for the chance to walk and drive through protected nature. As I understand it, the “spirituality” evoked, provoked, or invoked by the highway is tied to the particular cultural and social history of the United States that provides the stories, characters, events, metaphors, and resonances making up a spiritual idiom that merges with (and emerges from) the languages and experiences of physical mobility.

Looking Northeast Across Route C1 Elevated Highway by Michael Philip Manheim

Life is a highway
I want to ride it all night long
— Tom Cochrane, “Life is a Highway” (1991)

Although “spiritual” is so often cast as the antonym to “material,” any consideration of the venues, forms, and technologies of spirituality in America quickly must concede matter’s inescapability. In the case of the highway, the material produces the spiritual by laying down the grooves of physical space to be traversed, again and again, adding layers of experience, legend, myth, and memory over time. To travel the highway for any substantial distance is to move through space that is occupied by a century of ghosts, each moving through that space similarly, along the same trajectories, passing through the same landscapes and towns and crossing the same rivers and mountains. Moreover, those ghosts have stories—stories that have shaped and been shaped by a particularly American sense of authenticity and liberty. Spirituality here means a sense of getting to the real by stripping away the conventional, staying on the move to slip out of the confines of being pinned down by the stasis of habit. The authenticity and spirituality of the road is premised on the idea that the real is elsewhere, or can be reached by leaving the familiar behind. The highway is the space of potential, not here nor there: it is liminal. A “temporary autonomous zone.”

When travel writer William Least Heat Moon decided to drive the nation’s “backroads” highways that meandered through small towns and “real” America detailed in his classic Blue Highways, he thought that “Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one.” Maybe it could. At the very least, it might set things in motion and materialize the spirit of American dreams. More than simply a means of convenient transportation, the highway has held out this promise as a significant spiritual technology throughout its American history.

Looking Down From the Old Highway on Rowena Hills by David Falconer

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
— Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965)

Highway 61. U.S. Highway System (1924). The Interstate Highway System (1956). Route 66. Highway 1. The 101. 95. The names and the routes, the movement through changing landscapes as the roads wind through the mountains and prairies, call to mind other movements and peoples who found hope and purpose, who sought adventure or rebirth on the highway. For me, those connections are visceral: the highway conjures Jack Kerouac’s Beats and Ken Kesey’s Pranksters, who in turn recited Woody Guthrie’s Okies and Utah Phillips’s Wobblies and hobos. Here is a history of an other America that nevertheless has been a defining American experience. These (and many more) mythic figures of American history took to the roads and rails in pursuit of American dreams of freedom and autonomy—ambivalently defined in material, social, psychological, political, or transcendent terms. The common thread was movement across the landscape, typically at one’s own pace and whims. And that movement produced encounters with self and with others in ways that spun out of the everyday into the extraordinary. Kerouac’s novels, for instance, documented continuous religious and spiritual learning from the strangers he met on the road. Kesey’s boundless utopianism and the Pranksters’ experiments with reinventing reality were fueled not just by LSD, but by the mobility of their psychedelic bus traveling the American highways.

But as with most mythic histories, the road’s realities have been far more complicated than the romanticized images conveyed by literature, film, and folklore. The highway’s movement is dynamic and polysemous, transformative in specific relation to the motivations and imaginations of those who travel it. For some, therefore, it is a space of leisure and adventure, a remove from the tediums and conformities of everyday life in the social/consumer/workplace rat-race. For others, it is a space of labor, whether driving a truck or itinerantly looking for a next paycheck, a way to get ahead or at least to keep afloat. For some it is an escape from a life best left behind, perhaps a chance for a practical rebirth, a new beginning in a new place. For others, it may be an extension of a life, or a temporary voyage of discovery with the promise of a safe and comforting return. In any case, the road journey is a passage through time and space that produces potent potential encounters with newness that might challenge the status quo and the everyday. The highway holds potential.

View West Toward Worthington Glacier and Thompson Pass by Dennis Cowals

These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels.
Climb in back
Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.
Oh oh come take my hand,
Riding out tonight to case the promised land,
Oh oh Thunder Road
— Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road” (1975)

A glance at the abundance of stories set on the highway in various genres of American popular culture illuminates the desires encapsulated, but also the tensions inherent, in this space of discovery and becoming. Bruce Springsteen knew the spiritual measure of the road and made it a staple of his songwriting toolbox. The highway, for Springsteen, was the Exodus path. The car was the vehicle to the Promised Land. As Kate McCarthy has explained, though, the highway to the Promised Land, while remaining a central metaphor, has changed texture and mood over the course of Springsteen’s career, from an early vision of escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of small-town, working-class New Jersey to a later criticism of America’s failure to live up to its promises.

The transformation from hope to tragedy is as familiar a theme in American popular culture’s depictions of the highway as its converse. From Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise, the quest for freedom through movement has often ended in death and despair. Or is it a radical form of freedom that these texts teach? Thelma and Louise certainly leaves the ambivalence open. So do, in their own way, Bonnie and Clyde, another American archetype of the highway that influenced these and other films such as Natural Born Killers. Such films and characters are a reminder that the highway is also the space of the outlaw, the bandit, represented by motorcycle gangs who take the liberty to live according to their own rules of honor and community outside of the laws of the nation-state (for instance, see The Wild One, Hell’s Angels on Wheels, and Smokey and the Bandit.) They are twentieth-century pirates, portrayed as dangerous but radically free and fundamentally fair within their own world. They serve, then, in pop culture, as a critique of the material and social inequalities and the structures of domination and oppression that belie the American Dream. For all of their danger, violence, and refusal of the legal and social norms that guide mainstream American life, these outlaws and their stories figure prominently in the nation’s folklore. Like the sacred itself, according to theorists of religion, they are both appealing and terrifying, attractive and repulsive. And this, too, is part of the mystique of the highway as a spiritual technology that has the ability to take travelers to the edges of experience.

I cannot help but think that much of the spiritual power of the highway stems from the multiple tensions and contradictions that it embodies: the highway is a space of desire and danger, of freedom and violence, of individual autonomy and communal connection, of promise and pitfall, of industry and nature, of self and other, of stability and transience, of potential and limitation, of dreams and dirt. The structure of contradiction itself embodies a particularly American, and particularly modern, antagonism. It should not go unnoticed, for instance, that this particular spiritual technology is also destructive of the American Dream, inherently taking part in the industrial production and sales of automobiles and the overuse of fossil fuels. As so often happens, the pursuit of freedom and the real comes with great costs and unforeseen consequences.

But out on the highway old stories are inhabited, new stories emerge, and they blend together like the blur of the passing landscape as it mixes with the music on the radio. Throwing off the everyday, entering into the space of discovery and adventure, opening up to whatever possibilities and experiences come into play, the highway traveler is born anew.

I once had a landlord who was an arch Republican with signed pictures of various Republican figures (George W. Bush, Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan) on his walls. He was also an avid dowser, past-life regresser, and astral projector. He cured the neighbor’s apple tree of a worm infestation, found people’s lost objects over the phone, and attempted to heal my terror of snakes through a visualization technique that involved repetition and tapping on my sternum (the last one didn’t work and can’t speak to the second, but there weren’t worms in the apples when I lived there). He was an aficionado of conspiracy theories, a veritable archivist. I have never had so much fun talking to anyone with whom I disagreed so much. He was a truly marvelous person. But every time I try to describe the man to someone, the story is met with wonderment that a person could be both a conservative and a new age mage. Some sort of inauthenticity is implied in the discomfort. Yet why should it be so? What is our anxiety about dissonance? What is the landlord out of tune with but our own conceptions of harmony?

Explaining the unexplainable is a favorite human pastime. Semi-regular emails appear in my inbox from individuals who claim to see things as they really are in relation to whatever issue they place at the center of their universes—the Bosnian Pyramids of the Sun (suppressed by Egypt’s Department of Antiquities so they can monopolize the tourist trade), the hidden evil of the Council on American Islamic Relations (a front for a variety of anti-American, terrorist entities), the scourge of Muslim population growth (set to overtake the 80% Hindu majority in India in a matter of fifty years), and so on. Today’s missive encouraged me to explore the Illuminati Bohemian Grove Freemason connection, which no doubt would reveal the complex system of puppet strings being pulled by a cabal of puppeteers hiding in plain sight. A paleontologist friend gets emails from dinosaur aficionados who believe the paleontological establishment is bent on repressing the truth about dinosaurs, the environment, coexistence with humans, and so on. Not to mention the creationist vision of Jesus cradling a baby T-Rex… those were the days.

Grand explanatory schemes share certain qualities with conspiracy theories. Both seek to fulfill both our need to understand and our need to be mystified. I was in India, living in a Muslim majority community, when the World Trade Towers were brought down on September 11, 2001. Or were they? Shortly after the horrifying spectacle began to unfold, people of all faiths, all classes, all sorts began to approach me, suggesting various alternative explanations for the unimaginably terrifying collapse of the huge structures and the devastatingly tiny bodies that showered down in an endless loop on every channel. Many conspiracy theories emerged (it was all staged, no Jews showed up to work that day, the US government was the real culprit, Muslims were framed, Muslims hate freedom, etc. etc.), all transcending the evidentiary but fulfilling a need to try to explain. I don’t believe that the WTC and Pentagon attacks of 2001 are unaccountable at all, but it is clear that for many the simple is insufficient, the self-evident is inadequate. Reality is just too, well, real. Or maybe it is as Clifford Geertz suspected, that in situations that defy human experience or conception, speculation reassures us of the human capacity to eventually arrive at understanding. If we can propose solutions to a riddle (and what is more puzzling than the way things actually are) then we are also asserting our ability, maybe as yet unrealized, to comprehend all phenomena perfectly. But speculation can go awry, re-enchanting the disenchanted.

Does one reduce the pervasion of conspiracy theories to the need to understand and control a seemingly meaningless and random world? Yes and no. Or maybe. Of course reductionism is anathema to the scholar, but it is tempting to the citizen baffled by the absurdities that pass for explanations and the number of people who seem confident of President Obama’s foreign, Muslim birth. Where do “they” come from, these people… how did they get that way? And so we concoct our own conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theorists—they are crypto-racists, birther-xenophobes, libertarian technophobes. Ostensibly in search of rational explanations, believers may fix on the most illogical, most improbable available. It calls to mind Hume’s view of the perversity of most religious believers who ignore the rational beauty of nature and choose instead to construct religions that depend upon fear, superstition, and capriciousness, “Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams.” But through these dreams the rationalized world is re-enchanted. A conspiracy provides a key to a mystery that, even as it unlocks, obfuscates. Contradictions both acquaint us with the stable, familiar episteme in which we are comfortable, and reminds us of how tedious it would be if we existed in absolute purity. Indeed, contradictions are in the eyes of the beholder. My landlord was not riddled with anxiety about being a conservative and a dabbler in occult sciences—I was. I was the one who had to explore my own confusion and interrogate my own surprise. The instinct to seek a key to unlock the mystery is a reflection of an inability, closer to home, to account for his hybridity, eccentricity, and imaginative playfulness. The more we dismiss such lifeways as kooky, the more we impoverish our ability to actually make such accountings of the unexpected. Check your inbox.