I lied to a dying man, although I meant every word. It’s a strange thing, to say you intend to do something that you don’t really intend to do, yet feeling as though the words themselves are embraced in such uncompromised truth that they actually exceed their indexical meaning. If there is spirituality in promises, prayers, and praise, can there also be spirituality in the excellence of the lie?

I had known Phil for barely over a year, while doing ethnographic research with evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee. We became close friends, despite a four-decade generation gap and even wider cultural differences. I was a New York academic with an agenda; a secular Jew sojourning in the lives of church folk. Phil was a committed Christian, with a lifelong dedication to his church and a passion for ministries of evangelization. He was an endearingly calm, quick-witted Tennessean, and an ebullient father and grandfather. When I met him, he was already fighting for his life.

The lymphoma that eventually killed him was gaining ground, and Phil was undergoing a series of chemo treatments at a local hospital. He had a steady, seemingly endless stream of visitors; family, friends, coworkers. On the afternoon I visited he was uncharacteristically alone, but characteristically upbeat and talkative. As I approached his bed he sat up and smiled, barely showing a hint of fatigue or concern. “This sucks,” I said, gesturing at the wires, tubes, and monitors that surrounded him but clearly referring to something more. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Yeah, it does kinda suck,” he said, still smiling, “Thank you! You’re the first person to come out and say it since I’ve been here.”

We talked for several minutes, perhaps an hour, mostly about news and gossip in the community. We talked about my research, which Phil supported by helping me make contacts among local pastors and churchgoers and putting a little friendly pressure on those who never invited me to their Bible study groups. I used to joke with Phil that he was like “my personal mob boss” in the church. On more than one occasion he turned the table, calling me his “personal rabbi.” It was novelty that drew us to friendship in the first place; it was a shared sense of humor that kept us there.

As I prepared to leave Phil’s bedside that afternoon my heart was heavy and my hands turned cold. I knew what I was about to say. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, but I could see it coming and chose not to stand in its way. In my relations with people who were part of my research, I never wanted to feel like I misled or deceived anyone. But this instant just felt different. It called for something novel.

“I’ll pray for you.”

I said it.

Phil stared back stunned. In those fleeting seconds I imagine he was both shocked and pleased: There was hope for me yet. He was never the kind of guy to be smug or self-congratulatory about such a thought. There was undoubtedly a part of Phil that reveled in my words, but he was far too mature in character, and in his faith, to have settled on a triumphal reading of our exchange, as though my spiritual indifference was finally conquered and that was that.

And what of my character? I lied. I told someone that I would do something for him that I could not do. I didn’t plan to set aside time to petition God on Phil’s behalf, or “lift him up” as evangelicals say, at least not in any way consistent in form or content with the prayer practices of the faithful. Perhaps I should have simply said, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts, Phil”? Why even invite the pretense of religiosity? Was I so eager to make Phil happy? Did I think my words, my simple unexpected words, could actually save him?

The fact is, by telling Phil that I would pray for him I spoke something of an indirect truth. My sincerity rested not in the content of the statement but rather the sentiment that inspired it. It was a sentiment that called out to be expressed in prefabricated words, conveyed in what for me were new wineskins (to put it biblically). I wanted to enter a new level of social exchange, to give him an inalienable gift, however disquieting and self-alienating it may have felt. I wanted him to know that I cared about him that much.

In this sense I was perhaps more like Phil and his churchgoing friends than I had ever been before. Prayer is an act of private supplication and public worship, but that is not all it is. Prayer is an artifact of value, something given and received. It can circulate among friends and strangers like currency, sometimes in the form of an act, often in the form of a promise. “I’ll pray for you.” The words invoke piety, but they also signify sociality. They cannot be empty words. They have the power to create bonds, to forge narratives of belonging, to convey or reciprocate emotions. I suspect I’m not the first person to say those words without meaning them in a literal sense. There are many self-aware evangelicals, for example, who could probably admit to neglecting promised prayers at one point or another in their lives, either by failing to make time or forgetting altogether. But that’s not my main point. That’s not really the point at all.

I am often asked if I was ever moved spiritually during my fieldwork, whether I experienced a “God moment” akin to that famously described by Susan Harding, when she suddenly found herself interpellated by the conversionist discourse of her fundamentalist-Baptist interlocutors. Of course, such questions usually rely on assumptions as various as they are loaded, with regard to what exactly constitutes a “spiritual” experience. Nonetheless, on most occasions I feel obliged to respond in the negative. While I certainly experienced profound revelatory episodes, uncanny coincidences, and flashes of emotion with visceral intensity that I could have internalized in a spiritual idiom, I rarely felt inclined or compelled to do so. This response may be well received by certain scholars who would applaud me for holding my ground, for not allowing myself to “cross a line” from an intellectual position posited to be secular to the faith of my subjects. But that would be a misguided conclusion, misguided in that it presumes that the line between belief and disbelief (or better yet, between those who pray and mean it and those who don’t pray at all) is the only line there is to be crossed.

The reality is that there are many lines that can be crossed when an avowedly non-spiritual person interacts with “people of faith,” and not all of them have to do with spirituality as conventionally understood. Lines of sociality—that is, the terms of when and how we perform our relational affinities with other people—make up an intrinsic part of what it means to be evangelical. For all their individualist rhetoric, evangelicals are often intensely social people, who celebrate and affirm their interpersonal bonds with routine diligence. Negotiating those lines offers a different point of entry into the realm of evangelical spirituality, a moral disposition that, among other things, relies on the richly paradoxical claim of privileging “relationships over religion.”

So while I may not have flirted with conviction in theological terms, I explored a space of indeterminacy that in my experience was no less implicating. When I “lied” to Phil about praying for him I did not separate myself from his religious world, as one might critically accuse me of doing, so much as adopt a communicative cue derived from a mode of religious sociality in which stated affections, expectations, and courtesies—indeed, words themselves—provide the channels through which “authentic” spirituality is made to appear real and tangible.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve done little more than try to resolve an ethical lapse with an intellectual conceit, a half-truth at best. Or maybe, as opposed to centuries of Christian teachings insistent on transparency and objective sincerity in religious language (as Webb Keane has described), there are parallel, unspoken values attached to the art of well-intentioned words. Maybe Phil really knew what I really meant, and if he were still alive would understand why the memory of that afternoon both exhilarates and haunts me. Maybe I’m praying for him right now.

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