The hand of truth

He kneeled before me and asked if I’d hit his car with something.

“No,” I replied, staring past him.

I felt my mother’s hand touch my shoulder and I looked up at her.

“Is that true, Mike?” she said, staring down at me. “You know it’s alright to tell the truth no matter what happens because of it.”

Her hand stayed resting on my shoulder — I remember thinking that I could even feel its heat through my T-shirt — and that, along with what she had said, which hung in the air, helped me appreciate that something important was being transmitted to me, if only I was responsible enough to receive it.

And then I said three simple sentences that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

“No, it’s not. It’s not true,” I said, triggering tears that filled my eyes. “It’s not true.”

On a recent visit I asked my mother, who’s 97, if she remembered this distant episode, this episode when I believe I first learned that the truth mattered. Frankly, I didn’t expect her to recall the event, because many days she resides in a world of limitations and of what is falling away.

Sinking into her pile of pillows, she said of course she did.

“Though I never much cared for that rabbi,” she added, laughing lightly.

Without knowing it at the time, this was one of many life-lessons that I’d always measure myself against when assessing what sort of human being I was turning out to be.

I mentioned this memory to my brother David the next day on the phone, and that evening I received an email from him.

“Most people raise their children with a simple agreement that facts are factual and we shouldn’t lie,” he wrote. “If we know something is inaccurate, we shouldn’t say it is. Imagine if some teachers taught “2+2=4” while others declared “2+2=5” knowing this wasn’t true. When these two groups of kids grew up, chaos would unfold. No one could execute simple transactions, rooted, as they would be, in the breaking of that basic agreement to not knowingly lie.”

As human beings, though, we often hide the truth or skew it for our own benefit. We throw dirt clods at cars and say we didn’t.

But it’s our most essential nature that’s revealed when the hand of truth does land squarely upon our shoulder. Do we impart what we know to be true, or do we continue to insist 2+2=5?

It’s particularly troubling in a democracy when a great deal of the populace believes its leadership is practicing a sort of purposeful untruthfulness. Truth — and even democracy itself — suddenly seems more fragile.

“A president, to be sure,” my brother added, “is one of the people in our lives who has enormous influence when we talk about telling the truth. People take cues from how he characterizes people or issues, though how can we know whether we should agree or disagree with the president if there’s not even a common mind about being factual?”

Soon after President Trump was elected, he held a meeting at the White House at which he claimed he’d actually won the popular vote because the millions of more votes Hillary Clinton had received really didn’t count, that they were entirely the result of voter fraud. Nancy Pelosi, who was in attendance, said that simply wasn’t true.

In my imagination I see Nancy Pelosi, as she said this, placing her hand on the new president’s shoulder, as if she was trying to impart an important moral lesson to a child.

My most fervent hope is that after this particular president of our democracy is gone, there will be leaders’ shoulders upon which the hand of truth will still matter.

Mike Nagler is a trustee on the Burlingame Library Board.