When Truth Becomes a Matter of Interpretation

The column argues that in the current era, truth is increasingly impossible to verify because every account is filtered through agendas, interests and worldview. Citing Isaiah 59:15 and rabbinic teachings about the messianic era, the writer says the phrase “truth will be absent” can mean either that truth disappears or that it is fragmented into competing camps, each claiming exclusive possession of it.

The author adds a third reading, that truth still exists but people struggle to see it because journalists and media owners present reality subjectively. In the writer’s view, no newspaper or television channel is truly objective, and this is true across the political and religious spectrum, on the right and left, among secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox audiences alike. Even those who argue that they had to build alternative media to balance a system dominated by the other side are not, the author says, delivering reality transparently.

That distortion, the column says, prevents any community from honestly recognizing its own failures. Each side covers for its problems while attacking the other, and the other side is then dismissed as incapable of speaking truthfully. As examples, the author cites the debate over the “Hilltop Youth” and says there is no clear, clean way to know what is happening on the ground because neither Israeli mainstream media nor sectorial media can be relied on fully.

The same skepticism is applied to the October 7 attack, which the author presents as a question framed by competing narratives, including accusations of a planned betrayal, shared systemic weakness, a local failure, or a disastrous government blunder. Since the full truth may remain inaccessible now, the author says the only thing that can be trusted is the dedication and sacrifice of those serving the country and its residents, and ends by wishing they return safely.