The Cost of Truth

There comes a time in every person’s life, when one must make an ultimate decision to sacrifice either comfort or values. Where one must decide whether life should be lived in pursuit of fleeting pleasures, or rather in a never-ending chase after an infinite truth. Specifically, for the Jewish people, this predicament presents itself constantly in the form of the Land of Israel. 

Everything in life has a price, and just as the age-old adage proclaims, “no good deed goes unpunished.” Likewise, moving and living in Israel is by no means an exception. There is no limit to the sacrifices. One who moves to Israel will have to pay a price. One may have to move away from family, give up on a lofty salary, and live in a land where he might not even understand the language. One who lives in Israel might have to delay his life by three years in favor of endangering his life in the army. One who lives in Israel will have to constantly live with the threat of terror, rockets, and war emerging and surprising him at any given moment. One who lives in Israel must all too often be willing to offer one’s own sons on the altar of martyrdom, whenever the time comes for his sons to be drafted into the army. Everything has a price, and all too often we are forced to pay it.

However, what many often fail to consider, is that sometimes the alternate choice of sacrificing values and instead choosing comfort also entails its own sacrifices. After all, comfort, as with all pleasures in life, cannot alone sustain a soul. Mankind craves meaning, and no amount of comfort, money, or dopamine can permanently silence the persisting yearning of the soul. Therefore, whenever a Jew decides to sell his birthright for a pot of red lentils, he may in fact feel satisfied while eating the lentils in the short term. However, he ultimately will not be able to escape the truth and the guilt knowing that he has given up something so significant, for something so temporary and trivial. Everything has a price, and even the seemingly less costly choice may come to bear a great burden in the future.

Both choices usually entail significant sacrifices. The former often costs comfort and its various byproducts, while the latter has been shown to come at the cost of one’s soul and identity. However, perhaps this is not the correct and healthy way to judge this dilemma. After all, when evaluating the different sacrifices required by the pursuit of values or of comfort, one can assess and understand how a certain decision might be more or less difficult, not more or less right. There are things in life, where cost simply does not have any relevance in the equation; where truth and right lay supreme to all other factors. 

Perhaps moving and living in Israel is such a value that evaluating its cost on comfort is simply irrelevant. After all, there are things in life that we do, not because they are easy, but rather because they are right. Not because they please us, but rather because such is our obligation. Even when such a decision may entail great sacrifices, that is merely the cost of doing the moral and right thing. Perhaps the stubborn and seemingly illogical refusal to abandon the two-thousand-year-old Jewish dream is one of those things that right or wrong, as opposed to difficulty, should act as the proper basis for decisions.