Lies

I have always been scared by how easy lying comes to some people. Usually I just have to go with what my instinct is telling me. When an alarm goes off and says, "Ooh, that was a big fat lie," then I know I am usually right. After I got divorced I incorrectly characterized all Arabs as liars. I know, that sounds really, really racist and awful and just downright discriminatory. It obviously is not a practice common to only one culture. And I would really rail against lying emotionally, get all upset and bent out of shape, regardless of how minor the lie was. Then I learned to use it to my advantage. Perhaps it is a cultural thing to save face, no problem, let me see how well I can play at that game. It worked for awhile – worked when I had to make drama at work to get anybody to do the work I needed to, or worked when I really did not want to tell the school what I really thought of their teaching methods, so just smiled and lied to their faces.

But there were a few small problems with that. The biggest one is that it is not in line with my deep personal values on this subject. And I know that if I want honesty in my life, than I have to decide every day that I am going to live as honestly and openly as I can. (It also means not judging people and being very kind when the truth is revealed to you). The second problem is that I am sharing that lie-free life with my son. I can probably count on one hand the number of lies I have ever told him in his entire life….and those were mostly of the white lie variety. When I go through security at the Tel Aviv airport, I lie. And I tell my son beforehand that I am going to lie because in this one very important instance it makes my life easier for a few hours. I am proud to say that it was such a rarity for him to hear me lie, that when he caught me in the middle of telling a lie to the security agent, he attempted to correct me right in front of her. I was not amused…proud, yes, but amused, no. If he ever asks me a question where I really do not want to tell the truth, I turn the question on him and ask him why he was asking it, and what he thought was the right answer. I admit that I have an incredible fear that he will one day grow up like his father to break the heart of a woman through telling and hiding behind a giant lie. I would be so devastated if that ever happened. And so instead I try to teach him, by example, that it can be very difficult to the truth, but it is so, so freeing to be able to tell it. And usually the reaction and consequences to even the most difficult truths are not nearly as bad as the reaction to getting caught in a lie.

Now that my Arabic (at least the comprehension side) is halfway decent, I have had the pleasure of witnessing how adults teach children to lie. One day a colleague who lives in Jerusalem needed to pick me up before going to the office. This little detour for her meant that her children would most likely be late for school. In fact, they were 5 minutes late. As she was pulling the car up to the school she tells them quickly, repeatedly in Arabic, "Just tell the principal that there was too much traffic at the checkpoint, tell her the checkpoint was busy." I was wondering why it would have not been easier to just say, "Tell them your mother had to pick up a colleague for work, and it took too much time." Or just even, "We are sorry, we are late." Another friend has a pesky mother-in-law who is insisting her children go twice a week to the mosque to learn how to recite the Koran. The children really do not want to go and the mother-in-law is laying the guilt on my friend. Personally, I think the friend has two options – insist that the children go and help them to understand that sometimes in life we are required to do things we do not enjoy. Or second, to just tell the mother-in-law that the children do not enjoy this type of thing and they will not be going, and live with whatever grief she gets in return (the mother-in-laws ability to give grief is unlimited, so it would not be the first nor the last). Instead when she tells the children to go tell their grandmother they don't want to go and the children ask then, "What should we tell her if she asks why?" My friend replies, "Tell her it is too cold and you are too tired." Not only is she teaching her children to lie, but she is putting off the inevitable truth.

Perhaps these lies shock me in their outright audacity. However, it would only fair of me to reveal the ways I manage to lie without ever whispering a word, as lying is human nature. I lie when I don't like something somebody has said by keeping my mouth closed and not finding the grace to tell them that their words (or actions) hurt my feelings. I lie when I tell myself that something isn't really that important to me, and so it's easier to keep my mouth closed than to ask for clarification, or an explanation, or some help, or to actually take an action that would reveal how important that thing is to me. I lie to myself and others when I deny that my feelings are real, and often times they stem from some rather embarrassing deep-seeded insecurity about myself. And I have to admit, these are perhaps the most harmful types of lies that I know.