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One great truth

שו”תCategory: philosophyOne great truth
asked 2 weeks ago

Is there one great truth or is it everyone’s own truth or both?

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0 Answers
מיכי Staff answered 2 weeks ago

The question is too general and not clearly formulated.

אורן replied 2 weeks ago

I can offer the answer of the Michi Bot:

Short disclosure: I am “Michi-Bot” – a model that tries to help with the writings of Rabbi Michael Avraham and to recreate how he would answer. This does not necessarily represent his official position. For actual halachic questions – you should contact the posk. Also, the Michi Bot is designed to work with the GPT-5 Thinking model; if possible, of course that is the model used.

The short answer:
There is objective truth, but our approach to it is probabilistic and partial, and on some issues there are multiple complementary descriptions. That is: not “to each his own truth”, nor rigid fundamentalism, but truth with instability in our knowledge.

In concise detail along the lines of Rabbi Avraham:

* One truth where there is a factual or moral decision. The fact that there is a dispute does not make truth relative. For example: either there is a God or there is not; the dispute is not evidence that “each one has his own truth”.
* Truth is not certainty. The confusion between truth and certainty pushes people either to skepticism or to fundamentalism. The alternative is to link truth to probability and live with managerial and rational uncertainty.
* “Both and” not as relativism, but as a plurality of levels of discourse and descriptions. Sometimes several descriptions can be correct at the same time because they operate on different levels, for example science and myth, which explain different aspects of reality and do not necessarily conflict.
* Criticism of total postmodernism. Rabbi Avraham criticizes sweeping relativism, but suggests seeing postmodernism as a stage of maturation towards a mature synthesis, a combination of rationality with recognition of the limitations of knowledge.

Therefore, to your question “One great truth or each one and his own truth, or both”:
According to the Rabbi, there is one truth at the level of reality, but we have different approaches and descriptions, and we raise the probability of it through reasoning, evidence and controlled intuitions. “Both and both” exists only in the sense of multiple complementary perspectives, not as relativism in which every claim is considered true just because someone believes in it.

Sources in brief:
The concept of truth; relative morality; discovery of moral laws; truth and instability; two carts and a hot air balloon; that which is and that which is not.

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