I recently received the following letter: “Hello, Dr. Laitman, my name is Avi, and I’d like to share a problem that I’ve been dealing with from a young age. Since I can remember myself, I hated to lie, even when I knew that I’d have to pay the price for telling the truth. Many times telling the truth to people’s faces cost me dearly, and over the years, I’ve lost many friends. Even when I knew that they wouldn’t like hearing what I had to say, I couldn’t lie. And my question, Dr. Laitman, is why don’t people like hearing the truth? The truth is the highest value.”
So I told him that he was right, but that I recommended he do one more thing: that when he is saying the truest and most correct thing, where he has no doubt that he is a hundred percent accurate, that he should consider how much the other person wants to hear it, and if the other person would not like to hear it, then why is he saying something detrimental to the other person?
We need to be considerate of other people. Even in special cases where it is a matter of life or death, there too, we have the ability to thoroughly examine the situation and only then say what we have to say.
What, then, does it actually mean to speak the truth? Speaking the truth means that we do everything that is completely to the benefit of the other person according to the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Based on the video “When Should You Tell the Truth and When Should You Lie?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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