Photo Credit: YouTube
Steven Joel Sotloff as a hostage of ISIS, before his beheading.

Therefore the proper response when hearing of this first story is to strengthen our efforts to rectify and redeem the skin or the desires of the flesh we exhibited during this past year. And to be willing to give tzedakah like a “strong river” as part of the teshuvah process.

Reporting Truth

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The second story came as the result of either Arab extremism or death worship. Notice that while religions have been associated with both western culture and the Arab world, there is no need to mention them here as they are secondary to the spiritual underpinnings behind the discussion. And since our focus is on the journalist’s themselves, we don’t need to concern ourselves with classifying exactly what type of evil this evil is.

Between two extremes there is a mid-point and our mid-point is truth. At one extreme, we saw an example from western culture of what we call false light (the word light, אוֹר, is cognate to skin, עוֹר). But the extreme that we are now discussing is what we call the extreme of false morality. They consider their way true and just and have labeled others (even those similar to them) as the opposite. They have a desire to reveal something, but their revelation is centered on false morality not on false light.

The problem of course is that their morality is immoral, the most immoral. As such, the means then to rectify this second story is to increase our efforts to promote truth. Whereas we can say that the rectification of the first story—along with teshuvah and increasing tzedakah—is to promote the light of Torah, what is needed to respond to the second are true stances and public declarations in accordance with the holy Torah. It is also clear that Steve Sotloff’s prayers and fasting on Yom Kippur already brought about the beginnings of the truthful rectification to this story, the very story that cost him his life. In summation, if you expect to see a change in the world for the better, expect to see it come from journalists first. While celebrities should learn to promote the light of Torah instead of skin (the desires of the flesh), and politicians should borrow a page from the playbook from the life of a truth-dedicated journalist, still it is the journalists themselves that owe their allegiance neither to production companies nor political parties.

The lesson then, the thought that rectifies both these stories simultaneously, is that we are all free agents for truth. Hired by idealism and powered by a drive to make the world a more truthful place.

In the words of Barak Barfi, spokesman for the Sotloff family, “Steve was no hero. Like all of us, he was a mere man who tried to find good concealed in a world of darkness.”

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Yonatan Gordon is a student of Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh, and publishes his writings on InwardNews.com, a new site he co-founded.