LORD Edits ‘Distance Thyself From Falsehood’ To ‘Don’t Get Caught’

By evening, a summary and brief commentary by a Bnei Brak Rabbi had appeared, entitled Cover Thy Ass.

Heaven, February 14 – The omnipotent Creator announced today that He will issue a modification to a famous statute proscribing perjury, departing from the accepted 2,500-year-old literal interpretation of it and clarifying that the verse only bars getting caught in a lie.

Exodus 23:7 admonishes the Israelites to “keep far from a false matter,” a commandment that technically applies to judicial proceedings but over the millennia has taken on a broader moral sense of speaking with integrity. In a publication released this afternoon, the Almighty explained that a blanket prohibition against lying has always been far beyond the capacity of all but a select few, and that an honest expectation could never include such an impossible standard. Instead, the commandment bars lying irresponsibly or egregiously in a way that others discover the falsehood.

“My law was not given to angels,” explained God. “Physical, bounded existence can never hope to meet perfection. Every element of My system contains a concession to the limited nature of human existence. In the case of lying, apparently, too many people have taken a fundamentalist approach to not bending the truth, and that’s simply not sustainable.” The LORD added that through all of history, the average duration of a lie-free span from humans over the age of 4 has never exceeded eight minutes, and usually hovers closer to forty-five seconds.

“It has only gotten worse since the advent of instantaneous text communication,” noted YHWH. “As people’s ability to communicate instantaneously along multiple channels at once developed, the frequency of lies has increased accordingly. As such, the only reasonable policy for Me, as a deity, is not to demand perfection, but to demand prudence.” He said a Biblically-mandated penalty was not necessary, since society generally does a good job of punishing those who get caught lying. The glaring exception to that remains politics, but the offense there is lessened, saith the LORD, since people are generally asking to be lied to by leaders and candidates.

The new publication, called Better Thou Not Know, spans two parchment columns, and is intended to be added to the Torah scroll as an appendix to the book of Exodus. In addition to the explanatory passage detailing what constitutes getting caught and exploring some of the moral dimensions of the precept, Better Thou Not Know warns people against probing potential lies too closely where one’s property or welfare is not threatened by the suspected prevarication. “Distance thyself from awkward situations” serves as the introductory verse to the new section.

Already, exegetical and interpretive eyes have homed in on the text. By evening, a summary and brief commentary by a Bnei Brak Rabbi had appeared, entitled Cover Thy Ass.