A healthy society is a society where the truth is spoken, welcome and listened to. The Israelites, as has been frequently noted in this series of documents, were a people formed by covenant, by agreement, by contract. The covenant drew them as much to one another as it drew them as a people to God. Truth stood at the very heart of their relationship with God. It should stand also at the heart of their relationships with one another.
Human relationships are terribly fragile.
The pain we experience from even one broken relationship gives us some sense of what original sin must have meant - and must now mean. At the very root of our beings there is a deep insecurity. Mistrust is never very far from the surface either of our hearts or of our minds. We are surrounded with vast amounts of evidence that people are as readily destroyed by words as with bullets and with bombs. People can be eliminated, eradicated, annihilated in fact by prejudice and contempt.