“For certain people the pursuit of truth is an inner need.
We cannot go to sleep until we find out what truth is.
For us, truth is not a trivial matter such as what is the length of my trousers; it is something that we cannot live without.
And in this sense, it is deeply connected to our philosophy and to our faith.
The first sentence in Maimonides’ great halachic work is a good summary of this issue.
He says there that there is one level which is the highest, and there is nothing higher than it:
God alone is truth; nothing else can be called truth.
The search for truth, then, is the search for the Divine essence within this world.
This is what we are really looking for.”
From “The Pursuit of Truth,” a lecture by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, to girls’ school in Kiev