If recent presidential debates have taught us anything, we’ve learned to take what the candidates say with a generous helping of kosher salt. It should be quite funny that we now depend on the fact-checkers to tell us where the claims of the candidates fall on the truth scale before believing anything they say. But it's kind of sad. 

Deception is as old as humankind. The plotlines of the stories recounted in recent Torah readings revolve around failures to communicate honestly, which, commonplace as this is today, was of extraordinary consequence in the days of Noah. Those early generations paid dearly for their abuses of language and communication. And though we are today better equipped than ever to sniff out the hyperbole and call public figures on their compromised standards, old habits die hard. 

Noah was a righteous man, says the Torah. He obeyed Divine instruction to save himself and his family and labored 120 years to build the Ark. But, unlike Abraham who employed every tactic of persuasive speech in a passionate attempt to save the people of Sodom, Noah remained absolutely mute in the knowledge of the impending doom—the flood that was to destroy the world. His was a sin of omission, and when he finally emerged from the Ark and saw the devastation, his cry came too late.

The flood was itself a consequence of an abuse of language. The midrash describes Noah’s generation as corrupt and perverted, and blames its leadership for failing to communicate ethics and respect for the order and boundaries that define moral society. The resulting flood represents a world reverting back to tohu va-vohu, the void and emptiness—the inarticulateness and lack of differentiation that existed when waters covered the depths. 

Later on we read about the Tower of Babel. Here in an act of hubris, the people employed language to devise a scheme and gain power to challenge the supremacy of G-d. G-d in turn scatters them over the earth and frustrates their ability to communicate with each other, leaving them disempowered. 

We see foreshadowings of this in Bereishit, when, like the classic game of broken telephone, one miscommunication leads to another, and the first humans mess with simply worded instructions they received from their maker. This failure to convey G-d’s command correctly is especially striking given that it came right after the world was brought into existence through an act of speech: G-d speaks, and with each of his statements He creates order and form  out of the chaos and formlessness; He establishes boundaries separating dark and light, water and dry land, heaven and earth, and a moral order distinguishing man and animal—finally completing  a universe where, by virtue of speech alone, disparate creations exist in harmony. 

When, following each creative statement, G-d “sees that it is good,” He proceeds to invest the human being with the same creative power of speech for the purpose of bringing more order and goodness into an imperfect world. This gift of creative speech is what ultimately what sets the human being apart from the rest of creation, in the image of G-d.

Candidates with the gift of gab have the edge in presidential debates. And the temptation to fudge the facts is great, given a captive audience of millions when the stakes are so high. But over the long haul, they will be scrutinized and remembered for whether they honored their promises and stood by their principles.

We don’t know whether George Washington really did fess up to his dad about cutting that cherry tree down, or if there even was a cherry tree, and we might wonder how he became president if he never told a lie. But the fact is that he and Honest Abe are remembered as men who led with honesty and good character.

Today, the individual who makes a better argument and a more compelling promise to produce jobs and a better economy will get the votes of the people. Whether he succeeds or fails to do so remains to be seen. But even if he does, even in this economy, Americans want more than a functionary in the most powerful position of leadership. In hard times especially, when there is so much uncertainty, Americans want a leader who inspires steadfast commitment to the moral virtues that would make him worthy of their trust.