Emes Has Been Thrown to the Ground

I've always had a principle: it’s easy to be swayed by grandiose philosophies, and hard to see the flaws and issues in them. Therefore, if you really want to know what something is, take it all the way out, and see where it shows you.
For instance, you can look at Christian and Muslim theology to know what it’s really about behind all the talk about love and peace. When Christianity was the main religion and the Church ran the state you got: the Dark Ages. Doesn’t look like emes to me. And the Muslim state? You get Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – warring gangs, suicide bombers, “honor killings” of women and the general oppression of women, and mass chaos. Doesn’t that look like the perfect hand of G-d too? Not really. And if you look at Judaism you get the reign of King Solomon, when there was general peace in the land, courts of law, justice, and a functional society.
In my mind, the story always ended there. However, I've recently been confronted with a disturbing reality. The peace and chesed (acts of loving-kindness) that I used to see in the religious community I know understand to be a façade. If everyone really keeps the Torah, and to the extent that you do, one can truly reach great spiritual heights. But I don’t see the mainstream religious community doing so, and in fact, I see the opposite. The community LOOKS religious and LOOKS like they’re keeping the Torah, and yet something has gone terribly terribly wrong. These same people commit horrendous crimes against fellow Jews and non-Jews alike, and such fraud is often institutionalized and protected by the communities around it. I have some ideas about what ideologies are taught as Torah that are really sheker, but in the end all and be all I cannot be the final judge and jury of those issues. I can say the system doesn’t work and it doesn’t look like emes to me, and therefore I am disassociating myself with that system for this big picture alone. This simply cannot be what Hashem wants and I refuse to be associated with it.
But now I have a problem. With eyes wide open, I still see tremendous flaws in the other main paths of Judaism that I know about. I still believe that traditional halachah should have a serious bearing on my life and I happen to be most comfortable with a relatively machmir path, although I fully recognize that other paths are acceptable within halachah as well. I am not comfortable with any stream of thought that does not maintain at least the most lenient acceptable opinion. Feel free to call me a feminist, but I am not comfortable anywhere where I am minimized as a woman. I am not talking about mechitzas, aliyas, or learning Gemara. I am talking about being recognized as more than a wife and mother, as someone with opinions that matter and skills that can be used to help others that should not be discounted because “it’s not my place,” as someone who should not be excluded from classes because my presence would detract from the comradery of the men (aka Old Boys Club). G-d doesn’t deal in cliques and clubs, and trying to be extra-stringent in relations between the sexes shouldn’t preclude women from being able to develop themselves, because inevitably it is the women who lose. So where is the life of emes?
I am brought back to a Gemara (no, I haven’t learned it inside so I can't quote you where) that says when Hashem created the world and after Adam’s sin, Hashem realized that emes and shalom couldn’t both stay in Shamayim because the world could not continue to exist being held to such a level. So He “threw emes to the ground” - which is why in the prayer Sim Shalom, we ask Hashem for “bishlomecha” – YOUR peace. Shalom is still in its purest form, in the Heavens, in G-d’s realm. But emes has been exiled to the Earth, where it no longer exists in its purest form. This is why one can, in certain situations, lie for the sake of peace – in the end all and be all, shalom must remain pure while emes can be broken.
I see clearly that because emes no longer exists in its pure form, I will not find a perfect path to Torah existing in the world. Every one will have its issues, every community will have its faults, every person (including me) will have their weaknesses. And right now, the world is at such a low level I don’t know of anything that comes even close to functioning like emes. So I can't rely on some person or movement to try and explain Torah to me. I know it is a dangerous path and fraught with issues of its own, but I feel that the only way I have a chance of being able to live out Torah in a way that’s true to my inner compass is to do it by associating with people and places but not with ideas, movements, and labels. “Asai l’cha Rav” – one interpretation of this statement is that you should make YOURSELF into a Rav. I feel each one of us must makes ourselves into Rabbeim – not in the most literal sense, but in the sense of Teachers and Masters of Torah. And not in the sense of being able to quote a book (pick any and all of them) but in LIVING the Torah, in living emes, because “Toras emes” and “the seal of G-d is emes.” It’s all in the Torah, but people are obviously not reading it correctly, because people are LEARNING TORAH but they’re not LIVING TORAH. Keeping a bunch of laws and wearing a black suit doesn’t mean you’re living Torah. You have to be yashar first and foremost, and keeping the external laws will help refine and protect that. So from here on out, I’m going to keep learning and keep living Torah, even though that means I'm going to be doing it without a community, because I think the only way for me to live emes is to not be intimately associated with communities of sheker. Emes has been thrown to the ground – I'm not going to find it here. I'm going to have to go up and find it myself.