Teachers and parents spend countless hours trying to eliminate filler words from their children’s speech. “Like” is perhaps the most notorious offender—a verbal crutch that clutters communication and weakens expression. Yet in Parashat Bo, Moses himself uses that very word. When announcing the final plague—the death of the firstborn—he tells Pharaoh it will occur “kechatzot halayla”—literally, “like midnight” or “around midnight.”

Why the imprecision? Surely God knew the exact moment, and Moses, speaking on behalf of the Divine, could have proclaimed it with absolute certainty.

The Talmud (Berachot 4a) offers a remarkable answer: Moses deliberately chose approximate language lest Pharaoh’s astrologers err in their calculations and declare Moses a liar. From this, the Talmud derives a fundamental principle: “Train your tongue to say ‘I don’t know,’ lest you be caught in a falsehood.”

This brief passage contains profound wisdom that speaks powerfully to our age—wisdom about the relationship between certainty and truth, and about how debate and discourse are conducted.

The Double Lesson

There are actually two distinct lessons here, each with critical implications for how people think and communicate.

From Overconfidence to Falsehood

The surface reading focuses on reputation: Moses wished to avoid being called a liar by Pharaoh’s astrologers. There is, however, a much more fundamental concern here. The principle “train your tongue to say ‘I don’t know,’ lest you be caught in a falsehood” is about more than self-protection in argument—it warns that overconfidence actually leads people to commit themselves to positions that turn out to be false.

While Moses himself wasn’t at risk of error—as the Talmud notes, there is no doubt before the Holy One—the principle extracted here has universal application. When people become too certain of their positions, they become vulnerable to committing themselves to falsehood. One of the key reasons this happens is what contemporary psychology calls “confirmation bias.”

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to believe more readily that which is consistent with previously formed opinions and to discount contradictory information. What makes this particularly dangerous is that this bias is apparently not corrected by increased levels of education or intelligence. Researcher David Perkins conducted an experiment asking individuals to consider a social issue and write down arguments on both sides. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarizes the findings: “IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only the number of ‘my-side’ arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that ‘people invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.’”

The more convinced individuals are of their correctness, the more likely they are to marshal their intelligence not in service of truth, but in defense of positions they’ve already adopted. Once committed to a conclusion, confronting contrary evidence doesn’t lead to reconsideration—it leads to deeper entrenchment. Researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler discovered what they termed a “backfire effect”: under certain conditions, not only will new information fail to change minds, it can sometimes further entrench the original position and be interpreted as additional proof of that view.

Benjamin Franklin understood this danger well. In his autobiography, he describes how he trained himself away from dogmatic language:

“I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself… the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.”

Franklin recognized that absolute language doesn’t just affect how others receive one’s arguments—it affects the arguments themselves. The very act of expressing oneself with certainty creates psychological investment in that position, making it harder to recognize error.

Students of Rabbi Hershel Schachter are familiar with his frequent readiness to say “I don’t know.” This is not a contradiction to his vast knowledge but quite the opposite—it reflects his commitment to truth over the appearance of omniscience. His willingness to acknowledge uncertainty keeps him intellectually honest and open to learning more rather than forcing reality to conform to predetermined conclusions. In a culture that often mistakes confidence for competence, this humility is both rare and essential.

The Illusion of Confidence

The assumption tends to be that confident assertions are more likely to be correct. When someone says they’re “sure,” it seems appropriate to accept their report as factual. However, research reveals much less correlation—and sometimes an inverse correlation—between confidence and accuracy.

In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes how systematic overvaluation of assertive communication occurs: “We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate… The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to him, which means that he becomes increasingly powerful as a meeting goes on.”

Perhaps most telling is a study by UC Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock examining expert forecasting. Across many predictions about political and economic trends, expert performance was often not much better than chance. Moreover, in some of his analyses, fame and confidence correlated with worse forecasting accuracy—those most certain of their predictions tended to be least accurate.

Even the ability to distinguish truth from lies is far weaker than most imagine. As Nicholas Epley relates in his book Mindwise, “When one group of researchers evaluated decades of studies and hundreds of experiments that measured how well people could distinguish truths from lies, they found that people’s ability to spot deception was only a few percentage points better than a random coin flip: people were 54 percent accurate overall, when random guessing would make you accurate 50 percent of the time.”

This “confidence heuristic” creates a dangerous dynamic: the most certain voices dominate discourse, even when certainty bears little relationship to correctness.

The Path to Truth Through Humility

The Talmud (Eruvin 13b) records that after years of debate between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, a heavenly voice declared the law follows Beit Hillel. Why? Because they were modest and gentle, and would teach Beit Shammai’s position before their own.

This humility wasn’t merely good character—it was epistemologically significant. By acknowledging other possibilities, by stating their opponents’ views fairly and first, Beit Hillel demonstrated the intellectual openness that makes one more likely to arrive at truth. The recognition that one might be wrong, that others might have valid perspectives, isn’t weakness—it’s the very foundation of genuine wisdom.

This is precisely what separates truth-seeking from mere advocacy. Those who invest their intelligence in “exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly,” rather than just “buttressing their own case,” are the ones more likely to reach sound conclusions.

The Rhetoric of Bad Faith

But there’s another dimension to Moses’s choice of language, one painfully relevant to our current moment. Consider the absurdity of the situation: Moses has now accurately predicted nine plagues. Each has come to pass exactly as foretold. Yet the Talmud suggests that if Pharaoh’s astrologers’ clocks showed 12:02 AM instead of midnight, they would seize on this supposed discrepancy to declare, “Moses is a liar! This whole thing is fake! There is no God! We’re keeping the Jews!”

Rabbenu Bachya asked how it was even conceivable that the Egyptians could at this point disbelieve Moses after they had already acknowledged the truth of his previous predictions and their divine nature. The Pnei Yehoshua, in his commentary to Berachot, emphasizes how implausible it is that at the time of agonized shrieking and suffering, the focus would be on Moses being two minutes off.

Yet this is precisely how human argumentation too often works. The slightest perceived inconsistency gets seized upon to dismiss an entire position, regardless of its broader merit or evidence.

As R. Simcha Zissel Broide (Shem Derech to Ex.) stresses, this reflects a disturbing aspect of human nature: the tendency to attack everything one’s interlocutor is saying based on the flimsiest of holes. If critics think they can catch an opponent on one thing, they try to make the whole argument as if it’s nothing.

This phenomenon has been on vivid display in debates about Israel and matters of profound moral significance. Entire arguments will be invalidated based on the most tenuous supposed contradictions. It’s a rhetorical tactic that has nothing to do with genuine truth-seeking and everything to do with winning arguments and avoiding uncomfortable truths.

A Countercultural Stance

Both Franklin’s deliberate cultivation of tentative language and Moses’s choice of approximate phrasing point toward a countercultural stance: epistemic humility. In an age of social media certainty, hot takes, and absolute pronouncements, the willingness to say “I don’t know,” to acknowledge uncertainty, to state opposing views fairly—these are revolutionary acts.

Moses, speaking for God Himself, modeled a dual wisdom: he refused to be distracted by the need to expose the bad faith of his opponents, while simultaneously protecting his own integrity from both the appearance and the actuality of falsehood. Franklin recognized that the very grammar of certainty can trap individuals in error.

The lesson of kechatzot is multilayered: Personal humility makes people more likely to arrive at truth. Overconfidence, by contrast, leads them to invest their intelligence in defending predetermined positions rather than exploring issues evenhandedly. Meanwhile, those who argue in bad faith will seize on any perceived imperfection to dismiss truths they find inconvenient—but there is no need to enable their attacks by claiming more certainty than the situation warrants.

As we navigate complex times, facing questions without easy answers and with debates clouded by bad faith, perhaps the greatest service one can render to truth is to train one’s tongue, as the Talmud counsels, to say with appropriate humility: “I don’t know.” It will not display a lack of intelligence and knowledge; on the contrary, it is their essence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​