<p>Any comments? Thank you:-)</p>
<p>Describe an experience that you have had or a concept that you have learned about that intellectually excites you. When answering this question, you may want to consider some of the following questions: Why does this topic excite you? How does it impact the way you or others experience the world? What questions do you continue to ponder about it? (500 words max)</p>
<p>Many years ago, in my home city of Jerusalem, the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate asked of Jesus Christ a very important question: “What is truth?” Pilate is not history’s only Jerusalemite to puzzle this question; two thousand years later, another one was born.
Truth has always fascinated me. Since my birth, I have lived in a society in which truth is hard to discern. Truth is ambiguous at best, impossible to identify at worst. News and politics, and their underlying questions of truth, have been in my blood since I was a nine-year-old youngster passionately arguing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu’s merits to my disinterested swimming buddies. Because Israelis are news addicts, every different opinion on every conceivable issue has bombarded me every day of my life. None has been unpolluted truth. I have had to separate the wheat from the chaff, the accurate story from the propaganda. I have immensely enjoyed my evolving attempts at doing so.
My interest in the concept of truth was sharpened in tenth grade, when I took a journalism course. One course assignment was to sort through media articles on a given topic, and then to write my own article. I realized that many articles, even those from supposedly neutral sources, contradicted one another. I logically concluded that some sources must be withholding or distorting information. My curiosity sparked, I did what any inquisitively-minded person would do: I dug deeper. I analyzed numerous publications, and resolved that all news sources are biased in one way or another because they reflect a held worldview.
This idea both festered and developed within me, until in the twelfth grade I had the opportunity to expand it in the context of a college online research and writing course, the culminating assignment of which was to write an in-depth research paper. True to my character, I chose An Alternative Main Cause of the Second Palestinian Intifada as my topic. My sources ranged from taped television interviews to archived newspaper articles to internet blogs. Some did their best to be objective; others were so obviously biased as to be laughable. All believed that they had achieved truth.
Throughout history, people have given their lives for concepts that they believed were truthful, but were proved false. We see truth through the lenses of our worldviews. To two firm believers, opposites on an issue, their beliefs are their respective truths. Is it possible for both to be right because they believe that they are? Or are they both wrong?
The beauty of democracy is that even though no one is completely right, every person is free to express his or her opinions, attempt to convince others, and believe wholeheartedly in the truth of his or her statements. No one will ever answer Pilate’s question. After all, he only echoed the question of previous civilizations. Excitedly, I am traveling forward in a large caravan of truth seekers, straining to see what lies ahead, anxiously anticipating my journeys next stop: college.</p>