In a small city called Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine, a boy lost his mother before he understood what it meant. She left when he was three. She never came back. No one explained why. At four, on a wooden balcony above a courtyard, he asked an older neighbor girl the question he could not bring himself to ask the adults: When would his mother return? The girl answered plainly, "Your mother is not coming back." The boy's name was Martin Buber. Decades later he wrote that everything he came to understand about her absence began in that single hour on the balcony. Twenty years later, the mother who had left him as a boy traveled far to see him. He could not meet her eyes. He coined a word for what had failed between them: "Vergegnung," a mismeeting. Looking at her still beautiful eyes, he wrote, was like hearing that word spoken to him. The girl on the balcony had not lied. She had told the truth, and likely meant kindness — yet that accurate sentence left a wound. Why? We tend to treat honesty as the highest value in any relationship. Buber's story complicates that. The question was whether h