Shemirat HaLashon
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
Parashat Metzora, 5774 ~ April 5, 2014
There are three types of sermons. There are the sermons a rabbi loves to give, can’t wait to
give. The kind that comes from inside your soul, that reflects the core of your rabbinate.
The sermon I gave about being “In, For and Of the Neighborhood” a couple years ago. A
couple sermons about my conception of God. Any sermon about the value of meaningful
and transformative community Jewish community.
The second type of sermon is the one you have to give. All rabbis have these sermons as
well. It’s the sermon you feel called to, obliged to because of particular world circumstances
(Russia’s invasion of Crimea or the unfolding drama in Israel) or because something has
happened in the congregation, wonderful or tragic, but whatever the case you feel you must
respond. Or, rarely, but occasionally, something truly significant has happened personally in
your life and the only way you feel you can be authentic both to yourself and to your
congregation is to share that reality and attempt to frame it in a Jewish context. My first
Yom Tovim at Anshe Emet in Chicago, I was still saying Kaddish for my dad and my
daughter had just been discharged from four weeks in the NICU. I had to figure out how I
could honor those realities without being self-absorbed. As Hillel says, “Im ein ani li mi li” (if
I am not for myself, who will be for me?) “u’kshe’ani l’atzmi ma ani,” (but if I’m only for
myself what am I?) Being a rabbi often means to diminish the self, but you help no one if
you negate the self or the world.
And then there’s the third type of sermon. And that is the sermon that you, every rabbi, in
his or her own way, spends most of your rabbinate avoiding. It’s the sermon we run from.
But the thing is, about this third type of sermon, eventually like most of the things we run
from in life, they catch up with us. And then we’re forced to confront them and figure out
why is it that these things pursue us down dark alleyways and haunt us during those quiet
moments in between ubiquitous simcha meals.
So today I have a sermon that I’ve been avoiding. I’ve been avoiding it for nearly nine years
of my rabbinate and six years of seminary internships before that, and today, finally, it has
caught up with me. It’s the sermon that so many rabbis and teachers of Torah give on this
particular parasha. It’s a sermon about speech, namely how the rabbis somehow connect
speech to this disease called tzara’at. I’ve avoided it, I suspect, because on some fundamental
level it makes me uncomfortable – the idea that there could be a profoundly non-physical
etiology to any disease that manifests in such disturbingly physical ways. I can forgive them
for the bad science, but it smacks of “blaming of the victim,” something to that I, in my
pastoral role, resist at almost a cellular level.
Where does this idea come from, this notion that a skin ailment can be attributed to slander?
Well, it’s not in Tazria or Metzora. It comes, eisegetically I would say, from two sources. I’ll
take them in reverse chronological order. The first is from B’ha’alot’kha in the book of
Numbers when Miriam and Aaron come to Moses with a complaint: “Vat’daber Miriam
v’Aharon b’Moshe al odot ha’isha hakushit…Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of
the Cushite woman he had married…” (12:1). The midrashic tradition assumes the affliction
of tza’arat that follows nine verses later is a direct result of this lashon hara which literally
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means the “evil tongue.” But, while plausible, it’s not necessarily the most likely explanation.
First of all, the Torah is explicit that Miriam, and not Aaron, is affected – but both of them
spoke, yes? Disparity aside, perhaps Miriam was punished for challenging Moses publicly. A
present day Rabbi (Norman Cohen) suggests it could be a punishment for racism. Miriam
doesn’t like the blackness of Moses’ Cushite wife, so God turns her excessively white,
“measure for measure,” midah k’neged midah. Rashi, for his part, imagines them critiquing
him for abandoning his wife Tzipora! Even the translation “against” Moses is an
interpretation; while the preposition “b’moshe” is atypical, it could still mean they spoke “to”
Moses. The point is, there are any number of possible causes to Miriam’s ailment – and
even if we take the text at face value and assume there is a cause at all, the conspicuous
absence of any etiology in numerous chapters of Tazria or Metzora makes the Numbers case
the exception, not the rule!
The second example, which comes earlier in the book of Exodus (Ch. 4), is even more
tenuous. Essentially, God shows Moshe two magic tricks to impress Pharaoh: transfiguring
his staff into a snake and giving himself tza’arat before curing it just as quickly. The midrash
says the skin ailment was a result of Moses’ questioning the Holy One’s command to go
before Pharaoh, but there’s no evidence for such a claim. For these reasons, though, our
Sages say that the term metzora, one afflicted with this leprous condition, is an acronym for
motzi (shem) ra, literally one who brings forth a bad name, one who gossips.
So, knowing these midrashim and feeling uncomfortable with them, I assiduously avoided the
topic of gossip and slander in sermons on this or last week’s parasha. But then it occurred to
me: what if, after all these years, I’ve been thinking of it wrongly? What if I’ve been looking
at it from the wrong perspective? It’s baseball season now, so perhaps a baseball story is
called for:
There’s a young boy with a bat in hand, practicing his hitting by tossing a baseball into the air and swinging
at it. He does this once, tosses it up, takes a good swing and, swish, misses the ball entirely. He does the
same thing a second time. Swings and misses. The third time, he tosses the ball in the air, and carefully
keeping his eye on the ball, he watches it go up… and as it’s coming down he swings cleanly across his body
and… woosh. Misses it again. “Strike three,” says the kid to himself, “I had no idea I was such a good
pitcher!”
My teacher, Professor Walter Herzberg, would say perhaps the most important thing to keep
an eye out for when studying Torah is “perspective.” And sometimes to really understand a
text we need to look at things from a different angle.
So here’s another way of thinking about metzora. Since the Torah is clear, the Numbers text
notwithstanding, that this disease has no cause, nor any discernable cure, perhaps what the
rabbis are interested in exploring is not the nature of disease but the nature of speech. Think
about speech for a moment. In what ways do gossip, slander, lashon hara, manifest like a
disease. How do hurtful words corrode a person? How do they leave us feeling ugly,
disfigured and vulnerable? How do they force us to live in partial or even total isolation?
Aren’t they, literally, communicable?
The Torah says, “lo telekh rachil b’amekha. Lo ta’amod al dam rei’ekha…Do not go as a
talebearer among your people, do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Lev. 19:16).
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And tradition suggests the two clauses in the verse are not unrelated. Speech can kill,
sometimes literally – as in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia where the talebearing of
neighbors led to catastrophic loss of life. And in this internet age of social media –
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat – our society provides vehicles upon vehicles for
defamation. How many stories have we heard about kids who are bullied beyond repair,
taking their own lives rather than face an incessant barrage of words made visible to the
world?
But the arrested heart is only one version of death. Evil and destructive speech can also
undo a life in other ways – by obliterating a friendship, unmaking a marriage, or ruining a
career. Rabbi Israel Salanter, founder of the Mussar Movement says, “If you say of a rabbi
that he does not have a good voice and of a cantor that he is not a scholar, you are a gossip.
But if you say of a rabbi that he is no scholar and of a cantor that he has no voice, you are a
murderer.” (Of course Salanter, having never been a modern pulpit rabbi or cantor, was not
murdered nearly as frequently as some). But think about it, inasmuch as death is a
permanently altered state, the victim of slander or gossip is deprived of the life she once had.
She may be born again, but it will be, on some level, Phoenix-like, out of ashes. The
metzora, having no appearance of malady, may re-enter the camp, but the person who enters
will not be identical to the one who left. The world is filled with human beings sporting
scars invisible to the naked eye.
And, as the Talmud points out, it’s not only the slanderer who is culpable. The bystander,
too, bears some responsibility, perhaps a lot. “One who listens to lashon hara is worse than
one who recites it” we read in Masechet Pesahim (118a). For, as the verse in Leviticus makes
clear, to stand idly by our neighbor’s blood is to condone, even support, and perhaps aid and
abet the destructive act we witness.
But here’s the interesting thing; Jewish tradition makes a far more radical claim. In addition
to being culpable, all three parties are, paradoxically, damaged as well. Not just the victim,
the slanderer and the bystander, too, have lost something of their humanity. If, as the Torah
teaches, we are all created in God’s image and likeness, to defame another is to diminish
ourselves. Think about a time when you said something hurtful. How did you feel?
Perhaps big for a moment…but, if you’re a good person, and I know you all are, I bet it
wasn’t long before you felt yourself deflate.
The Talmud (Arachin, 15b) teaches: [Slander and gossip] kills three persons: he who tells, he who hears
and he about whom it is said. And what is the range of such devastation? The Gemarra
continues:
Rabbi Hama bar Hanina said: what is the meaning of “Death and life are in the ‘hand’ of the tongue?”
(Proverbs 18:21)… It tells you that just as the hand can kill, so can the tongue. One might say that just as
the hand can kill only one near it, thus also the tongue can kill only one near it, [but we read in Psalms
(64:4)]: “Their tongue is a sharpened arrow.” Then one might assume that just as an arrow kills only
within [a short distance], thus also the tongue...Therefore the text states: “They set their mouths against
heaven and their tongues range over the earth” (Psalms 73:9).
The range of speech, positive and negative, is limitless – as the Chassidic story reminds us,
doing lashon hara is like opening a feather pillow outside on a windy day – and then trying to
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collect all the feathers. And what could be truer in our modern world of cyber-technology?
The number of lives who are literally snuffed out by their own hand or that of another is so
utterly dwarfed by the number of people who are irrevocably harmed each and every minute
of each and every day. So much bile courses through the wires that connect us, ricochets
between satellites. One hundred forty years ago, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan penned a book
called Chafetz Chayim. It chief purpose was to enumerate the laws of shemirat halashon, proper
and improper speech. His analogy? That of a telegram. “Notice how carefully they
consider each word before putting it down,” he writes. “That is how careful we must be
when we speak.” Words have always been precious to Jews, but now even the printed word,
the emailed word, the texted word is cheap, and oh, so ubiquitous. How much more relevant
it is in our day that nearly one quarter of the forty-three sins listed in Yom Kippur’s Al Chet
prayer are sins committed through speech!
Each Shabbat, we offer a Mi Sheberach, a prayer for healing. We consider those whose lives
have been turned upside down by illness, whose families have been absorbed in their
suffering. This week’s parasha, I have come to understand, masquerades as a text about
disease. But like a persistent, pursuing sermon, a phantom illness from this ancient text
becomes a powerful metaphor for an all too real condition. The world, which God lovingly
created with speech, has become eroded by it. What is the best response? Refuah, healing.
We shouldn’t be naïve, the cure for a pandemic isn’t simple. But here’s one small place to
start. Let us speak less. Listen more. The rabbis point out the human head has two ears but
only one mouth. Which do you think we’re supposed to use more? Do we get credit for
holding our tongues or their proxy, our keystrokes? Usually not. Rabbi Harold Kushner
writes, “Only God can give us credit for the angry words we did not speak.” But speech
unmade is also sin undone. It’s not a bad place to start.
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