Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, PhD
Kehillat Israel Reconstructionist Congregation
November 6, 2009
“I offered to drive my mother-in-law to the doctor’s,” one of my friends once told me, “But when I arrived at her house, I found her standing in her front yard gossiping with her next door neighbor about another neighbor who lived down the street. “Mom, we’ve got to go,” he interjected, but she just ignored him and continued to talk to the neighbor telling her all the things about the other woman that she didn’t like. “Mom,” he repeated, “we really have to go.” But she just kept talking to the other woman anyway.
“Mom,” he finally said loudly, “I’m sorry but we have to go to the doctor’s office now please,” as he pulled her away.
“Sorry,” she said as she got into his car. “I didn’t know what to do. That woman just wouldn’t stop listening to me.”
Jewish tradition teaches us that there are 613 mitzvot, 613 commandments hidden (and not so hidden) within the Torah. You may know that the very first commandment is “Be fruitful and multiply,” and of course everyone knows about the “Ten Commandments” Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. On Yom Kippur this year I spoke about another commandment: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor,” and how it is the moral imperative from which Jewish tradition teaches that we are all responsible to act on behalf of those who would otherwise suffer pain or possible death from lack of available health care.
The 613 mitzvot were specifically detailed in the 13th century by the great Jewish theologian, Moses Maimonides, and they deal with God, Torah, relations between Jews and non-Jews, ethical behavior of all kinds, treatment of animals, strangers, slaves, parents, children, ritual obligations, prayer, marriage, divorce and family issues, responsibilities to the poor and vulnerable in society, sexual relations, dietary laws, business practices, courts and judicial procedures, how to treat the land, criminal law, property rights, idolatry and forbidden religious practices, obligations of the priests and ritual practices in the temple, ritual purity and impurity, responsibilities of leadership, how to act in time of war and more.
But of all these 613 mitzvot that seem to cover nearly every possible aspect of a person’s life there is one that I believe is the most difficult of all to keep and when transgressed carries with it the most devastating and potentially destructive consequences of all. Which Mitzvah do I choose? The mitzvah is called in Hebrew simply, SHMIRAT HALASHON – “Guarding Your Tongue.”
It’s the most difficult mitzvah because it goes against human nature. Like my friend’s mother-in-law, we all seem to revel in talking about each other, and can’t seem to stop listening whenever someone else does the same thing. Of course gossiping about celebrities is a multi-billion dollar business – from the long list of magazines (People, Us. We, National Enquirer) to television shows like TMZ whose entire raison d’etre is to hunt down celebrities in the midst of their daily lives and expose every faux pas or misstep to public scrutiny.
But it’s not just celebrities whose lives are exposed in every lurid detail any more. With the blessings of the internet, the curses of instant mass exposure with the tap of a computer key has created a new world of complex ethical challenges that would have made the rabbis of the Talmudic age turn pale with horror.
Think of how easy it is to use the power of the internet’s indiscriminate mass communication capability to destroy reputations, spread slander and misinformation about anyone at any time from the President of the United States to the girl who sits next to you in class. We call this transgression in Hebrew, LASHON HARA – “HURTFUL SPEECH” and it finds its way into nearly every aspect of our lives – from the bedroom to the board room.
Sometimes it is simply mean-spirited and designed to hurt, and just as often, I suspect, it isn’t even recognized for the pain that it can inflict until after the damage is done. In fact, most offices and corporations today have had to institute company-wide policies regarding the content and use of email in an attempt at curbing the potentially destructive and even libelous nature of what people seem to be willing to commit to writing and then send to just about anyone. At least one of the large, well-known law firms in Los Angeles has officially forbidden the use of “Reply all” by anyone working in it’s many branch offices throughout the world in an attempt at preventing what has happened to almost everyone I know at one time or another.
You write a note to someone thinking it is personal and for their eyes only, and somehow the “reply all” button is pushed and your “private” correspondence is suddenly broadcast to the world. Or perhaps you write something that is sent only to one other person, but the content isn’t something you’d want shared with anyone else. But once you send an email into cyberspace, you have absolutely no control as to whom it might be forwarded and what life of its own it may have forever.
I will never forget when I first moved to the San Fernando Valley to work at Temple Judea. That very year a male high school teacher was fired from his job when one of his female students revealed that he had made sexual advances against her after class. He was fired from his job, he was humiliated in public, his reputation was ruined, and when a year later she recanted the story and admitted that she was just angry with him for giving her a poor grade on a paper she had written, it was long beyond the possibility of redeeming his now lost career and the stigma that he carried.
“Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” said Proverbs. And how many lives have indeed been taken because of lies spread and believed. I had the privilege of going to the Theatre this week and seeing “Parade” at the Mark Taper. It is a musical about the infamous Leo Frank tragedy in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1914. Leo Frank was a Jew who was unjustly accused of raping and murdering a young girl who worked in the factory he supervised and was convicted on the evidence of “witnesses” who simply made up stories and lies about him. There was no evidence of his guilt at all, but throughout history the lies and accusations that people invent take on a life of their own.
So it was with Leo Frank, that the local citizenry was so incited by their own anti-Semitic passions that when his sentence was commuted from death to a life sentence from the outrage of pressure from around the world that came to bear on the governor of Georgia, he was taken out of prison by a mob and hanged for the crime he never committed. Life and death are in the power of the tongue.
That is the reason that within the prayers of every Jewish service are found these words: ELOHAI NETZOR LESHONEE MAYRA USFATAI MIDABAYR MIRMA - “O God guard my tongue from evil and my lips from telling lies.” Because the most difficult mitzvah in the Torah, is to guard our tongues from all the pain that they can bring upon another. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former US Ambassador to the United Nations once said, “Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.” Look at how Israel with all the lies and exaggerations filling the media every day was recently voted “Biggest violator of human rights in the world” by more people than any other country. Bigger than North Korea, Saudia Arabia, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, China? What we say really does matter.
You all have heard many times the famous story of the woman who comes to the rabbi wringing her hands and feeling terrible about having spread gossip about another woman in her town and asking for the rabbi’s advice as to how to make amends. Of course the rabbi tells her it is to the woman she has injured that she has to make amends, but tells her first to take a pillow and go into the middle of town and tear it open and scatter all the feathers into the wind.
She complies with the rabbi’s request and then asks what she should do next. “Go and find all the feathers and put them back into the pillow,” says the rabbi, which of course she cries is impossible. “So too,” says the rabbi, “once the words have left your mouth it is just as impossible to retrieve them .”
According to the rabbis of the Talmud – “Lashon Hara” is any speech from which another may be injured or hurt. Even if what you say is true – just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. If your speech hurts another human being, tarnishes their reputation, causes another to think less of them, then it is still “Lashon Hara,” and that is why “guarding our tongues” is the hardest mitzvah of all.
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