The Evil Tongue

Mintz, Alan

The Evil Tongue Alan Mintz The awesome power of the tongue is universally known, but we tend to emphasize only its most dramatic forms — public perjury, slander and defamation of character,...

...Lashon hara is involved every time we originate or pass on a story about a person's past which, though true, has the effect of undercutting his or her present efforts, every time we disseminate information about a person's family or spouse that would adversely affect our judgment of that person, and, generally, every time we reveal something about a person that he or she would want kept secret...
...2. SPEECH IS REAL AND CONSEQUENTIAL...
...Its author this month is Alan Mintz...
...However, for the Jew sensitive to the Tradition, the full dimensions of the concern of Judaism for the quality of life can be appreciated only in the particulars of the law...
...In this connection, the laws of lashon hara play an important role, functioning to restrict the sphere of conflict to the disputants themselves and preventing the accusations of either party from being picked up in gossip and bruited about until they gain universal currency as well as thoroughgoing distortion...
...one should further avoid excessive praise because it tempts the listener to balance the picture by matching virtues with vices...
...If the "negative truth" he has to communicate, for example, will prevent future injury or loss of money — information about various forms of violence and dishonesty — then he must not hold back...
...The Rabbis were especially sensitive to the significance of situational factors in determining the ultimate import of a communication...
...these suggest the tenor of this entire constellation of law, and touch most directly on the daily business of life...
...We all know the present and past histories of many people, and the degree to which, in conversation, we withhold some information and release other gives us ALEINU, the title of this column, is token from the prayer which begins with that word, and means "it is incumbent upon us" This column is for wrestling with God and his commandments...
...Jewish law comprehends a truly immense number of discrete modes of prohibited speech, each with its own derivation from Scripture and its own set of conditions: verbal abuse, public humiliation, defamation of character, swearing false vows, slander, talebearing, profanity, blasphemy, informing, cursing, false flattery, mockery, and of course, lying...
...4. COMPLETE DISCLOSURE IS NOT TRUTH...
...slander and talebearing...
...However, the Rabbis were characteristically less concerned with what people "believed" than with the actions taken on the basis of those beliefs...
...The Talmud nicely reflects on the essentially triangular network of relations set in motion by lashon hara: "The talk about third [persons] kills three persons: him who tells [the slander], him who accepts it, and him about whom it is told...
...Instead, focus is on a more subtle question, that of circulating information about a third party which, though negative, is nonetheless true...
...they have become like lepers who no longer have a place in the community of men...
...According to the Rabbis (Leviticus 19:17), "Thou shalt surely rebuke thy neighbor" unambiguously commanded a Jew to reproach his fellow for his wrong actions...
...This practice is referred to as lashon hara (literally, "evil talk," or slander) and it is prohibited...
...How people speak about one another has much to do with their control over one another...
...who has written for a number of periodicals, and is spending the year in Jerusalem studying Hebrew literature as a Lady Davis post-doctoral fellow remarkable power...
...When being spoken to of someone whom we have not yet met, we are commonly put in possession of information which makes it nearly impossible for us to form a fresh opinion of the person when we finally meet him...
...One should avoid praising someone in public, we are told, because a large gathering is bound to include enemies of the person...
...Judaism holds speech to be a form of action as significant as physical aggression or violence...
...The burden of discussion and investigation in Jewish sources does not center on the prohibition against unfounded rumor and the like — that is taken for granted...
...We indulge in a particularly serious form of lashon hara when our disparagement of a person's talents and capacities in his or her work results in a loss of professional reputation and a deterioration of business...
...Of this long list of prohibitions, I here discuss only two...
...Life is lived with intense interaction, intense concern, intense participation, and more than occasionally, intense criticism and conflict...
...The only thing to be achieved by keeping such stories in circulation, it was understood, was the formation of invidious coalitions which, fueled by furtive communications, eventually led to total communal breakdown...
...It is also through speech that we inflate and deflate reputations and transmit informal though highly consequential evaluations of professional and business performance...
...Whereupon people will hear it and come and plunder him...
...The commandment to reproach is significant for just this reason: Its fulfillment redirects the practice of speaking about people toward the goal of speaking to people...
...Judaism argues that the mere disclosure of facts is not equivalent to truth...
...There are times, to begin with, when a Jew is positively commanded to speak lashon hara...
...Jews have struggled for centuries to develop ways in which ideals can be rendered operational in everyday life and to see to it that there is no circumstance, no matter how uncommon, in which the Jew is without guidance in the particular application of general values...
...While in the case of the subject of the slander the death referred to represents potential real suffering, for the slanderer and the recipient their deaths are moral and religious: They have ceased to be alive to the consequences of their actions...
...Thus while there is little hope of controlling the faculties of imagination and suspicion, there can be every expectation that a Jew will decline to act on the basis of the slander, that he will continue to act, in other words, as if he had never heard it...
...Now, the Rabbis were perceptive enough to realize that once a choice piece of information has been deposited or a seed of doubt planted, it is immensely difficult to withhold our tacit assent, for we invariably believe that if it was said at all there must be something to it...
...It is not only the speaker of lashon hara who places himself in transgression, but the recipient of the communication as well...
...We are in the habit of thinking that the "truth" is obtained by revealing all the facts about a given situation or person...
...Most of all, one must beware of indiscriminately revealing kindnesses that have been done for one and not for others...
...Judaism finds itself particularly at odds with the contemporary emphasis on the primacy of self-expression, for Judaism refuses to consider expression or discourse exclusively from the point of view of the speaker, as his right or his need...
...It has been the genius of Judaism never to allow doctrines and values such as these to remain merely ethical ideals...
...About matters of such moment it is not surprising that Judaism has something significant to say...
...With such an image the Rabbis sought to underscore our ultimate responsibility for what we say, a responsibility that cannot be selectively accepted precisely because the consequences of our words cannot be selectively applied...
...Each of these types, either by virtue of actions or religious identification, is located outside the Jewish speech-community and therefore outside the orbit of its reciprocal responsibilities...
...Praise is a good example...
...Though hedged in by numerous conditions and contingencies, the commandment to reproach is a central institution of Judaism and one which reveals a great deal about the underlying rationale of the entire network of laws which ideally regulate the Jewish speech-community...
...A community commonly uses this power as a means of enforcing some kinds of behavior and censuring other kinds...
...I use the Hebrew term because lashon hara is actually something we do every day in ordinary conversation, while "slander" suggests the kind of litigation and criminal intent we would hardly associate with our own lives...
...Yet it is through speech that we have an image of persons we do not know well, and often a vivid preconception of those we haven't yet met...
...At once the most distinguished and least conspicuous aspect of the laws of speech is aimed, paradoxically, at promoting confrontation rather than inhibiting it...
...And it has been the constant goal of Jewish law to make that life livable by limiting the costs of conflict without limiting the intensity of community...
...3. SELF-EXPRESSION IS NOT THE HIGHEST VALUE...
...To the uninitiated, such applications to the contingencies of daily life might sometimes appear over-elaborate and absurdly legalistic, and to others, the presumption of the law to regulate private moral life might seem a restriction of personal freedom...
...A similar imperative (as well as a similar set of cautions) applies in a case where the judicious disclosure of information might reconcile parties to a quarrel and further the cause of peace rather than conflict...
...By gesture, the Rabbis inferred the capacity for the style of an utterance — tone of voice, hand motions, and the whole arsenal of nonverbal skills we all command — to turn the ostensible content of a statement inside out...
...Next morning he goes out into the street and says: May the Merciful One bless So-and-so, who labored so much on my behalf...
...In Jewish legal sources the recipient of lashon hara is the subject of special attention...
...The Rabbis were fully conscious of the heights of ingenuity we reach in utilizing implication, gesture, and context for the purposes of lashon hara...
...The cardinal principle they laid...
...Every word a man pronounces, according to the Rabbis, ascends to heaven and is recorded-under his name in a book, and no matter how a man might protest that his words do not adequately represent him, nothing once spoken can be erased...
...We are asked to break the circuit of indirection and mediation and to attempt face-to-face encounter...
...It is sometimes closer to the truth to withhold information, as when its disclosure would only serve to make someone seem unattractive, or to damage reputations gratuitously...
...For a Jew to be asked to observe all these prohibitions is to be asked to do a great deal, and the strain would be greater if it were not for certain areas of leniency which make the law workable...
...The teachings of Judaism relating to speech are represented in four doctrines: 1. SPEECH IS A FORM OF ACTION...
...This is not a trifling matter, however, and before he goes ahead, a man must not only have observed the dishonesty or violence at first hand but also have good reason to believe that his transmission of the information will indeed make a difference...
...It goes without saying that he is enjoined from passing on what he has been told...
...his special responsibility is to refuse to believe the slander...
...The very exhaustiveness of this catalog reveals a stubborn realism about the multifarious ways evil enters human affairs through the agency of speech...
...To impugn a man's generosity, for instance, one need only expand on the size of his fortune and leave the rest to the imagination...
...Speech, as it is discussed in Jewish sources, is social and communal in nature, drawing together the speaker, the listener, and the one spoken about into an ineluctable web of relationship...
...In short, life is with people...
...In the Talmud the story is told of the man who comes to a strange city and has the good fortune to receive generous hospitality from a certain resident of the town...
...In Jewish law such indirection is called "the dust of lashon hara," and it, too, is prohibited...
...The Evil Tongue Alan Mintz The awesome power of the tongue is universally known, but we tend to emphasize only its most dramatic forms — public perjury, slander and defamation of character, rumormongering — rather than its insinuation into the crevices of our daily lives and the justifications of our ordinary behavior...
...The Rabbis used the verse from Proverbs, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue," as an occasion for stressing that speech is potentially both a lethal weapon and an instrument of salvation...
...Leniency also obtains in cases where the subject of lashon hara is either a non-Jew, a Jew who has rejected the Jewish community, or a Jew who has repeatedly committed immoral acts and refused to change...
...It is through the quality of our talk about people, it was taught, that we create the solidarity of community or give way to the primitive state of nature...
...Now, the Rabbis knew that conflict cannot and should not be eliminated from the life of a vibrant community, but they also knew that the secondary consequences of conflict, the fallout that reaches beyond the disputants, can and must be controlled...
...Finally, there is a partial exemption from these injunctions when a story which is classifiable as lashon hara is told in the presence of three or more persons at the same time and unaccompanied by a warning against repeating it, the assumption being that under such circumstances the story is destined before long to become common knowledge...
...It is precisely because the Rabbis recognized that it was natural to make snide remarks to a friend, and unnatural for a man to speak directly to an opponent, that they made the latter course a positive commandment...
...The needs of self-expression, like any form of self-actualization, must therefore be balanced against the potential costs to others, a calculation that cannot always be decided in favor of immediate release...
...If we were only enjoined from direct expressions of disparagement, then we could bear our burden lightly, for we are all adept at the kind of subtle innuendo that manages to do its business without calling attention to itself...
...As a reaction to disappointing behavior, we are asked to take our sense of offense directly to the source of the disappointment, rather than enlisting others in our outrage and putting in motion a story which will have a life of its own over and above its original provocation...
...The image of community in Judaism is not romantic...

Vol. 1 • January 1976 • No. 6


 
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