Shabbat Shalom--April 8-9, 2011

Parshat Metzora
Rabbi Paul Steinberg

“My God, keep my tongue from evil, my lips from lies. Help me ignore those who slander me. Let me be humble before all.”
- Concluding lines of silent Amidah prayer

In his book Chutzpah, renowned law professor Alan Dershowitz relates the following story:
My mother is vacationing at a Jewish hotel in the Catskill Mountains, and is sitting around with a group of older women. One of them hears my mother’s name and, without realizing that she is my mother, launches into a discussion of that other Dershowitz, the Harvard professor. “Such a wonderful boy he is, but why did he have to go off and marry a shiksa [non-Jewish woman]? All the smart and successful ones do it, Henry Kissinger, Ted Koppel…? Why?”
My mother, playing dumb, strings along the know-it-all: “How do you know that Dershowitz married a shiksa?”
Mrs. Know-it-all knows: “My son’s cousin is his best friend. He was at the church where they had the wedding.”
My mother responds: “Well, I heard that he married a Jewish woman.”
“So you heard wrong,” Mrs. K.I.A. assures my mother. “That’s the story his family is putting out, can you blame them?”
At this point my mother can’t hold back. “Alan Dershowitz is my son. I was at the shul where he married Carolyn Cohen, whose father’s name is Mordechai and whose mother speaks fluent Yiddish. So what do you say about that?”
“Oh, I’m so glad it wasn’t true!” Mrs. K.I.A. says in obvious relief, but quickly adding, “How about Henry Kissinger, is his wife Jewish too?” (p. 15)

Although a bit silly (e.g., the chutzpah of insisting on such a false story), Dershowitz’s anecdote speaks to the power of the lure of gossip. So tempting is gossip that we will embellish and even falsify information for the mere feeling of passing it on.

Judaism identifies two kinds of gossip that are to be avoided:
1. Lashon Ha-ra (literally, “the evil tongue”) – true, but negative stories or information that lowers the esteem of the person about whom it is told. A subcategory of this is tattling.
2. Motzi Shem Ra (literally, “bringing an evil name”) – Lies and rumors; negative and false statements about someone.

Why would anyone gossip? When we are honest with ourselves, we find that we primarily gossip in order to raise our own status by lowering the status of others. Rarely is spreading humiliating information about another person for the sole purpose of protecting someone, but instead it is almost always self-serving. Somehow we feel a temporary and pseudo-sense of gratification by shining light on someone else’s miseries, peccadillos, or secrets. After all, isn’t the media obsession with Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen in large part feeding the dark pleasure of enjoying the misfortune and downfall of the rich, famous, and beautiful.

Second, by gossiping we feel – albeit artificially – that we are “in the know.” If we know a personal secret, inside information about someone else, we can feel a sense of self-importance, and justify our prejudices and attempts to assassinate someone’s character (such as the Dershowitz story, where a woman’s cousin had inside information).

Finally, we also spread gossip to exact revenge for being wronged. This is usually especially unfair. In this case, we carry anger about something and use information to damage the one who angered us, often exaggerating the information so that it especially stings.

In this week’s parshah, Metzora discusses the person with a horrible skin disease called tza’arat (often called “leprosy,” but not the leprosy we know today). The rabbinic sages ask what would cause such a disease. Citing cases when Moses’s skin became infected for refusing to obey God’s command (Ex. 4:1-6) and Miriam’s skin disease (Num. 12:1-13), the Rabbis conclude that rather than a physical ailment, this tza’arat is the consequence of gossip; it is a physical symptom of a spiritual malady. Moreover, the Rabbis notice that the word metzora (“leper”) can be read as an acronym, hinting at the aforementioned term for gossip: Motzi Shem Ra.

All of the biblical commentators pick up on this rabbinic interpretation, claiming that the disease serves as a just punishment for the sin of gossip – “a measure for measure”. Perhaps most notably, Pinchas Peli, a twentieth century Israeli commentator suggests that a skin disease is a “deserved punishment… [because it is] an illness that cannot be hidden [from the public]” just as the act of lying, slander, and gossip publically damages someone else.

Certainly gossip does not, or at least very rarely, causes physical diseases, and those who suffer from skin ailments should not be seen as guilty of gossip. That said, it is absolutely clear that, like an infectious disease, gossip, slander, tale-bearing, lying, character assassination can poison, spread, and destroy a society. This is especially true today, when we have access to so many modes of faceless communication, such as texting and the Internet. Unfortunately, as Rabbi Harvey Fields notes, “Learning to quarantine such evil and to cure ourselves from the temptation of lashon ha-ra [and motzi shem ra] are still significant challenges today.”

Shabbat Shalom!