By Rabbi Joshua Z. Gruenberg
One of the hardest lessons to learn as a rabbi is that your word — that is to say, how you speak to people and what you say — matters. It matters a lot. It should not come as a surprise, given how often the rabbis guarded against evil speech and gossip. Maimonides teaches us, “Whoever speaks with an evil tongue is as if he denied God. Gossip kills three people: the one who says it, the one who accepts it and the one about whom it is said.” (Hilchot Deot 7:3) Just the slightest slip of the tongue is akin to murder in the eyes of our greatest teachers.
Maimonides was definitely influenced in this teaching by personal experience, having witnessed the horrific arguments between his students and their adversaries. In fact, the authorities of the day were able to use this internal Jewish division, especially the evil things they said about one another, as a platform for growing antisemitism. There was an enemy seeking our harm, and Maimonides witnessed how we helped them by mistreating one another.
The Torah portion of Tazria discusses in depth how we would be able to purify skin ailments that appeared on the body. As you read through, two things become instantly clear. First, the Torah is not a science book. Second, these ailments were very scary to the community and they just weren’t sure how to explain their existence. Fast forward to the story of Miriam in the book of Numbers where the Torah indicates that Miriam is stricken with leprosy because of the gossip she spreads about her brother Moses.
Modern biblical scholars unanimously agree that the connection between evil speech and leprosy is, at its heart, a rabbinic explanation of this story from Numbers 12. There is nothing in the basic meaning of the text or science to suggest that gossip alone could cause a skin ailment of this kind. It is therefore fair to ask why the rabbis wanted to conflate these seemingly two disparate entities.
It is fair to say that throughout Jewish history, our darkest times have been those periods when we were our own worst enemy. There have always been enemies who sought our destruction, and historically our worst communal moments were when we participated actively in our own destruction. The eternal lesson is the same one my mother still imparts to my family today: We must take care of one another, because nobody else is going to do it for us. That is why the rabbis connected leprosy and gossip. Because they understood that even the slightest bit of evil speech could be the beginning of the downfall of even the strongest Jewish community. They knew that through our words, we have the ability to cause damage and harm that is on the level of death. I will conclude by sharing that given the state of the world today, I wish more people were as scared as the rabbis.
Rabbi Joshua Z. Gruenberg is senior rabbi of Chizuk Amuno Congregation.
