A License for Speaking

Your Personal Weapon 

Since Yuval received his license for a gun and purchased a pistol – there is much rejoicing in his home. At last, the family has something real and exciting to do; literally, they are playing with fire. He, his wife, and his children practice at home, cock the gun, go out to forests and shoot at targets they have scattered around there and feel like true heroes. Needless to say, these games end badly. Very badly.  

Every person with a bit of sense knows that great power necessitates much responsibility and carefulness. A gun is not a toy. A gun can kill. You will not allow your ten-year-old son to take a turn around the block in the family car, because it could end badly for you, for the child, and for the passers-by. A car is a very powerful and dangerous thing, which must be operated with skill, alertness, responsibility, and great care. It needs to be taken seriously.  

A senseless person may not have a license for a gun or for driving a car. Someone who is not careful with a gun or while driving is not only an outlaw, but a danger to the entire society! 

So, one may ask: who gave us permission to talk? Is talking less dangerous? True, our mouths don’t shoot bullets, and do not have 200-horse-power engines, but that doesn’t mean that they are less damaging. “Death and life are in the hands of the tongue.” A gossiper roams around the world and makes people miserable, separating husbands and wives, ruining people’s good names, their chance to get married, their businesses. He ruins lives just by speaking. 

David Hamelech said in Tehillim that lashon hara (harmful speech) is a weapon: “… and their tongues are a sharp sword.” (Psalm 57:5) Chazal say that it is like a sword that kills everything. Lashon hara has also been described as an arrow, because it hits and causes damage from afar. In our times, we might compare lashon hara to a powerful missile or bomb. 

Leave Society 

Therefore, in our parasha, the Torah gives the metzora (the person afflicted with “leprosy”) a very unusual punishment: “He shall live apart; outside his camp shall be his dwelling”. Even people who have types of tuma (impurity) that are more severe than this are allowed to walk among other people, but the metzora – the person who spoke ill of others – must be in total isolation. He has to stay away even from other people who are tme’im or metzora’im. 

One must know that a person who is in the habit of speaking lashon hara, besides the damage he causes society, does a huge amount of damage to himself. Rabbi Nachman writes something amazing (Likutei Moharan 54:5): Lashon hara removes the da’at from the person and increases the animalistic power in him, and he will never be able to love Hashem. This is because he is animalistic and is deeply in love with his animal side, and Hashem yitbarach doesn’t want him, and all his view of reality and of life has become distorted. His judgment has become completely twisted.  

These are absolutely terrible results! It is a loss of his tzelem Elokim (image of G-d). You see a person who looks like a human being and is seemingly functioning in this world as a human being – but in reality, he is in disguise: He is a two-legged animal. His entire inner world and value system is animalistic and rotten.  

Not for nothing was the Second Temple destroyed because of lashon hara, for lashon hara is destructive; it destroys everything, ruins the person who speaks it, destroys society, and demolishes the Jewish people from the inside.  

Adding Fuel to the Fire 

Lashon hara is also the fuel of the yetzer hara. Rabbi Nachman says that if a person would guard his speech completely and speak only clean, true words – he would not have any yetzer hara. Any false speech means a little more yetzer hara. Because the yetzer hara is the falsehood getting hold of a person and steering him away from the true way and purpose. Lying causes falsehood to sink deeper into the person and he is thus increasing the falsehood in himself and removing himself from the truth. Naturally, by doing so he tightens the hold of the yetzer hara on himself, because this is precisely the yetzer hara. Bad speech – even if it supposedly happened – is called falsehood, because anything against Hashem’s will is a lie. 

We do not lack yetzer hara, and it really is not worthwhile for us to add more and more of it to our lives. Therefore, before saying anything, think carefully if it is worthwhile to you to pay this high price for it. Think whether it is worthwhile for you to force more and more lies and evilness upon yourself and to inflate your yetzer hara even more – all in order to get some attention from other people by way of your “witticisms” and “cleverness”, which are total foolishness, for “He who spreads slander is a fool.”  (Proverbs 10:18) 

We Say No to Disengagement 

But the greatest damage of lashon hara is to one’s health. 

In the same section (Likutei Moharan 54:5), Rabbi Nachman says that lashon hara is the ruin of the medameh (power of imagination). All of our holy emuna (faith) is called “clarification of the imagination”. The purpose of man is to rectify the medameh and that is why we are called “adam”, similar to “edameh la’Elyon” (I will become like the Supreme One.) Rabbi Nachman says that the power of the imagination is influenced by lashon hara. In other words, lashon hara can cause a person to lose all of his emuna. 

Losing one’s emuna means losing one’s connection with Hashem, with life, because “the tzaddik lives by his emuna.”  (Habakkuk 2:4) Faith gives life. Every word of lashon hara disconnects a lifeline, disengages him completely from Hashem, as the Holy Zohar says that all of the Supreme light is unavailable to him.  

But the worst outcome of this relates to mental health.  Good mental health is based on emuna, “For the soul and the faith are one,” as Rabbeinu says, and as we have explained at length in the book The Garden of Emuna, as well as in the amazing, healing booklet, True Happiness. 

Emuna protects the soul and heals it. Emuna is what is behind a person’s ability to withstand the trials and tribulations of life. One doesn’t play around with emuna! 

The sin of lashon hara takes the emuna away from the person. In other words, it destroys the person’s resilience. Someone who speaks lashon hara is cutting off the branch upon which he is sitting.  

And the bad results of this are ruinous, because when one’s nefesh (soul) is unhealthy, it means one will be living a life of sadness and depression, anxiety, irritability and anger and all types of mental and emotional illnesses. 

He Who Believes Is Not Afraid 

Unfortunately, even before Simchat Torah we wrote and spoke about the plague of anxieties that besets our generation, and after the immense disaster that came upon us it is only getting worse. So the most precious thing at all times, and particularly at this time – is emuna. Whoever has experienced bad traumas and losses says that he gets all his emotional support only from emuna. 

And so, if it is important to guard one’s tongue at any time, how much more so should we guard and be guarded from lashon hara, from any bad speech about any Jew, when the sword rules, in times of war and fear. 

Lashon hara is the thing that demolishes the Jewish People from the inside, because lashon hara creates schisms among Jews. We all feel, and all the soldiers say so outright, that all their powers come from our being united. “Together we will win,” “We are strong together” – these are not empty slogans, but rather reality. And so, in the times of the wicked King Achav, when no one spoke lashon hara, they would go out to war and be triumphant; whereas in the times of David Hamelech, who was righteous, there was lashon hara and divisiveness, and therefore war caused casualties. 

Pesach eve, when we have pe–sach (the mouth speaks) – the power of speech gets stronger and serves to strengthen our emuna. Now is the time to work on a general “cleaning for Pesach” of our speech, get rid of any bad speech, and strengthen good speech. This is the greatest thing we can do for ourselves and for all the Jewish People right now.