Parashat Be'halot'cha

This week we read about the laws of the Temple Menorah, the Jews celebrate their first Passover since leaving Egypt, we rebel against G-d because of the poor taste of Mannah and the lack of meat in our diets (G-d responds by sending Quail and by killing off those who rebelled) and we finish with an interesting section about Miriam (Moses’ sister).

The text says that Miriam spoke badly about Moses and as punishment is inflicted with tzara'ath (similar to leprosy – I wrote about that a few weeks ago). We know that impure speech (lashon hara) is a sin and the punishment is tzara'ath, so this seems reasonable. However, this passage leads to a separate mitzvah regarding lashon hara; the Rambam writes that in order to remember not to speak lashon hara, we are to remember what Miriam did and how she was punished.

This seems strange to me, we have been given a mitzvah to remember not to speak lashon Hara, and this mitzvah entails an eternal lashon hara against Miriam - remembering and speaking about that which seems to be negative about Miriam. We’re told to speak negatively about Miriam in order to remember not to speak negatively about people. I’m sure you see why this is troubling.

The answer to this problem is that our speaking about Miriam is not lashon hara, since she didn’t intentionally do anything wrong. We are not trying to put Miriam down; we’re trying to learn from her mistakes. And since Miriam didn’t intestinally sin, there is no harm in talking about what she did. Miriam spoke out against her brother out of love for him, it harmed no one.

So if she didn’t intentionally do anything wrong – if there was no sin – then why the punishment? Because when you deal in lashon hara, the effects are devastating.

The story is told of a man who comes home after a hot day of gold and goes to the fridge to pour a glass of coke. He takes the bottle of what he thought was coke, but which his wife had filled with bleach. The wife did not do that intentionally, a bottle of bleach broke, and the only bottle around was from coke, so she saved as much bleach as she could in the coke bottle and left the bottle on the counter. Someone else saw the bottle out on the counter and put it in the fridge. As the bleach touched the man’s lips, he sensed something wasn’t right and didn’t drink it. It wouldn’t have mattered if the wife put the bleach in the bottle intentionally or unintentionally, if you drink bleach it has devastating effects.

The same is true for lashon hara. Unintentionally speaking lashon hara is just as devastating as speaking it intentionally.

A man came to his Rebbi feeling very bad about speaking lashon hara about a friend. He asked the Rebbi ho he could remedy the situation. The Rebbi told him to go get a feather pillow, the man did. The Rebbi then told him to cut it open and release the feathers into the wind, the man did. The Rebbi then told the man to go collect all the feathers, only when he had collected all of them would the lashon hara be remedied.

Our words are like the feathers of that pillow. Once they leave our lips we can try to clean up the mess, but we can never get them back. Just as the feathers can never be fully retrieved, lashon hara can never be fully remedied.

Shabbat Shalom