Lashon HaRa – Bad Mouthing A Nation

At the end of this week’s Torah portion, (BeHa’Alotecha), an incident with Aaron and Miriam speaking ill of Moses draws our attention and returns to a topic dealt with on more than one occasion in the Torah – the harmful effects of lashon hara – gossip.

We all are guilty of doing it – which is precisely why classic Jewish sources devote so many pages of texts and have developed so many guidelines addressing the problem.

There is a joke, not from our classic texts, about a mother who calls her son and says, “I don’t want to say any lashon hara which is how these conversations usually begin and don’t tell anyone, but I heard your brother and his wife are having problems and are barely speaking to each other.” When her son asks, “Ma, Who told you that?”  she replies – “Everybody is talking about it… But don’t tell anyone I told you.”

It is so easy, tempting and, let’s face it – sometimes even gratifying to talk about another person, to spread a rumor, or repeat something juicy we heard about someone, without giving any consideration to whether the rumor is true or not, and not thinking about the harm it may do. Yet spreading lashon hara, even when true, is also frowned upon. In fact, Maimonides, in his classic work of Jewish law, Mishneh Torah, says that it is a sin to speak disparagingly of another person – even if what you say about them is true.

So, yes, Judaism has a great deal to teach us about speech and interpersonal relations.

But the problem of spreading false rumors goes beyond personal matters, for what is true in the micro system applies in the macro, on a larger, global scale. And there the harm can be infinitely more potent.

I am referring to the nation of Israel, where it seems libelous charges and outrageous lies spread with unbelievable ease. It is as if there are no limits to what can be said.

The recent and most absurd lie is the accusation by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who wrote that dogs have been trained by Israel to rape Palestinians. That this is biologically impossible did not deter him from writing such garbage, nor did it prevent the so-called national paper of record from printing the allegation.

The charge is nothing short of a blood libel.

A blood libel originated in the Middle Ages with the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood to make matzah. Although it has absolutely no basis in Jewish law or practice, Jews have been subjected to blood libels for centuries in different countries. It was used to justify persecutions, expulsions, forced conversions, and massacres of Jewish communities.

Misinformation about Jewish people has always had the same trajectory: accusation and amplification, resulting in violence. The blood libel never required truth to be lethal — it required only repetition and acceptance by authorities whom people trusted.

Unfortunately, the barbaric practice of making unfounded accusations and seemingly, reputable outlets spreading the filth is not a historical relic of the past.

The irrational prejudice known as antisemitism mutates and now, the current form, anti-Zionism, ignores facts, logic, reality and truth. The same pattern of demonization, malicious and false accusations against Jews or the Jewish people, portraying us as evil or murderous, are leveled in the halls of places presumed to be sanctuaries of justice, fairness and impartiality – from the United Nations and its various agencies to legacy media outlets. They give the lies credibility and are subsequently circulated on social media platforms and other biased outlets – the classic definition of lashon hara – spreading harmful information about another, only now the means of spreading it are vastly more expansive.

There are countless examples of these ancient tropes adapted to falsely portray Israel as deliberately murdering children and innocent people, with the same intent as in previous generations – to dehumanize, ostracize and portray Jews as evil.

The conspiracy theories are often wild and unbelievable, invoking imagery harkening back to medieval accusations that Jews poisoned wells during the Black Death. In the past, Jews were accused of exploiting and using the bodies of non-Jews in sinister ways. Today, Arab media has said that Israel harvests skin or organs from Palestinians and sells them.

In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of poisoning water. Today, Israel is accused of poisoning Palestinian water wells and starving Palestinians by not allowing food to enter Gaza.

Modern blood libels may not involve ritual murder, but they similarly portray Jews or the Jewish state as uniquely malicious, delighting in the suffering of innocents or engaging in fantastical conspiracies that have little regard for evidence. The classic blood libel accused Jews of murdering innocent children for ritual purposes. Today it takes the form of the blatantly false charge that Israel deprived Gazans of food and tried to starve them.

As we have seen in the streets of Europe, Canada and even in the United States, and on college campuses, the falsehoods, the lashon hara spread about Israel and Jews, has dangerous consequences.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington just released a document refuting each and every one of Kristof’s charges with facts and empirical evidence. The report asserts that “the Jewish national project is accused of the gravest sins in the modern political lexicon and language of liberalism and human rights, … Jews are singled out as the only nation undeserving of self-determination: the nation once condemned for its religion, then its race, now its homeland.”

If truth is one of the pillars upon which the world stands, as is asserted in Pirke Avot, then every lie, rumor and distortion chips away at that pillar. This is true when we speak about our neighbors, and it is true when the world speaks about the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

In both cases, the lies cannot be retrieved or retracted, so let us in our personal lives and in our political discourse be guided and learn from the teaching of our tradition.

Words matter.

Judaism does not merely prohibit speaking harmful falsehoods; it also cautions us against becoming eager consumers of them. In the words of the Psalm, “Guard your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.”

The challenge of our time, for all of us, is not only what we say, but what we are willing to believe.