RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:JEWISH RENEWAL:JEWISH SPIRITUAL RENEWAL:BLIND IN THE MIND

RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:JEWISH RENEWAL:JEWISH SPIRITUAL RENEWAL:BLIND IN THE MIND

 

  Jewish Spiritual Renewal:Shabbat 1/31/09:Hebrew College:Torah:Talmud:TaNaK

Shalom Chaverim v' Talmidim... and a special Yasher Koach to our rabbinic students at both Hebrew College Yeshiva in Suburban Boston and those at Aleph Yeshiva in Philadelphia.... and a Mozel Tov to our new rabbis from Aleph who are still with us (Thank you! You honor us!):

We all make mistakes with our tongues. I was in conference with fellow rabbis on line and two of them had me laughing out loud. A rabbi in California wrote of a Bar Mitzvah who, when blessing his tallit, said, "Asher Kidshanu bemtizvotav vitzivanu lehadlik ner shel tzitzit," praising God "who has commanded us to kindle the flame of the tzitzit." A sure flag burner in the making there.

 

And then my favorite, from a rabbi in Massachusetts, who had a young student say the blessing over cookies, which usually concludes, borei minei mezonot, only the child said, "Borei pri zonot," thanking God for the fruits of the world's oldest profession.

 

Allow me if you will to start this week's class with a quote that is called a Jewish proverb. I cannot ascertain its authorship. If someone knows it, please tell me. "No doctor can cure the blind in mind."

 

As rabbis or future rabbis, or as teachers in synagogues to Jewish children and adults, we can only pass the message; let folks know the 'emet.' If this helps them with God's aid to become spiritually awakened, then they and God have made this choice.

 

If they choose to live in darkness, and stay blind with their own defects of character, no amount of preaching, teaching, nagging or scaring them with tales of a Dante-like Gehena, will change them.

If one wishes to think this bit of Talmudic teaching is hogwash because they believe God doesn't exist, then they will continue to act with impunity:'' Whoever has compassion towards others will be shown compassion from Above. '' (Talmud Bavli Tractate Shabbat 151b)

 As long as they get a secondary gain from their poor behaviors, as long as we live in a society that tells folks 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' and we now see Vegas behaviors everywhere, we have to keep our egos in check and realize we never had much influence on changing anyone at anytime. We only teach, not preach.

 

Allow me also a quote from our famous Jewish Spanish author of the Golden Age of Jewry when we lived side by side in relative peace for 400 years with our Islamic cousins. Judah  ha Levi wrote circa 1000 CE: ''Libi b'mizrach, v'ani b'sof ma'arav'' -- "my heart is in the East, yet I am in the uttermost West," lamented our medieval poet. Make no doubt about it, Judaism is an Eastern religion. It was born in what is now Iraq, with roots in what are now Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, et.al., and was allowed to develop in Spain, which at the time was more Eastern  than  European.

 

Many of us Jews may live in the West, but our neshemot, our souls, are Eastern. When we pick up the bad habits of Western civilization, we have our sages' advice to help us wash our souls clean of them.

 

One such habit that is commonplace in the West is Loshan ha ra, the evil tongue.(Sometimes you will see it spelled loshon hora, or loshon hara).  It is far more defined than gossip. And Judaism has many rules regarding how to guard one's tongue and what actually constitutes loshan ha ra. Simply put, with few exceptions, when we talk about another, true or false, good or bad, we are actually engaging in loshan ha ra.   In fact most of what is on TV or in the newspapers is loshan ha ra. And it is getting worse.                

 

A little Talmud: "If others speak evil of you let the worst thing said seem unimportant in your eyes;

but if you have spoken evil of others, let the least word of it seem important.

If you have done much good, let it seem little in your eyes, and say: 'not of mine own have I done this, but of that good which has come to me through others.' However, let a small kindness done to you appear great."

(Talmud Tractate Bavli Derech Eretz Zuta)

 

A little more Talmud: "The tongue is three pronged. Loshan ha ra kills three: The subject, the listener and the speaker." (Talmud Bavli Tractate Arachin 15b).  The person who listens to gossip is even worse than the person who tells it, because no harm could be done by gossip if no one listened to it. In fact we have an obligation to tell someone who is telling us something about someone else to 'stop.' And if it's negative information or a complaint about someone, we are to counsel the speaker to talk directly to the person they are trying to speak ill about. In this way peace is established among our people because folks learn how to be assertive with one another. Not aggressive, but to be honest and discuss things directly in a peaceful manner.

 

Some TaNaK: : ''Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people (Lev. 19:16),'' and ''Ye shall not wrong one another "(Lev. 25:17).  According to tradition this last pusuk refers to wronging a person with speech. Repeating loshan ha ra makes one a tale-bearer. The sage  Rabbi Ben Sira (Apocrypha 19:10) advises us :''Did you hear something about someone? Keep it to yourself. You will not burst."

 

Judaism is intensely aware of the power of speech and of the harm that can be done through speech. The rabbis note that the universe itself was created through speech. Of the 43 sins enumerated in the Al Cheit (all my sins) confession recited on Yom Kippur, 11 are sins committed through speech. The Talmud tells that the tongue is an instrument so dangerous that it must be kept hidden from view, behind two protective walls (the mouth and teeth) to prevent its misuse.

 

Speech has been compared to an arrow: once the words are released, like an arrow, they cannot be recalled, the harm they do cannot be stopped, and the harm they do cannot always be predicted, for words like arrows often go astray.

Some Talmud:  The one who gossips stands in Syria and kills in Rome.  (Talmud Yerushalmi Tractate Peah 1:1)

 

Some Medieval Rabbinic wisdom: ''Be very careful with gossip because with it you will embarrass yourself, for one who denigrates is merely projecting his own fault onto someone else. It's natural to take your own faults and point them out in others.''( The Ways of the Righteous, The Gate of Loshan Hara)

In the movie Doubt the writers steal a bit of Chasidic parable and use it in a priest's sermon about gossip.The priest of course tells the story using  a priest as the protagonist. Here is the original: A man went about the community telling malicious lies about the rabbi. Later, he realized the wrong he had done, and began to feel remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything he could to make amends. The rabbi told the man, "Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds." The man thought this was a strange request, but it was a simple enough task, and he did it gladly. When he returned to tell the rabbi that he had done it, the rabbi said, "Now, go and gather the feathers. Because you can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect the feathers."

 

Some Torah: ''So said the God of the Hebrews: "... Let My people go, so that they may serve Me."  So said Moses to Pharaoh in Exodus 10:3. Our freedom as Jews come with a price as does all human freedom. We were not freed to run   willie nillie in B'midbar, lost in the wilderness all of our lives. We have a loving God and loving Rabbis who gave us sage advice to follow. 

 

''There are times an urge swells up so fiercely inside, it becomes a taskmaster with a stinging whip. From where does darkness attain such awesome might to consume the power of a Godly soul?

It is not its own power--for darkness has no power of its own. Darkness is no more than the absence of light, and your soul is pure light.

It is a power God has granted the dark on a temporary understanding, so that it may challenge the human soul and awaken its innermost depths.

That is why, as soon as you will stand up and say, "My soul is not the chattel of any taskmaster. I have free will to choose as I please and I choose life!"--before that instant is over, the tyrant inside is no more, as darkness vanishes before the light,'' as quoted by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneersohn.

 

Some Talmud: Our sages tell us that a dream featuring a river, a dove or a cooking pot is an indicator of peace (Talmud Bavli Tractate Beracoth 56b). How do these particular items relate to peace?

 

Well we all know that from the Noach Parasha that the image of the dove carrying an olive branch has become a symbol of hope for peace.

 

Some more Talmud: Bavli Tractates Horayot 12a and Kritot 5b:  The Torah is compared to water. Those who behave as if they have no Torah learning, like those who commit loshan ha ra, are considered thirsty and urged to drink from Torah. While a  Jewish king is  anointed with oil, the ceremony is conducted next to a spring of water. This is to  indicate that the king's rule will continue as water flows or as Torah is followed.  Water is  life-giving force and all of Torah's path lead to peace.  

 

A pot takes two opposing forces: heat and water, and can bring the two together for the common good, to make a meal to nourish,,,perhaps a friendship, perhaps a disagreement. But we have to be careful not to stir this pot to vigorously to cause a bubbling up of emotions. Those who commit loshan ha ra are pot stirrers in our community.

 

This week, a little more than 2000 years ago, a wonderful thing happened for Judaism. Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach successfully completed the expulsion of the Hebraic -Priests- Sadducees (who denied the Oral Torah (Talmud, as well two of the three books of the TaNaK, and the authority of the Rabbinic Sages) who had dominated the Sanhedrin (Supreme Court) in Judea. He  replaced them with his Oral Torah-loyal Pharisaic Rabbinic disciples, on the 28th of Tevet ,which was today, Shabbat January, 24, 2009, in 81 BCE.

 

Please remember that Rabbis and Priests were killing each other, and also doing so thru proxies, the Hasmonean brothers who were fighting each other for control of Judea. On one day, the Talmud tells us, a Hasmonean Hebrew King killed 900 rabbis and their wives and children.

 

Without Rabbis and Rabbinic Judaism, Jews would still be Hebraic, mired in the written Torah alone. The 36 death penalties would apply, we would be stuck in our homes for 25 hours on Shabbat, we would be bringing helpless farm animals to be sacrificed, and there would be 39 lashes for loshan ha ra.

 

Judaism has always had its divisions. When the Ba'al Shem Tov started Chasidic Judaism in the mid 1700s in Eastern Europe, there was soon a group called the Mitnagdim  ( the opponents) led by the Vilna Gaon. While now 300 years later, both of these rabbis works are studied equally, at that time, it was so bad that normative Judaism voted to in the official letters issued by the council,  to expel the Chasidim from every Jewish community, to regard them as members of another faith, to hold no social intercourse with them, not to intermarry with them, and not to bury their dead.

 

By the mid 1800s, 100 years later, peace reigned, and the Mitnagdim  and Chasidim  had their sons and daughters marrying one another.

 

The Rambam,[ our famous Rabbi Maimonides], found that his  copious works on Jewish law and ethics were initially met with opposition during his lifetime by jealous, less studied Rabbis.  It was only posthumously acknowledged that he was one of Judaism's foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers. Today, his works and his views are considered a cornerstone of Jewish thought and study. But in his life time, rabbis and lay leaders of Jewish communities said 'he was no rabbi.'

 

Few of their names are remembered.

 

''Who is the "gossipmonger"? One who carries reports and goes from one person to another saying, "So-and-so said this! And I heard such-and-such from this person!" Even if what he says is true, he destroys the world. Far worse is "Lashon Hara," the evil tongue. This is talking disparagingly about someone, even if he says the truth. One who actually lies is called a "slanderer." '' (Maimonides, Mishna Torah, Laws of Character Development, 7:2)

 

Rabbis and leaders of sects and even local synagogues will disagree. This is the beauty of Judaism. We have no set creed. But for rabbis or lay leaders or Jews to knock rabbis with loshan ha ra, is chillul ha Shem, especially when it is done publicly in front of those who are not Jewish.  For a rabbi who is spiritually fit, these barbs fall right off of his back.

 

 But for the speaker, it only makes him or her look like a jealous, coveting fool, who is spiritually disconnected from God, especially when the folks he told the loshan ha ra to, call the subject to tell him. Luckily the subject, spiritually centered, stops the speaker, and laughs it off, without saying anything negative about the ba'al loshan ha ra (the master of gossip). And can immediately forgive, as Judaism asks of us.

 

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin writes, "The desire to seem important can impel otherwise rational people to act in a pathetically dishonest way and commit loshan ha ra about those with whom they are jealous." You will rarely see a happy person, with a good sense of self, who is successful, bad mouth another. It is usually those hapless, sad sacks, with low self esteem who have to pump themselves up at the expense of others.

 

Pray for them.

 

"If a person says that a rabbi cannot sing and a cantor is not a scholar, he is guilty of speaking lashon hara. But if someone says that a rabbi is not a rabbi and a cantor is not a cantor, it is equal to murder."

 

So allow me to end with a bit of TaNaK:  Ps: 34:12-13: "Who is the man who desires life (Chofetz Chaim) And loves length of days that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil And your lips from speaking deceit.''

 

The Rabbi Chofetz Chaim who died in the 1930s: wrote this prayer for those with a gossip defect of character: ''Gracious and merciful God, help me to restrain myself from speaking or listening to derogatory, damaging or hostile speech. I will try not to engage in loshan ha-ra, either about individuals or about an entire group of people. I will strive to say nothing that contains falsehood, insincere flattery, scoffing or elements of needless dispute, anger, arrogance, oppression or embarrassment to others. Grant me the strength to say nothing unnecessary, so that all my actions and speech cultivate a love for your creatures and for You.''

 

May you all live spiritually, in shalom, until 120 years.

 

As always, a d'var Torah follows:

 

Shavuah Tov:

Rabbi Arthur Segal

Hebrew College, Newton Centre, MA

Via Shamash Org on-line class service
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