Article in LAS CRUCES BULLETIN (our local weekly) ... 10/21/2016
Be careful because you cannot take back hurtful words
A Jewish folktale, set in 19th century Eastern Europe, tells of a man who went through a small community slandering the local rabbi. One day, feeling suddenly remorseful, he begged the rabbi for forgiveness and offered to undergo any form of penance to make amends.
The rabbi told him to take a feather pillow from his home, cut it open, scatter the feathers to the wind. The man did as he was told and returned to the rabbi.
He asked, “Am I now forgiven?”
“Almost,” came the rabbi’s response. “You just have to perform one last task: Go and gather all the feathers.”
“But that’s impossible,” the man protested, “for the wind has already scattered them.”
“Precisely,” the rabbi answered.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin cited this classic story in his book “Words That Hurt, Words That Heal.” More than 20 years ago, Telushkin took his campaign to encourage appropriate speech to the greater community.
There was good reason for such a campaign then and now.
Technology spreads our words quickly. It is next to impossible to “go gather all the feathers,” that is, to take back any misleading or inaccurate statements we may have made.
I have heard people say recently, “Well, those were only words, not actions, so it doesn’t matter.”
Rabbi Telushkin’s point in writing a book about speech was that words DO matter.
Jews around the world observed the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, on the evenings of Oct. 11 and 12.
On that day, Jews fasted and recited prayers of confession during worship. In those meditations on misguided human action, statements about speech are pervasive. One prayer admits that we, as members of humanity, cause harm through our words, make insincere promises, lie, engage in offensive speech, engage in gossip (share true information when we don’t need to) and spread rumors (which are often unconfirmed).
Reciting those words on Yom Kippur this year reminded me of Rabbi Telushkin’s efforts to take our “ethics of speech” in a more positive direction.
In 1995, he pushed for a national “Speak No Evil” day that was embodied in a United States Senate Resolution. That declaration called on Americans to eliminate all hurtful and unfair talk for 24 hours for one day a year; to transmit negative information only when necessary; to monitor and regulate how they speak to others; to strive to keep anger under control; to argue fairly, and not allow disputes to degenerate into namecalling or other forms of verbal abuse; and to speak about others with the same kindness and fairness that they wish others to exercise when speaking about them. In his book on speech, Rabbi Telushkin added that we should try to focus conversations about people on their good qualities, not on their flaws, and that we should try to give criticism in private, using reassuring and non-threatening words. He cited the important teaching that embarrassing another person in public iscruel and inadvisable.
Do these goals for what we say (and do) sound impossible to achieve?
Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to keep our words positive and constructive.
If we are careful with what we say, we will, unlike the man in the story, have no need to gather “scattered feathers” or to lament our inability to take back words we wished we hadn’t shared.
Rabbi Larry Karol has been with Temple Beth-El in Las Cruces since 2011.
RABBI LARRY KAROL
For the Bulletin
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