For the sin of misusing our words

We are one week away from the start of Rosh Hashanah 5787 next Friday evening. During this month, Elul, we should have been engaged in gathering the “behavior data” we will need beginning next Friday night, which is also the start of the Aseret Y’mai Teshuvah, the 10 Days of Repentance. This is when we need to get serious about doing the cheshbon hanefesh, the “accounting of our souls” that we must access on Yom Kippur if we are serious about making ourselves better people in 5787 than we were in 5786.

There are sins we commit with our hands, our money, and by the things we do or fail to do. But the sins we commit simply by opening our mouths, sitting at our keyboards, or picking up our pens are the easiest to commit and the most difficult to avoid if we don’t know that they are sins. Yom Kippur has an astonishing amount to say about those sins.

Let me begin, though, by asking for forgiveness from those readers of this column whom I may have offended during the past year by my words, which challenged those things they support. My intention is to educate and inform, never to embarrass or cause anguish. In turn, I forgive anyone who during this past year has written or spoken negatively to me or about me. Disagreement may sometimes be necessary, but disrespect never is.

That being said, beginning on Yom Kippur we recite the Ahl Chet, the alphabetical litany in which we confess to a remarkably broad assortment of sins — 44 in all — 10 times. More than one out of every four of those sins involves, directly or indirectly, the misuse of the words we speak or write.

That is how seriously Judaism takes how we use our words.

There is an entire family of sins involving speech, including ona’at devarim, lashon hara, rechilut, and motzi shem ra. Some or all may overlap, but they are not the same.

Ona’at devarim is hurting another person with words. Its biblical source is Leviticus 25:17: “You shall not wrong one another, but fear your God.” Because the Torah already prohibited financial wrongdoing three verses earlier, the Talmud concludes that this verse refers to wrongdoing through words. (See the Babylonian Talmud tractate Bava Metzia 58b.)

It includes insulting someone, humiliating someone, deliberately reminding someone of an embarrassing past, making a cruel joke at someone’s expense, or saying something we know will cause another person anguish. The example the Talmud gives is asking someone who had a relative executed by hanging to “please hang this up for me.” We used the word “hang” innocently, but it could have reopened a wound.

The Talmud goes so far as to say that ona’at devarim is more serious than financial wrongdoing. Money can be returned. The damage caused by words is not so easily repaired.

An old tale attributed to the great chasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev tells of a man who had spread malicious stories about his town’s rabbi. As Yom Kippur approached, and overcome by remorse, he went to the rabbi to beg forgiveness and asked how he could make amends.

The rabbi told him to take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the wind. The man did so and returned.

“Now,” said the rabbi, “go gather up all the feathers.”

“That’s impossible,” the man protested. “The wind has scattered them everywhere.”

And so did it scatter the man’s malicious words. Once we utter or write such words, we no longer control where they go, who hears them, who repeats them, or whom they ultimately hurt. We may sincerely regret saying them, but we cannot any more gather them all back than we can gather feathers scattered by the wind.

Lashon hara, “bad speech,” is saying bad things about someone else even if the information is true. Truth is no defense if the person we’re telling the negative information to had no legitimate need to hear it. If there was a legitimate reason, Judaism does not sanction protecting a wrongdoer at the expense of a potential victim.

Gossip is another matter. Closely related is rechilut, talebearing: carrying information from one person to another in a way likely to create resentment or hostility. Repeating it may nevertheless be a sin. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for someone is to not tell that person what someone else said about him or her.

Then there is motzi shem ra: spreading damaging information that is false.

We do that when we repeat rumors without knowing whether they are true. We forward accusations we have not verified. We repost claims that confirm something we already believe even though we don’t “know it for a fact.” Today, motzi shem ra can travel around the world before breakfast. The retraction usually cannot catch up.

Now consider the Ahl Chet litany.

We confess to sins involving the utterance of our lips, improper speech, foolish talk, evil speech, talebearing, insincere confession, scoffing and mockery, and the idle chatter of our lips. More than one out of every four in that litany of 44 confessions is in this category. There also is a “short confessional” that begins with the word “Ashamnu.” Fully 25 percent of the sins on its list belong in this category as well.

That begs the question: Why does Yom Kippur devote so much of its two confessionals to speech?

Perhaps it is because words are the easiest weapons we possess. We can destroy a reputation without leaving our chair. We can humiliate someone before hundreds of people with a Facebook post or a letter to the editor. We can spread a rumor to thousands by pressing “share.” We can turn private resentment into public condemnation with a few taps on a telephone.

Nothing we can say afterward can excuse what we did.

There is a reason the Torah’s prohibition against verbal wrongdoing ends with the words “you shall fear your God.” Other people cannot always know what we intended when we said something. We can always claim we meant something else.

God knows.

Which brings us to Yom Kippur — and to something about Yom Kippur that we too often misunderstand.

We are not “forgiven on Yom Kippur” for the sins we committed during the year that just has ended. Yom Kippur is not some kind of annual spiritual car wash in which we drive in dirty and emerge at Ne’ilah sparkling clean. Repentance is not a revolving door. As the Talmud teaches us, “One who says, ‘I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent,’ is not given the opportunity to repent.” (See BT Yoma 85b-86b.)

Maimonides, the Rambam, provides perhaps the clearest test of what genuine repentance requires. Complete teshuvah, he says, occurs when a person again confronts the same situation, has the same opportunity to commit the same sin, has the ability to do so — and does not, “because of his repentance.” (See his Mishneh Torah, The Laws of Repentance 2:1.)

That changes the way we should understand the Ahl Chet and the work we must do beginning on Rosh Hashanah. We will enter a new year carrying the promises we made on the previous Yom Kippur. During 5786, life presented us with opportunities to discover whether those promises meant anything.

We will not be forgiven for our sins when the shofar sounds to bring Yom Kippur to an end. Yom Kippur operates on a longer timetable. We will only be forgiven for the sins we committed in 5786 when the shofar sounds to end Yom Kippur 5788 — assuming we meant it when we say this year that we repent.

There is an additional complication involving sins against other people. God can only forgive us for the sins we commit against God. God cannot forgive us for the sins we commit to anyone else. Only those we harmed can forgive those sins.

The problem is that we don’t always know we harmed someone. To return to the example I cited earlier, we asked someone to hang something for us. That person did as we asked but did not tell us that our use of “hang” caused distress. Being ignorant of harm we caused does not make our words permissible.

We still have 17 days to go before we enter the synagogue on Yom Kippur and begin striking our chests to add these to our cheshbon hanefesh ledgers. Whom did we embarrass or insult this year? What information about someone did we reveal, or what true story did we tell for no legitimate reason? Whose reputation did we damage? What did we say in anger that we cannot take back?

And perhaps the most important question of all: Which of these same questions did we ask ourselves last Yom Kippur?

When Yom Kippur arrives, perhaps the most important question is not whether we can remember the words we said last Yom Kippur. It’s whether we remembered them during the year.

May we all have a tzom kal, an easy fast, and a healthy and rewarding 5787. And may we take the time we still have to study each of the 44 items on the Ahl Chet list and the 24 on the Ashamnu list, and use their 10 recitations to engrave each item on our hearts and minds.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

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