My favorite part of every Bar Mitzvah is what takes place in my office a week or two before the Simcha. I meet with the Bar Mitzvah boy and his parents to discuss the upcoming weekend, what their plans are, how things are going, and then, I ask the parents, “Please tell me all about your child.” And I get to listen as parents list quality after quality of their young man. I watch as the child, who until this moment was slightly checked out, perks up, and listens as their traits are shared.
Leiby, your parents did not disappoint. Your father told me about your love for family, your social skills, and your deep connection to Yiddishkeit. Your mother described your sense of humor, your musical talents, and your sensitivity. Of course, these are traits you acquired from them, each in their own way, giving you a shining example of what it means to be a contributing, community-centered, Jewish adult.
But my favorite-favorite part was when I asked you what you want to be when you grow up. Most kids hem and haw at this point. But you thought about it, you hesitated for a second, and then you blurted out – “I am going to be an inventor. I am going to invent a solution for pollution.” On Friday morning I checked it out – the name Pollution Solution was once trademarked by a linen company but their trademark expired in 1993. If anyone wants to get a great Bar Mitzvah gift for Leiby, all yours.
But what I didn’t tell you at the time was that that I had the same dream when I was around your age. That’s right. You see, there was a very popular television show when I was growing up called… Captain Planet. It told the story of these five kids who each had their own superpower, and “With the five powers combined they summon Earth’s greatest champion… CAPTAIN PLANET!”
Horrible graphics, plotlines that could have been written by a second grader, but for some reason it captured my imagination.
Admittedly, a lot has changed since then. Singlehandedly, over Pesach I threw out enough plastic plates and tin foil pans to kill off an entire species.
But as I told you, Leiby, in my office, pollution is actually the perfect metaphor for something that is found in our parsha that I have always struggled to explain. TUMAH. Tumah is translated as impurity but that really doesn’t capture its essence.
Tumah, Rav Yehuda Halevi explains, is rooted in death. But that doesn’t seem to match up with our day-to-day experience. One behavior that generates tumah, the tumah of tzo’ra’as is lashon hara, gossiping. I don’t know about you, but if I am being honest, I feel energized when I hear a juicy piece of gossip.
Don’t give me that look. This is biology. When listening to gossip, our brain gets a shot of dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ chemical that we all enjoy.
The question is why. Why does it feel so good to hear something scandalous when we know that it’s so wrong?
Rav Shlomo Freifeld has a brilliant take on Lashon Hara. He makes the following observation: If I were to tell you that in Raleigh, North Carolina, some dude named Bob did something wrong. Would you care? Not really.
But if I told you that it was someone who lives on this block, who is in this room, someone you know well, did something wrong, all of a sudden we get excited. Why is that?
Rabbi Freifeld explains that tragically most of us assess our self-worth relative to the people we know. We plot ourselves on a continuum with all the people we know. Am I a kind person? Well, let’s look around. If this friend is rude to everyone she talks to and this friend runs from chesed opportunity to chesed opportunity, and I, am sometimes rude and sometime engage in chesed, well then I suppose I am a moderately kind person.
But let’s say I find out that Mrs. Chesed-Chaser also is terribly mean to her children, guess what happens? Now she has gone down a few notches, which means that I am now a better person relative to the people I know.
This is why we don’t care if Bob from Raleigh is up to no good. He doesn’t affect my standing. This is also why the best type of gossip, the one that causes a massive flow of dopamine, is gossip about people who are supposed to be upstanding. Because when they go down, I go up. (Not in the Michelle Obama way. You know what I mean.)
The more gossip I speak, the more Lashon Hara I listen to, the less in touch I am with who I am and who I am meant to be. I completely lose sight of my own potential; I forget that my worth is intrinsic and that I will only be judged based on who and what I can be. What greater form of death can there be then living and breathing while being completely divorced from my own self-worth. Mi ha’ish hechafetz chaim? Who wants life? Who wants to really be connected to themselves and not live in a self-imposed delusion? Someone who abstains from gossip.
And this is where the Tumah-pollution analogy kicks in. Because in the short term, pollution is meaningless. It’s just one plastic plate. It’s just one puff of smoke. It’s just one factory. But it adds up. The smokers’ lungs eventually collapse, the inner harbor is eventually toxic, and the air in China, for example, is the direct cause of 2 million deaths a year. In the short term, if I know the hock, I am popular. If I know the latest community news, people gravitate to me, and as I put others down, I get lifted up. But in the longer term, it’s death. Who am I? I have no clue. I am so caught up in everyone else’s news, moving up and down on the superficial scale of relative worth, my own identity is buried in the rubble.
Mi ha’ish hachafetz chaim? If you want life, if you want your own life, stay away from gossip.
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The fight against pollution has not been all that successful. TV shows like Captain Planet were successful in creating greater awareness, there have been some controversial pieces of legislation that have moved the needle, local efforts to encourage recycling have been a bit of a joke, for the most part, it’s not working.
The same could be said about the modern fight against Lashon Hara. Kickstarted by the Chafetz Chaim about a hundred years ago, it has also seen some success; learning the laws of Lashon Hara has become in vogue, setting aside time every day not to speak Lashon Hara is trendy. But like the fight against pollution, we’re just not there yet. If I were to tell you that I am going to now share with you a juicy piece of Lashon Hara no one would budge. (Should I?) If anything, the gossip industry is getting so much worse. What was once whispered between two friends is now posted publicly for posterity. Society-at-large has become a cesspool of takedowns and criticisms.
But the solution I believe is right in front of our eyes.
That famous passuk that describes Lashon Hara is well-known. Mi ha’ish hechafetz chaim? Who wants life?
N’tzor l’shoncha mei’ra. Restrain your lips from speaking evil. That we all know. But we forget that Dovid Hamelech has more to say. Sur mei’ra, stay away from evil. And this is the part people forget – Va’aseh tov, do good. Bakeish shalom v’radfeihu. Seek out peace and pursue it.
The best way to combat speaking lashon hara is not only to stop speaking negatively, it’s to speak positively, it’s to compliment, it’s to seek out opportunities to share kind words. And it’s magical.
“Leiby, you rocked your leining.”
“Jeff and Ayala Pensak, thank you for putting together this kiddush!”
“Jay, thank you for keeping me company!”
“Cerrill, I love your new glasses! Where’d you get them?”
“Thank you everyone for laughing at my silly jokes.”
Leiby, how did it feel when I complimented you? It felt good, right? But you know who else felt good? I did. Because when we speak positively about other people it demands confidence, it demands of us to stop judging ourselves based on others and to just lift them up. When we compliment people it gives us life. It trains us to connect to our true selves. Using our mouths for good is the greatest antidote to the death-inducing-tumah that is brought on by gossip.
And this is where you come in Leiby. One of the most beautiful traits that you learned from your parents is your kindness. And you express that kindness regularly by complimenting your friends, by sharing with them a word of comfort when they’re going through a difficult time. I don’t know if you’ll ever come up with a solution for physical pollution, but you’ve already made a real dent in the spiritual and verbal pollution that we are surrounded by.
Imagine a world where we all learn from Leiby. If instead of, or in addition to committing to not speaking Lashon Hara for an hour a day, we commit to complimenting one person each day. If when we go to kiddush today we compliment someone. If when we go home, we notice how a child or spouse did something nice and we let them know that we saw it. If in our next conversation with a colleague or friend, we seek out a way to praise them. Imagine how pure our world would be.
We don’t need Captain Planet. We need more Leiby’s. We need more positive speech to overcome the toxic pollution of Lashon Hara.