Gossipmongers Gain Nothing
I once heard about a man who desecrated the Shabbat in public. I could not remain silent in the face of such flagrant insult to Shabbat and expressed my anger to his family, so that they should not follow in his ways. The man’s nephew decided to take matters into his own hands. He went to the Shabbat offender and told him how angry I was at him.
The man became livid. “If the Rabbi is so angry at me, I am not interested in him anymore.” He removed every last vestige of Judaism from himself. He threw off his kippah and began swearing profusely. Then he decided to place a call to my home. “Rabbi! Is it true that you are angry at me? Because if so, I am abandoning Judaism!”
I immediately replied, “Not at all! Chas v’shalom!”
“But my nephew said you are angry at me,” he continued.
“That is not true. I am not angry at you at all.”
The man was finally mollified and apologized for his outburst. After our conversation, he went back to mitzvah observance. He again laid tefillin and did mitzvot like an ordinary Jew is expected. But he was still upset about the incident. He phoned up his nephew and asked why he had said lies about me. The nephew said he had not told him lies at all. Whatever he said in my name was the absolute truth. He was surprised that I had denied these things and said he would call me up to straighten out the matter.
When he phoned me, I asked him, “Why did you slander my name to your uncle, telling him that I was angry at him?”
“I thought it would be an effective way of getting him to do teshuvah. I never thought he would fly off the handle like he did. I never dreamed he would consider abandoning mitzvot altogether.”
I taught him an important lesson. “The things you told your uncle are considered rechilut, an offshoot of lashon hara. Although they were true, and said with good intentions, they were negative words which are forbidden.
“The Torah forbids us from recounting anything negative said about another person. The Torah knows that this can be the cause of terrible dissention and damage, as nearly happened with your uncle.”
I added, “You may have told my words to your uncle with different inflections than I used. Maybe you even added some of your own words, to spice it up a little, all with good intentions. But the Torah warns us against bearing gossip (Vayikra 19:16). We are enjoined not to behave like a vendor who peddles his wares from one person to the next.
“It would have been more effective had you conveyed to your uncle that I wanted to see him. I would have offered him constructive criticism, suitable to him personally.”
