After my recent column about the draft I was in contact with someone who was upset that I had spoken lashon hara about another Jew and about Eretz Yisrael and wrote that “while spiritual reality is the only causal factor” and “Torah learning protects us as nothing else can” did the Chofetz Chaim not “write copiously that Torah learning which was abundant at the time of the Churban Bayis Sheni did not protect us from it because sinas chinam and lashon hara are the key factors that again and again bring calamity upon us? So speaking lashon hara about those Jews who by seeking to draft chareidim would reduce Torah learning is rejecting the Chofetz Chaim’s order of priorities.”
I quote her words because they illustrate several important points. The first is that as with any area of halachah lashon hara isn’t whatever we want it to be. It is what halachah as determined by poskim says it is. This magazine has acknowledged talmidei chachamim — baalei halachah — who review its contents for halachic permissibility. The recent column on the draft was also read by a revered gadol b’Torah who commented that he had “read no article as compelling and as powerful on this issue as this one. I hope it is spread far and wide.”
What in the eyes of an uninformed person may seem like lashon hara may actually not only be permissible to say but something one is obligated to say. Only once the halachic status of a statement has been clarified can we go on to determine whether to apply the Chofetz Chaim’s teaching about the destructive power of lashon hara despite abundant Torah learning. But this is no benign mistake well-meaning though it surely is. Invoking the Chofetz Chaim in this way is doubly problematic: First and most immediately it results in a stifling of the effort to protect Torah and bnei Torah from those who threaten them. But more generally it suggests a simplistic romanticized lens through which to view gedolei Torah.
I absolutely love stories about tzaddikim. I tell them at my Shabbos table and read them for my own inspiration and enjoyment. Yet there are those who take issue at times with merit with certain “gedolim stories” that they feel give no sense that a tzaddik had to struggle to achieve greatness as we all must. Airbrushed of these details they say such stories are at best uninspiring and perhaps even discouraging to the reader. Some time back this magazine featured a symposium in which several of my colleagues here addressed this very issue.
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