Parshah Commentary

This week’s double parshah, Tazria-Metzora, describes in great detail a skin condition known as “tzaraat,” often translated as “leprosy.” According to rabbinic tradition, tzaraat is not only a physical malady but also a punishment for lashon harah, literally “evil speech,” a term that refers to slander and gossip. The rabbis treat this phenomenon with a perhaps hyperbolic gravitas. In the most robust Talmudic discussion of the act, they claim that gossipping is equivalent to heresy and of equal weight to Judaism’s three cardinal sins of murder, idolatry, and forbidden sexual relations; that one who gossips should be stoned and that God cannot tolerate keeping them alive; and that gossip kills not only the person who spreads it, but also the subject of the slander and anyone who hears it.

This grand denunciation notwithstanding, rabbinic literature is short on specifics about what negative speech qualifies as lashon harah, offering only a few caveats—for instance, that such speech is permitted when done in the presence of the person it concerns or of three other people (and thus becomes public knowledge), or when it’s about someone quarrelsome. And the subject isn’t treated systematically in authoritative law codes like the Tur and the Shulchan Arukh. It wasn’t until the 19th century that this prohibition was, as scholar Benjamin Brown writes, “transformed from a principle-based domain into a rule-based discipline,” as part of a broader process of applying legalistic precision to ethical teachings that he calls the “halakhization of musar.” He argues that “the peak of [that] process” was Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s Chafetz Chaim (1873), an immensely popular book laying out a set of directives about what can and cannot be said and under what circumstances. Despite the Talmud’s aforementioned leniencies on speaking lashon haron—and the fact that the rabbis of the Talmud regularly berate and demean one another—Chafetz Chaim took an incredibly strict approach, prohibiting even speech that is true or positive. The book is still widely studied in yeshivas and seminaries, and continues to carry great cultural weight: The slogan “Lashon harah doesn’t speak to me” is adorned in Hebrew on rubber bracelets and bumper stickers in religious communities across Israel and the United States, the phrase furnishing everything from the names of nonprofits to the titles of pop songs.

In 2017, Rabbi Kagan’s great-great-great-granddaughter Rachel Sandalow-Ash published a piece entitled “In Defense of Lashon Hara: Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative,” in which she asks, “Is gossip just a derogatory term for women’s speech? And are prohibitions against gossip just another way to silence women?” As critic Alexandra Schwartz notes in her recent review of gossip podcast host Kelsey McKinney’s new book on the subject, the term originated as a way of describing an emotional, relational connection (the etymology of “gossip” comes from “God sibling”) but quickly became negatively associated with women and their “idle talk,” a link that has functioned to denigrate speech that “can act as a check on power” in a patriarchal world. (The primary story in the Torah of someone afflicted with leprosy, which becomes one of the core textual sources linking the disease with gossip, reflects this gendered association: After both Aaron and Miriam speak about Moses’s wife, Miriam alone is stricken with the condition.) Since gossip can be a mighty tool for the marginalized to share information about people who have acted abusively, it makes sense that the halakhization of lashon harah occurred at the tail end of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, a period when the Jewish world—like the broader world—was rapidly opening to new kinds of authority that threatened traditional gender norms and communal structures. Chafetz Chaim restricted precisely the sorts of speech that might facilitate questioning the status quo.

If gossip can serve the vulnerable by undermining hegemonic power structures, it can also do so by helping to maintain systems of care. When certain personal information is shared without malice—for example, that someone is sick or out of work—it can allow a community to know who could use extra support. This social function of gossip suggests an alternative way of understanding the rabbinic linkage between lashon harah and tzaraat, in which the two are connected because they can both teach us something about communities of care. Drawing on our parshah’s directive that the afflicted leper should “call out, ‘Impure! Impure!,’” the Talmud states that anyone who is suffering should “announce his pain to the community” so that “the community will pray for mercy on his behalf.” The rabbis thus reinterpret an injunction that forces lepers to uphold their own ostracization, reading it instead as a way for the community to know of their pain and help them. Under this framework, leprosy, like gossip, is tied to the imperative to make suffering visible, to open our eyes to the pain around us.

This understanding of tzaraat may help illuminate a strange mention of the malady elsewhere in the Talmud: In a cryptic discussion on redemption in the tractate of Sanhedrin, the rabbis refer to the Messiah as a leper. What might this mean? When the third-century sage Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi asks the prophet Elijah when the Messiah will come, Elijah responds that he should go ask him himself, for he is sitting outside the city gates. Rabbi Yehoshua asks how he will know which one is the Messiah, to which Elijah responds: “He sits among the poor who suffer from illnesses. And all of them untie their bandages and tie them all at once, but the Messiah unties one bandage and ties one at a time. He says: ‘Perhaps I will be needed to serve to bring about the redemption. Therefore, I will never tie more than one bandage, so that I will not be delayed.’” We might take Elijah’s answer to suggest that the Redeemer is not only already here, but ready to act with alacrity—waiting only for us to seek out and value the sick and the leperous, the yentas and and the gossips.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.