This week’s parasha has two parshiyot in it: the main one, Parashat Kedoshim, with many, many different halachot, together with Acharei Mot. And it’s interesting to see that Parashat Kedoshim again has the mitzvah of lashon hara in it, actually the mitzvah of rechilut, as the pasuk says: לֹא־תֵלֵךְ רָכִיל בְּעַמֶּיךָ לֹא תַעֲמֹד עַל־דַּם רֵעֶךָ אֲנִי ה’ (Vayikra 19:16). What does lo telech rachil mean? Rashi tells us that rachil comes from a merchant, a rochel, who goes around and sells things. So is a person not allowed to be a merchant? No. Chazal explain it doesn’t mean a real merchant; it’s a parable for somebody doing rechilut. Just as a merchant takes his merchandise and gives it over to somebody else, rechilut means you take what you just heard in one place and you go and say it over to somebody else.
Rashi explains it this way: אֲנִי אוֹמֵר עַל שֵׁם שֶׁכָּל מְשַׁלְּחֵי מְדָנִים וּמְסַפְּרֵי לָשׁוֹן הָרַע הוֹלְכִים בְּבָתֵּי רֵעֵיהֶם לְרַגֵּל מַה יִּרְאוּ רָע, אוֹ מַה יִּשְׁמְעוּ רָע, לְסַפֵּר בַּשּׁוּק. Anybody who incites fights between people, and anybody who speaks lashon hara, goes to his friend’s house to see what evil or what negative thing he can find there. He sits at the table with that person, drinks the coffee, and meanwhile draws out all the information about everybody else in the city, and then he goes and delivers it to the people he heard about. And Rashi brings that this is the language of rochel: רוֹכֵל — הַסּוֹחֵר וּמְרַגֵּל אַחַר כָּל סְחוֹרָה, וְכֵן הַמּוֹכֵר בְּשָׂמִים לְהִתְקַשֵּׁט בָּהֶם הַנָּשִׁים, עַל שֵׁם שֶׁמְּחַזֵּר תָּמִיד בָּעֲיָרוֹת. If you have all kinds of perfumes to sell to women, you knock on people’s doors: are you interested in this? Are you interested in that? He shows them his merchandise. That’s the same idea: a person goes with what he heard and gives it over.
Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?
This is actually a continuation of last week, Tazria-Metzora, which told us how the metzora was punished, very severely, for speaking lashon hara. When I gave a shiur on this mitzvah, I explained it with a story. A person in shul sees somebody walk in with new shoes that have a funny look, and he whispers to his friend, did you see these funny shoes? The friend looks, laughs a little, and that’s it; they start davening. No question, that was lashon hara: lashon hara is anything negative you say about somebody else, something that, if he heard it, would cause him pain, or fear, or a loss of money, or any other negative reaction. And the Chafetz Chaim proves that it’s not only when you speak about the person himself but also about his property, anything that belongs to him. He’s not an evil person; he just had to make the comment.
He goes home and sees his hand turning white. By the night it has spread to his arm, his chest, his neck. In the morning it’s all over his body, some of his hair is turning white. He runs to the doctor; the doctor won’t treat him, calls an ambulance, and people with covered faces take him far out of the city and leave him there. No doctor, no creams, no cell phone to call his wife, nobody to talk to; michutz lamachaneh moshavo. It’s called tzara’at. It’s itchy and painful, it starts bleeding, and he feels like the end of the world has come. A Kohen will come to look at him in another week. And on the way, the Torah says he has to embarrass himself and call out tamei, tamei, so that, as Rashi says, people should stay away from him, and as the Gemara says, so that people should pray for him. That’s how a metzora used to live.
So we asked last week: does this punishment fit the crime? Yes, he made a little joke about his friend’s shoes, and that’s a violation of the Torah. But did he do something so evil that he should go outside all three machanot, worse than all the other teme’im, alone without any healing? When I asked this question I didn’t get so many answers, because it’s a very strong question. The punishment should be in accordance with the violation.
Separating a Man From His Wife
And when you learn Chazal and Rashi, they turn the table around, and you see that my story is really not the appropriate story for tzara’at. Rashi says on badad yeshev: מַה נִּשְׁתַּנָּה מִשְּׁאָר טְמֵאִים לֵישֵׁב בָּדָד? הוֹאִיל וְהוּא הִבְדִּיל בְּלָשׁוֹן הָרָע בֵּין אִישׁ לְאִשְׁתּוֹ וּבֵין אִישׁ לְרֵעֵהוּ, אַף הוּא יִבָּדֵל (Rashi, Vayikra 13:46, from Arachin 16). He didn’t merely talk about somebody’s shoes. To get tzara’at, Rashi tells us, it has to be much more. He separated between a man and his wife.
I once read in a book of Miriam Adahan about an experiment with dolphins: they separated each dolphin with a glass window so none could have contact with the others, and within a short while all of them died. A living being must have association with others; they even have to be able to touch. Today in jail, the worst punishment is segregation: you don’t speak to anybody or see anybody. It’s considered so cruel that many organizations in America are fighting to stop it, even for the worst criminals, and a person who comes out of segregation is not normal anymore in the way he thinks and behaves. Why does the metzora get that? Because he separated between a man and his wife, between a man and his friend.
How does it work? You tell somebody, I saw that your wife doesn’t cook so well; she hardly cooks. That goes in like poison into his heart, and you don’t know how far-reaching it can be. He goes home, and now it’s in his heart: she’s not doing her job. Any wife has that thermometer that right away feels, my husband is not happy, he doesn’t appreciate me. She gets upset, what happened to you, why are you acting like this, and if he responds, here we go, there’s the fight. Or the opposite: a woman tells her friend, it’s so hard, the kids are driving me crazy, my husband is very busy. And the friend says, what are you talking about? Your husband is lazy, he doesn’t help around the house, doesn’t give you money, he’s a no-good husband. A couple of sentences, that’s all it needs. She goes home with that poison in her heart, she’s not warm to him, and it goes from one thing to another and can lead very, very far.
Ahanu Ma’asav
And now we come to our parasha, Kedoshim, and we see the same idea. Lo telech rachil is not merely somebody who said something a little bad about his friend. The Gemara in Arachin, daf 16, says: מעיל מכפר על לשון הרע, the me’il of the Kohen Gadol atones for lashon hara. But isn’t tzara’at the kaparah of lashon hara? The Gemara answers: לא קשיא, הא דאהנו מעשיו, הא דלא אהנו מעשיו. There are two different scenarios. One is that you spoke negatively about somebody but it never got anywhere: our case of the shoes. It’s lashon hara, it’s a bad thing, a person would be punished severely, but it’s lo ahanu ma’asav, and after teshuva the me’il of the Kohen Gadol would be mechaper. But when ahanu ma’asav, when his words were “successful”, so to speak, they bore fruit and people came to fight because of him, as Rashi says, the me’il is no longer sufficient. Then the tzara’at comes, at full force.
And so we understand our pasuk too. Why is the Torah so strict about rechilut? Again Rashi: the rachil goes into his friend’s house like a spy. He feels comfortable, they give him coffee and cookies, they sit around the table laughing and talking, the friend opens up, and he draws out all the information: that person in shul is such a bad person, he’s doing this and doing that. And what does he do with it? Rashi says at the end of that long Rashi: נִרְאֶה בְעֵינַי שֶׁהָיָה מִשְׁפָּטָם לֶאֱכֹל בְּבֵית הַמְקַבֵּל דִּבְרֵיהֶם שׁוּם הַלְעָטָה, וְהוּא גְמַר חִזּוּק שֶׁדְּבָרָיו מְקֻיָּמִים. Not only does he eat by the one he drew the information from, he goes to deposit it by the person who was spoken about and makes a whole meal there too: you know what he said about you, this is how he feels about you. And by that he separates two people, a man and his wife, or two friends. That’s ahanu ma’asav, and that’s why the Torah takes it so strictly. The punishment: the body gets tzara’at. It decomposes and breaks down.
Hashem Erases His Name for Shalom Bayit
Where else do we find something being erased? By the mei hamarim. When a woman is suspected by her husband, the parasha of sotah, the Torah says to write the parasha on a scroll and put it in the water. Hashem says: My name that was written in kedusha should be erased, in order to restore shalom bayit between the couple. Erasing Hashem’s name is a very severe violation of the Torah, but for this purpose, and only for this, Hashem is willing to give it up. And this person, who speaks about somebody’s spouse and breaks the connection between them, doesn’t care. Hashem says, I’ll erase My name to restore shalom bayit, and he is willing to break shalom bayit. So the punishment is that his body, just like the Shem Hashem, should be erased: his flesh and his skin start breaking down.
We find it also by the Nachash Hakadmoni. He saw Adam and Chava, got jealous, and had the desire to take Chava. Back then the nachash was shaped like a human being: he would talk, he had legs. So he came to Chava and incited a fight by giving her the fruit from the tree and having her give it to Adam, to get rid of Adam and marry Chava; that’s how Chazal say it. And the Midrash says the Nachash Hakadmoni also became a metzora. Again: you try to break apart two people, the punishment is the same. Take a look at the places where Chazal and the pesukim show us people who became metzora’im, and you’ll see this idea again and again.
What About Miriam?
Now the question I had: how did Miriam get tzara’at? She didn’t try to do anything bad. Yes, the Torah says she spoke about Moshe Rabbeinu, b’avdi b’Moshe, and that’s terrible. But take a look at Chazal and at the Rambam at the end of Hilchot Tumat Tzara’at: her intention was good. She heard that Tziporah was no longer together with Moshe Rabbeinu, and she meant to bring them back together. Still Hashem took it very seriously and gave her tzara’at.
Could be the answer fits the same Gemara in Arachin, daf 16: לעולם אל יספר אדם בטובתו של חבירו, שמתוך טובתו בא לידי רעתו. A person is not even allowed to praise somebody in front of others: that person is such a great man, such a ba’al chesed. Why? Because from the praise you come to the negative. And when we’re dealing with shalom bayit, that’s a very, very sensitive thing. You can’t interfere, you can’t even say good in such a way, unless it’s complete praise, like Avraham Avinu getting praise from the malachim, ayeh Sarah ishtecha. But something that brings a little negativity and could lead to something negative, nobody can touch, unless the person really came to help. To go and interfere in people’s lives, the Torah doesn’t allow, as we saw from all these pesukim, and the Torah takes it an extra step. Hashem gets very angry when one comes between a couple, or between two people, bein adam lachaveiro. And we saw how strict it is in our parasha.
Based on Rabbi Shay Tahan’s class “JRoot Radio – May 5, 2017 – Parashat Kedoshim and Acahrei Moat” (Parashat Kedoshim): listen to the class.
