Words, Reeds and Slipping Tongues

Dear friends,

There are those moments in which the words slip out. You didn't mean to say what you said but had every intention of saying it differently.  

There are those moments in which the words don’t come out. You meant to say what needed to be said but it wouldn’t come out. 

What is it that governs the balance of what stays in and what comes out? What makes us falter with too many words, the wrong words, not enough words? What should we do and not do after we make such a mistake? 

One clue our tradition gives us is this: The quill with which a Torah scroll is written must be made from a reed. I’ll get back to that in a bit.  

Last week I was quiet. People would ask me things and I’d look at them silently. This was, as you might imagine, frustrating to them. I wasn’t engaging much with the world at large either. When I checked the news from Israel, I found that a racist Jewish supremacist of the most abominable type was poised to become one of the strongest people in the country in the upcoming elections. I took that information in and kept my silence. I don’t think either of those examples is what the rabbis meant when they said: “Silence is a fence around wisdom.” 

This week I spoke. By Monday evening I had referred to a friend several times in the wrong gender pronoun. I didn’t even notice it until they gently pointed it out. Later in the week, when a complete stranger emailed me with a critique of my educational methods based on a photo they saw online, I sent back two emails with a critique of theirs, based on their email. That might be closer to what the rabbis meant about silence and that fence. 

What was it that made me act so differently these last two weeks? 

I studied such questions in the lead-up to the High Holidays, and on Yom Kippur I presented some of my thoughts on the matter to you all. I was hoping to improve my own relationship with words, and to get us all thinking how we might do that. As I was speaking words about words on Yom Kippur, my tongue slipped. Something I hadn’t intended to say came out.  I felt it happen, with the beginning of what one might call awareness, but didn’t quite catch it in the moment. I’ve since spoken to a few people about it, some caught it and others didn’t, so it certainly was miss-able. But it also certainly hurt a few people and caught the ears of others.  

“Words,” I said, “are what created us.” In explaining this, I described the verbal communication between two people, which leads to new life. “Most of us, maybe all of us wouldn’t be here in this room if it weren’t for those words spoken between our parents. Between our father and our mother.” 

I had intended to make a point about the power of words to create, but the ad-lib in the moment showed how words hold the power to exclude. In front of me were several people who come from a variety of parental situations that don’t include a father and a mother.  

My notes that night didn’t include the words father or mother. They emphasized the fact that this may not be true for everyone in the room. So what was it that made them come out the way they did?  

I remember the moment. I had liberated myself from my notes. I looked around the room. For a split second I considered whether any of the people I was looking at may fall into a different parental category to mine. No one person I happened to look at did, but of course there were many in the room I wasn’t looking at (if you are one of those people and I haven't called you, I apologize). I felt, as one sometimes does, connected to the words I spoke. I had my own parents in mind. And I spoke the words “father and mother” out of my experience. For a second or two, I suppose I lost sight of the people to whom I was speaking and slipped into myself. 

The same thing happened this week when I mis-gendered my friend, as most of us have done many times. We lose sight of the other’s experience and speak from our own. This, I remind myself in moments of guilt, is natural to us humans.  

Emmanuel Levinas describes natural human behavior as a selfishness that is miraculously overcome when we see another’s face. Our natural state of mind is to think about ourselves. Even truth itself is in large part a subjective experience. Speaking from our own experience is often all we can do. This is important to remember, especially when that leads us to hurt people we love. But when we see – really see – another person’s face we are drawn out of our natural selfishness. That is when we can perform the human miracle of stepping out of ourselves and doing for another.  

I should say at this point that there’s a major difference between spewing hatred that is claimed to be a slip of the tongue, and unintentionally losing track of what you’re saying. The recent Anti-Semitic tweets that have caught the public eye are good examples of patterns of hatred, rather than mistakes by well-meaning people. 

So, what are we meant to do when we slip? How can we see the other’s face, even after we’ve failed to do so? Admitting and apologizing is a good start of course. In some cases, there are things we could do to try and avoid slipping again. With gender pronouns, for example I’ve been advised to try the PPP: Pre-Pronoun-Pause.  

The Jewish tradition takes words very seriously, so much so that wrong use of words is in some cases considered worse than murder. And still, once the words have been spoken, we are taught not to dwell on them: act and forgive; forgive yourself if you’re the offender or forgive the offender if you’ve been hurt.  

A Talmudic story goes to the heart of the matter: 

Once Rabbi Elazar was riding along the riverside on his donkey, and was feeling happy and tired because he had studied much Torah. 

There chanced to meet him an exceedingly ugly man, who greeted him, "Peace be upon you, my master!" R. Elazar did not return his salutation but instead said to him, "How ugly this person is! Are all the people of your city as ugly as you?" 

"I do not know," said the man. "But go to the craftsman who made me and say to him: How ugly is the vessel which you have made!" 

Realizing that he had done wrong, R. Elazar dismounted from his donkey, prostrated himself before the man, and said to him, "You are right. Forgive me!" But the man replied, "I will not forgive you until you go to the craftsman who made me and say to him, 'How ugly is the vessel which you have made.'" 

R. Elazar kept on walking after him until he reached his city. The residents of the city came out to greet him, saying, "Peace be upon you, O Teacher! O Master!" Said the man to them, "Whom are you calling 'Master'?" Said they, "The person walking behind you." 

Said he to them: "If this is a 'Master,' may there not be any more like him in Israel." 

"Why?" asked the people. 

Said the man: Such-and-such he has done to me. 

"Nevertheless, forgive him," said they, "for he is a man greatly learned in the Torah." 

"For your sakes I will forgive him," said the man, "but only if he does not act this way anymore." 

Soon after this R. Elazar entered the study hall and taught: "A person should always be flexible as the reed and let them never be hard as the cedar. And for this reason, the reed merited that of it should be made the quill for the writing of the Torah.” 

The holiest words, the ones that should never be broken – those are written with the intention of flexibility. Let us remember that the next time that harsh, hard judgement bubbles up in us over a word uttered in error. Perhaps that might open the door to apologies, forgiveness and improving our relationship with spoken and unspoken words.
Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha