A Lesson in Lashon Hara

I mentioned in a previous post that homeschooling parents like to take real-time life situations that happen to them, their children or otherwise and make a lesson out of it.  It is a way of getting out of using a worksheet or finding/making up a story to prove the point.  With a real-time life situation everything is laid out perfectly for us.  This weekend was one of those times.

I hope that I am following all the proper procedures for lashon hara. I did some review of the halachas before writing this post. I have tried to make everything ambiguous here in the posting.

“Who is the man who desires life, who loves days to see goodness? Guard your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceitfully.” [Tehillim/Psalms 34:13-14]

My husband has a subscription to a business magazine.  As we sat down to dinner he asked me what I knew about a certain topic in the magazine.  I had heard about the topic but did not know much about it.  He proceeded to tell me all about the article – one person felt a certain something was bad, blogged about it on their website, and what ensued was the shutdown of 80% of a person’s business which affected about 6,000 people’s lives.  All in the course of a mere 6 weeks.  My husband told me all about the business and how the certain product was made, and then he told me about what was written in the blog. What he told me made my blood boil. If what my husband told me was true, the accuser (without much thought to their own words, or thoughts about doing a real investigation and really trying hard to see the other point of view to make a proper decision,) just slandered another person’s business – FALSELY!

Since the discussion with my husband, I have read the article in the magazine.  I have read the blog article of the accuser in question, as well as doing my own investigation to try to find out the truth.  What really struck me was not that I disagreed with the person, but that the person seemed to take the fact that their words destroyed thousands of lives almost instantaneously, very lightly.  Very, very lightly.  Even if one believes that something is hurting others and something needs to be done about it, that fact that one feels they need to take the livelihood away from thousands of workers, they should not just say “oh well.”  One needs to understand the implication of “mere words.”

I told my husband that we needed to talk to our children about this.  We need to use real life examples that they can possibly understand to try to instill in them what our words can do.  Yes, words can create – the world was created with 10 sayings, but our words can also be used to destroy.  We talked in depth today at lunch.  I told the boys both sides of the story.  I told them what I found out with my investigation.  I then told them to think about it and we would finish talking at a later time.  At supper I brought up the topic again.  I asked leading questions like, “was anything wrong with either person”, “what was wrong,” and “why was it wrong and what should the person have done if they felt very strongly about it?”

I know that one talk about this important topic is not enough.  I do not think one can learn too much about this topic. (I just recently finished “Guard Your Tongue” with my challah baking friends.)  I also know that we did not cover everything that we could cover today.  However, I feel it is better to give small amounts of information at a time, for they will not soak up very much if you give a lot at a time.

Now, for a change in thinking, I’m off to go grocery shopping and then to finish my talk for the Homeschool Conference which is in only 2 weeks! (Yikes!)  😀

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