Strident Language - Parshat Ki Tavo

 

There is some ferocious language in this week’s Torah service.

That is to say, there’s a little bit of lovely language – if you do good and follow God’s commands God will bless the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your soil and your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed and enemies will flee before you – which sounds very nice.

 

But if you do not hearken to the voice of God, the Torah goes on to say; damned be your basket and kneading bowl, dammed be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil. God will strike you with consumption, with fever, with dehydration, with blight, with jaundice. They will pursue you until you are destroyed.

It's really brutal.

And in one of the most – no – the most brutal verse, I think, in the entire Torah, the famine that will sweep the nation will be so severe that, even the tenderest among you – the most exceeding daintiest will resort to the cannibalism of their own children.

Here’s the thing about language, in Judaism.

Language counts.

Language has what, in Hebrew, is called mashmaut a concrete reality. Language has power.

So much so, that the very Hebrew word for a thing, an object, devar, is the very same as the Hebrew word for a word, davar.

So much so, that the mechanism of creation, in Judaism, is speech – And God said, “let there be light, and there was.”

 

There’s a remarkable coda to the awful verse in this week’s Torah reading, it’s buried in the Josephus’ The Jewish War.

Josephus, once a Jewish General protecting the Jews from the Romans, is writing a thousand years after this verse in Deuteronomy comes to be. He writes about the Roman siege of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 and he describes a famine so severe that the kneeding bowels and the baskets are indeed damned and even, that there is a parent so desperate in their hunger, that they commit this unimaginable cannibalism of their own child, just as the Book of Deuteronomy prophesised.

In so many ways, there’s nothing that could possibly be said about something so awful, but, the thing I feel, reading Deuteronomy and Josephus and God help me, the news and everything else, is that the great Russian playwriter, Anton Checkov’s, most famous rule is somehow at play.

"If in the first act [wrote Checkov] you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Somehow it feels that the action of invoking in strident speech a loaded gun, even if it were only meant as to terrify, or persuade, or keep us far from mistake, it feels like that action has somehow presaged that gun going off.

Language has Mashmaut.

To be honest, I wanted to talk about this even before the news of the murder of Charlie Kirk on Tuesday night. Before I realised that this week is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I lived through in NY.

I wanted to talk about this in the context of my own in-tray, the sort of emails that come in, not so frequently, but too frequently, that cross a line between seeking to disagree with what I have to say – always welcome – and into a world of strident discourse that is designed to extrapolating disagreement into a world of discourse I find deeply scary and bad.

Here's a quick tour of the greatest hits of my in-tray in these last months.

There was the time I was in the car driving my family back from a couple of days in Yorkshire when the phone went off and my wife suggested she should answer it – it might be important. “No,” I said – I tend not to answer phone-calls from numbers I don’t recognize. But when they called back, she thought I should answer so I did, only to hear someone scream their accusations that I was responsible for the genocide of Palestinian babies.

Or the time, I wrote something about something – I can’t even remember, I don’t think it was particularly pointed at all – and someone, a Jew!, responded that they hoped I felt guilt for the responsibility for the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim at the Jewish Museum in Washington. To be clear, Lischinsky and Milgrim were murdered with no justification and certainly not by me.

Or the time, actually just last week, when I wrote something about the organisation Standing Together, an organisation of Jews and Palestinians that, quite literally, Stand Together to express the idea that Jews and Palestinians are indeed capable of standing together and a member of this Synagogue wrote to me, accusing me of siding with, “anti-zionists, antisemites, who are funded by Iran and Qatar. They want to see Israel and its people wiped off the face of the map - from the river to the sea. [this person wrote, before shifting to a full CAPS LOCK ON SCREAM] BY MARCHING WITH THEM, YOUR ORGANISATION, AGREES WITH THEM.”

To be clear, I’m a Zionist, I’m not an antisemite, I don’t want to see Israel and its people wiped off the face of the map. Nor, having spent quite some time engaged with them, does anyone involved in Standing Together either.

Or the time when I dropped a politically engaged member a note ensuring they knew that our local MP is coming to speak at New London on Tuesday of this coming week – she is, you know, if you are interested in engaging with our local political leadership, do come.

And this member wrote back this way,

Thank you for mentioning the event with Rachel Blake MP next week. I must admit that my utter hatred of this horrific Labour government runs so deep within me  that I have no interest in anything that a politician willing to hold the Labour whip has to offer.

  It was the phrase, “utter hatred” that caught my attention. That made me think of the connection between Chekhov’s law about pistols on the wall and the parsha and Josephus and then Charlie Kirk and, I don’t know who even remembers Jo Cox at this point. I thought about Jo Cox.

It has to stop.

All of it, from the left, from the right, from the lovers of Israel and the lovers of Palestine, from the supporters of Labour and the supporters of any other political party.

It has to stop.

We have to stop using and valorising the sort of strident language that isolates, intimidates and belittles the very humanity of people who take views other than our own.

Even if the positions other people take seem to us obviously wrong, so obviously cruel and unjustifiable that it seems to us so obviously justifiable to use the most strident language we can, it has to stop.

We have to take control of our language, use language as if it has Mashmaut – for indeed it has Mashmaut, use language as if, every time we use strident language, we hang a pistol on the wall in Act One of a Chekhov play.

Here are the two problems with using strident language.

The first is that the language we use has a life of its own once it leaves our lips. There’s a cute story about the Rabbi who wished to teach some poor kid about the dangers of Lashon HaRa, evil language who told the kid to find three pillows, bring them to the top of a mountain and pound the pillows until the feathers flew away in the wind. The kid does exactly as asked and looks at the Rabbi as if to say – “Is that it?” and the Rabbi tells the kid to go and find each and every feather and bring them back and return them to their pillowcases. Language has a life of its own once it leaves our lips. It might be that my ideal audience can cope with my strident language. It might be that 99.9% of my audience are going to hear my strident language and realise that I mean no physical harm towards those I critique. It might be that only a person affected by mental illness or trauma could possibly understand my strident use of language as justifying physical harm. But that 99.9% is not enough. Not even close to being enough.

The second reason to avoid strident language when speaking about those with whom we disagree is that we are  to be both wrong and make things worse, rather than better. I think about this in the context of this coming season of Teshuvah. When it comes to my own failings and errors, I tend to think of myself as basically a decent and reasonable person whose errors, even the bad ones, are slips that deserve to be forgiven. But when I think of failings and errors of those I disagree with, or those who have caused me pain, I tend to think of them as entirely corrupted by their failings. But the truth these other people, they think of themselves as reasonable people too. I’ve met many many people in my life who think of themselves as reasonable in my life – even if I think they are acting most unreasonably. I’m not recommending we start hugging terrorists. I’m not recommending naivete, but if we want a society that is more cohesive, more kind, more generous of spirit, we have to stop the strident use of language, we have to stop hanging pistols on the wall. We have to speak about, even the people who hurt us and who we disagree with, as if they are complex human beings with their own pains and self-perceptions of reasonableness. It’s not going to help to keep pushing ‘them’ away from ‘us.’

Language is the greatest gift we possess, as human beings. It’s the greatest responsibility. It’s capable of causing the greatest amount of damage.

It’s also the best tool we have if we want to mend, to bring compassion, to offer hope.

As we come up to this Rosh Hashanah season, here’s a resolution for us all – to use language as if it had Mashmaut – for indeed, it does.
Shabbat Shalom