Q&A: The Chafetz Chaim and Evil Speech
The Chafetz Chaim and Evil Speech
Question
I’ve always been curious whether all the details, laws, complexities, and great stringency brought in the book Chafetz Chaim are really necessary. In other words, it sounds to me very far-fetched that the Torah would demand so much, to such a degree that in my opinion only a small percentage of people are even capable of living up to it. I’m not asking about the severity of evil speech itself, but about what is defined as evil speech.
Answer
I’ve written here more than once that in my opinion the Chafetz Chaim almost invented the whole field of evil speech. Many of the details brought there are derived from aggadic literature and from non-compelling reasoning. It is no accident that almost no discussions of the laws of evil speech were written until his time.
Discussion on Answer
You should ask a sociologist.
I liked that. But it does have practical implications regarding how trustworthy what he writes is, and regarding how much I can rely on the Rabbi’s opinion on the matter here—not that I mean, Heaven forbid, to be dismissive.
That you’ll have to decide for yourself.
In general, I don’t see what exactly you want to rely on. I didn’t write anything halakhic here.
But it does have halakhic implications. The Rabbi may not see this as having halakhic implications simply because the book has become part of our religious culture, but if I’m wondering whether to rely on it or not, that has enormous halakhic implications.
Is there a reason for that? Meaning, in the end this book was embraced very warmly. There could be two aspects to this: either Haredi Judaism was in a process of becoming stricter, in inverse proportion to the great leniency of the various types of people leaving religion; or it was accepted because it really is something important that Jewish history had not dealt with enough, as the Rabbi himself pointed out.