Parashat Behar II: Words that Hurt

“Do not wrong [lo tonu] one another” (Lev 25:17). This is the second of two commandments not to wrong one another. The first appears just a few verses earlier, in verse 14. The rabbis (see Rashi who cites the midrash Sifra) understand the first prohibition to refer to ona’at mamon, “wronging one another with respect to monetary matters,” and the second to refer to ona’at devarim, “wronging one another with words.” The Talmud says that wronging another through the use of words is a more serious offense than wronging with money, because monetary wrongs can be more easily rectified (Baba Metzia 58b).

Some examples of ona’at devarim are: embarrassing someone, giving someone advice that is more suited to the advisor than the advisee (Rashi), reminding a convert or a ba’al teshuva, a newly religious Jew, of his past, telling someone who is suffering that his suffering is a result of his own sins, showing interest in buying something in a store when one has no intention of actually making the purchase (Baba Metzia 58b), and anything else that may hurt the feelings of another. Nehama Leibowitz suggests that the motive behind many of these hurtful words is the sense of superiority gained by making another feel small.

Nehama Leibowitz also points out that this word tonu, “wrong,” is normally used in the Torah to refer to the treatment of someone who is weak or downtrodden, such as the ger, the “stranger” (see Ex 22:20 and Lev 19:23) or the widow and orphan (Ezek 22:7) or the poor (Ezek 22:29). In our context, however, the verb is used to refer to the way one treats one’s fellow. Perhaps the idea here is that one should not treat one’s fellow in this superior way, turning him into one of the poor and downtrodden normally referred to with this verb.

The cruelty involved in some of these statements is often subtle. Only the speaker really knows if his intention was to hurt. Rashi suggests that the reason this prohibition is followed by the words, “And you shall fear your God,” is precisely because of this subtlety. As he says, “The One who knows thoughts, He knows [the truth about one’s intentions].” He says that all commandments in the Torah which are connected to one’s private thoughts include this term, “And you shall fear your God.” Part of what makes this approach so interesting is the focus on the speaker rather than hearer. One would think that the test of whether the statement was hurtful is how the hearer feels about it; Rashi tells us that no, the test is how the speaker feels. The point is to stop yourself from speaking in a way that you yourself consider hurtful.

This issue plays out particularly often and hurtfully among children. I hear my kids saying to each other things like: “I had ice cream in school today. Did you?” in the full knowledge that the other child did not and would feel badly about it. Or, to a friend who has just said how excited she was to have gone to a certain amusement park: “That park? Oh, I’ve been there five times already.”

I’m not sure how one helps one’s children learn not to speak in these hurtful ways. Perhaps by getting them to admit that their intentions were to raise themselves up at the expense of another? There is a great children’s book on the subject of such hurtful words, The Hundred Dresses, by Eleanor Estes. One of the best things about the book is that it is told from the point of view of the children who are doing the teasing (and onlooking), showing how they come to feel remorse and understand the gravity and impact of their actions.