LEV999 The Talmud adds two more examples of oppressive speech: If a person is visited by suffering, afflicted with disease, or has buried his children, one must not speak to him as Job's companions spoke to him, “Is not your piety or confidence, your integrity your hope? Think now, what innocent man ever perished? Where have the upright been destroyed? As I have seen, those who plow evil and sow mischief reap them” (Job 4:6-8). If ass-drivers sought grain from a person, he must not say to them, “Go to so-and-so, who sells grain” when knowing that he has never sold any. Rabbi Judah said: “One must not feign interest in a purchase when he has no money, since this is known to the heart only, and of everything known only to the heart it is written [in that Torah], ‘And you shall fear your God’” (Leviticus 25:17). Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b. The first of the Talmud’s examples is telling sick people that their past sins are the reason for their suffering. Even if a person with lung cancer smoked three packs of cigarettes a day or a person who had a stroke is obese, so that there is indeed a probable link between their past behavior and their present illness, one may not mention that when visiting the ill person. However, if the person will recover, the doctor may--and probably should--describe that connection and ways of stopping smoking or avoiding overeating because that may have some practical benefit in avoiding a recurrence of the disease; but even a doctor should refrain from blaming the ill for their disease if they have no hope of it for recovery. People outside the field of medicine who have no practical reason to mention this language are definitely prohibited from saying to the ill that they are responsible for their illness, and the Mishnah compares those who do to Job’s “friends” who similarly blamed a job for his troubles and who were ultimately chastised by God for doing so (Job 42:7-9). [Note that in asserting that such language is oppressive speech, the Rabbis of the Mishnah seemed to prefer the way the Book of Job addresses human suffering to the theology of Deuteronomy 28:58-61, which does link sickness to sin. The Talmud’s second example of oppressive speech--telling someone seeking grain to go to someone whom the speaker knows has none-- is another instance of warning us against “placing a stumbling block before the blind to” (Leviticus 19:14)—this time, before the cognitively blind, people who lack information and can be misled by those who give them false directions. To do that is oppressive speech, because it steals not only the questioner’s time, but also his or her trust in other people and even his or her self-respect as someone whom others will not intentionally lead astray. Clearly, this does not apply to games where the whole point is to deceive one another (card games such as poker or I Doubt It come to mind), for then everyone enters into the game with the intention of having fun by seeing how acute one is in identifying false information. It certainly does constitute oppressive speech, though, when children taunt each other in this way. Even in less personally charged situations, when, for example, one is asked for directions, one must prefer to say “I don't know” if one in fact does not know, rather than sending someone “on a wild goose chase.” Harming another's money or property is clearly prohibited, as the passage in Leviticus 25 that we have been discussing spells out in detail. Even so, after explaining what is included in the category of oppressive speech, as quoted above, the Talmud poignantly indicates why verbal oppression is even worse than that: Rabbi Yochanan said on the authority of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai: “Verbal wrong is worse than monetary wrong because with regard to the former it is written, ‘And you shall fear your God (Leviticus 25:17), ‘but not of the second” [in Leviticus 25:14, which the Rabbis interpret to prohibit monetary wrongs]. Rabbi Eleazar said: “The former [verbal oppression] affects his [the victim's] person, the other [only] his money.” Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani said: “For the latter [monetary wrongs] restoration is possible, but not for the former [verbal wrongs].”
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