Words That Hurt, Words That Heal

How To Choose Words Wisely And Well

Joseph Telushkin

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780688163501
• eBook ISBN: 9780062012913
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Psychology

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rebbe comes this newly revised edition of Words That Hurt, Words That Heal—an invaluable guide in how choosing the right words can enrich our relationships and give us insight to improve every facet of our lives.

“I don’t know anyone whose life would not be blessed by this book.”—Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People and Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life

Joseph Telushkin is renowned for his warmth, his erudition, and his richly anecdotal insights, and in Words That Hurt, Words That Heal he focuses these gifts on the words we use in public and in private, revealing their tremendous power to shape relationships. With wit and wide-ranging intelligence, Rabbi Telushkin explains the harm in spreading gossip, rumors, or others’ secrets, and how unfair anger, excessive criticism, or lying undermines true communication. By sensitizing us to subtleties of speech we may never have considered before, he shows us how to turn every exchange into an opportunity.

In this fully revised edition, Joseph Telushkin brings this classic into the modern age. Remarkable for its clarity and practicality, Words That Hurt, Words That Heal illuminates the powerful effects we create by what we say and how we say it.

PART ONE

The Unrecognized Power of Words

1

The Unrecognized Power of Words

In a small Eastern European town, a man went through the community slandering the rabbi. One day, feeling suddenly remorseful, he begged the rabbi for forgiveness and offered to undergo any penance to make amends. The rabbi told him to take a feather pillow from his home, cut it open, scatter the feathers to the wind, then return to see him. The man did as he was told, then came to the rabbi and asked, “Am I now forgiven?”

“Almost,” came the response. “You just have to do one more thing. Go and gather all the feathers.”

“But that’s impossible,” the man protested. “The wind has already scattered them.”

“Precisely,” the rabbi answered. “And although you truly wish to correct the evil you have done, it is as impossible to repair the damage done by your words as it is to recover the feathers.”

 

This famous tale is a lesson about slander, of course, but it also is a testimony to the power of speech. Words said about us define our place in the world. Once that “place,” our reputation, is defined—particularly if the definition is negative—it is very hard to reverse. President Andrew Jackson, who, along with his wife, was the subject of relentless malicious gossip, once noted, “The murderer only takes the life of the parent and leaves his character as a goodly heritage to his children, while the slanderer takes away his goodly reputation and leaves him a living monument to his children’s disgrace.”

The Jewish tradition views words as tangible (in Hebrew, one of the terms for “words” is devarim, which also means “things”), and extremely powerful. The Bible clearly acknowledges the potency of words, teaching that God created the world with words. As the third verse of Genesis records: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

Like God, human beings also create with words. We have all had the experience of reading a novel and being so moved by the fate of one of its characters that we felt love, hate, or anger. Sometimes we cried, even though the individual whose fate so moved us never existed. All that happened was that a writer took a blank piece of paper, and through words alone created a human being so real that he or she was capable of evoking our deepest emotions.

That words are powerful may seem obvious, but the fact is that most of us, most of the time, use them lightly. We choose our clothes more carefully than we choose our words, though what we say about and to others can define them indelibly. That is why ethical speech—speaking fairly of others, honestly about ourselves, and carefully to everyone—is so important. If we keep the power of words in the foreground of our consciousness, we will handle them as carefully as we would a loaded gun.

Unfair speech, however, does more than harm its victim; it also is self-destructive. Psychiatrist Antonio Wood notes that when we speak ill of someone, we alienate ourselves from that person. The more negative our comments, the more distant we feel from their object. Thus, one who speaks unfairly of many people, comes to distance and alienate himself from many individuals, and, as Dr. Wood notes, alienation is a major cause of depression, one of the most widespread and rapidly growing disorders in America.

The avoidance of alienation is but one way in which one can benefit from avoiding unethical speech. People who minimize the amount of gossip in which they engage generally find that their connections to others become more intimate and satisfying. For many, exchanging information and opinions about other people is an easy, if divisive, way of bonding with others. But those who refrain from gossiping are forced to focus more on themselves and the person to whom they are speaking. The relationship established thereby almost invariably is emotionally deeper.

In addition, anyone who makes an effort to speak fairly to others and to avoid angry explosions finds that his social interactions become smoother. Admittedly, when one is angry at someone, maintaining a good relationship with that individual might seem irrelevant. But consider—particularly if you have a quick temper—whether you’ve ever heard yourself say, “I don’t care if I never speak with him [or her] again!” about someone with whom you are now friendly. People who learn to speak fairly avoid going through life regretting cruel words they said, and friendships needlessly ended.

In the larger society too, we are in urgent need of more civilized discourse. Throughout history, words used unfairly have promoted hatred and even murder. The medieval Crusaders didn’t wake up one morning and begin randomly killing Jews. Rather, they and their ancestors had been conditioned for centuries to think of Jews as “Christkillers” and thus less than human. Once this verbal characterization took hold, it became easy to kill Jews.

African Americans were long branded with words that depicted them as subhuman (“apes,” “jungle bunnies,” “niggers”). The ones who first used such terms hoped they would enable whites to view blacks as different and inferior to themselves. This was important because if whites perceived blacks as fully human, otherwise “decent” people could never have arranged for them to be kidnapped from their homes, whipped, branded, and enslaved.

Similarly, when the radical Black Panther party referred to police as “pigs” during the 1960s, its intention was not to hurt policemen’s feelings, but to dehumanize them and thereby establish in people’s minds that murdering a policeman was really killing an animal, not a human being.¹

Unfair, often cruel, speech continues to poison our society. Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most popular talk-show host, repeatedly labels those feminists he regards as radically pro-choice as “feminazis,” leading listeners to believe that there is a significant body of feminists (if they are not significant, why is Limbaugh bothering to attack them?) who think like Hitler and plan, like the Nazis, to do horrible things to those who oppose them. To call Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug “feminazis,” as Limbaugh does, is unethical, makes rational discourse impossible, and constitutes an unintentional mockery of the sufferings of the Nazis’ real victims.² G. Gordon Liddy, another right-wing talk-show host, and a man who has been highly honored within his industry, advises his listeners to aim for the head rather than the bulletproof vests of invading federal ATF agents.

Verbal incivility characterizes some highly partisan liberals no less than conservatives. When George Bush was elected president in 1988, Mayor Andrew Young and Congressman Richard Gephardt commented that not since the days of Hitler and Goebbels had a political campaign been built so deliberately on the technique of the Big Lie.³ What an irony! In the very act of condemning Bush’s campaign for its supposed lies, Young and Gephardt tell a much bigger and vicious untruth. With similarly overwrought and unethical language, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted to one of President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominations by asserting: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution, [and] writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government.”⁴ Those familiar with Judge Bork’s views and judicial record knew that Kennedy’s statement was an amalgamation of untruths and misleading half-truths. But the senator’s agenda was neither accuracy nor fairness; it was to defeat Bork’s nomination.

In popular culture the deterioration of civilized discourse is even more pronounced than in politics. A contemporary musical genre, “gangsta rap,” glorifies killing police and raping women. A 1990 album, The Geto Boys, by the group of the same name, includes this horrendous couplet:

I dug between the chair and whipped out the machete She screamed, I sliced her up until her guts were like spaghetti.

Another lyric in this album speaks of the need to “stab the girl” in her breasts, and “just cut her to bits.”⁵

Gangsta rap is only one manifestation of contemporary music’s incendiary usage of language. When Axl Rose, lead singer of Guns N’ Roses (famous for the lyric “I’ll rip your heart in two and leave you lying on the bed”), attended a “homecoming” concert in Indianapolis in 1991, he told his cheering fans that “kids in Indiana today are just like prisoners in Auschwitz.”⁶ Film critic Michael Medved has commented: “When he later defended these appalling remarks in conversations with reporters, no one thought to ask Rose the obvious question: If he really believes that parents are like guards at a Nazi death camp, wouldn’t teenagers be perfectly justified in killing them in order to achieve their freedom?”⁷

If so, one could be sure that some leading figures of the youth culture would be far from upset. Responding to the alarming statistics of black-on-black crime, rap star Sister Souljah suggested that “maybe we should have a week of killing whites. Just give back what whites have done to us.”⁸

A nineteenth-century story tells of a man who saw a large sign over a store, PANTS PRESSED HERE. He brought in his pants to be pressed only to be told, “We don’t press pants here, we only make signs.”

The “sign makers” of our time are those who compare their political opponents or parents to Nazis, and glorify mutilating women; in short, those who use words to incite rather than inform.

Violence, however, is only one possible result of unethical speech. Another is the destruction of what decent people consider their most important possession, a good name. Raymond Donovan, President Reagan’s first secretary of labor, was the victim of a long campaign of rumors and innuendo, which finally culminated in a criminal prosecution. After running up legal bills in excess of a million dollars, he was acquitted of all charges. When he emerged from the courtroom, and reporters swarmed around him for his comment, Donovan posed a bitter question: “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”

Truly—as the anguished Ray Donovan knew—once feathers have been scattered to the wind, they cannot all be recovered.

PART TWO

How We Speak About Others

2

The Irrevocable Damage Inflicted by Gossip

“What does a good guest say? ‘How much trouble has my host gone to for me. How much meat he set before me. How much wine he brought me. How many cakes he served me. And all this trouble he has gone to for my sake!’ But what does a bad guest say? ‘What kind of effort did the host make for me? I have eaten only one slice of bread. I have eaten only one piece of meat, and I have drunk only one cup of wine! Whatever trouble the host went to was done only for the sake of his wife and children.’”¹

These two takes on the same party, reported in the Talmud nearly two thousand years ago, go straight to the heart of ethical speech: the fact that most of us, given a willing ear, are bad guests and, often, disloyal friends. It is infinitely more interesting to look for others’ flaws—in the case just cited, the supposed self-interest of our host—than to praise their good qualities. How much more satisfying it is to chew over the fact that so-and-so is having an affair, was fired from his job for incompetence, has filed for bankruptcy or, less seriously, for that matter, tells very unfunny jokes and then laughs at them uproariously, than to discuss how good a spouse, how loyal an employee, how financially circumspect, how wonderful a raconteur he may be.

How strange that dinner parties, where we have partaken of a host’s hospitality, so often seem to prompt the most critical “postmortems.”*

The impulse to be a “bad guest” violates the biblical injunction “You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people” (Leviticus 19:16). This directive is the foundation of Jewish dictums on ethical speech—which, not coincidentally, appears only two verses before the Bible’s most famous law: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

Because the biblical commandment is so terse, it is difficult to know exactly what is meant by “talebearing.” Does it mean that you are forbidden to talk about any aspect of other people’s lives (telling a friend, “I was at a party at so-and-so’s house last night. It’s absolutely gorgeous what they’ve done with their kitchen”)? Or does the verse only outlaw damning insinuations (“When Sam went away on that business trip last month, I saw his wife, Sally, at a fancy restaurant with this very good-looking guy. She didn’t see me, because they were too busy the whole time making eyes at each other”)? Is it talebearing to pass on true stories (“Sally confessed to Betty she’s having an affair. Sam ought to know what goes on when he’s out of town”)?

The Bible itself never fully answers questions of this nature. But starting with the early centuries of the Common Era, Jewish teachers elaborated upon the biblical law and formulated, in ascending order of seriousness, three types of speech that people should decrease or eliminate:

1. Information and comments about others that are nondefamatory and true
2. Negative, though true, stories (in Hebrew, lashon ha-ra)—information that lowers the esteem in which people hold the person about whom it is told. A subdivision of this is tattling (in Hebrew, rechilut)—telling Judy, for example, the critical things Ben said about her.
3. Lies and rumors (in Hebrew, motzi shem ra)—statements that are negative and false

NONDEFAMATORY AND TRUE REMARKS

The comment “I was at a party at so-and-so’s house last night. It’s absolutely gorgeous what they’ve done with their kitchen” is nondefamatory and true. What possible reason could there be for discouraging people from exchanging such innocuous, even complimentary, information?

For one thing, the listener might not find the information so innocuous. While one person is describing how wonderful the party was, the other might well wonder, “Why wasn’t I invited? I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Appendix
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Books by Joseph Telushkin
• Copyright
• About the Publisher