Originally published in the Jewish Journal · Table for Five
You shall not curse a deaf person. You shall not place a stumbling block before a blind person, and you shall fear your God. I am the Lord.
-Lev 19:14
Don’t curse someone deaf. But wait! They can’t hear, so what’s wrong?
Rashi explains: don’t curse anyone, even the deaf. It’s all part of Torah’s utopian revolution for former slaves: treat everyone with civility because all humans, however humble, have a God-given soul that demands respect.
But what if no one’s around to hear your curse? You’re just talking to yourself, right? No harm no foul. Ramban brings down where it’s wrong. Don’t forget the end of the verse, he cautions. “Fear your God, for I am HaShem,” because, Ramban adds, “God sees the secret things!”
This suggests an even more profound and mindblowing revolution wrought by Torah. Humans have a private interior territory – a realm of intention before action that includes our innermost discourses with and commentary to ourselves. The Divine has dominion over that sanctum, too. The deaf may not hear our curses, but we ourselves are always the first audience for our intentions and thus their first, maybe even their primary, victim. We are diminished (the Hebrew for “curse” carries the sense of “to make smaller”) by our grumblings, even if we only think them.
Let’s flip it. How healing and gracious would it be, especially for our relationship to our self, if we silenced the incessant babbling of the evil tongue in our heads and instead articulated, even inwardly, only the shining attributes and blessings of our loved ones or even strangers? What a sweet and healthy way that would be to live!
