After my recent column about the draft I was in contact with someone who was upset that I had spoken lashon hara about another Jew and about Eretz Yisrael and wrote that “while spiritual reality is the only causal factor” and “Torah learning protects us as nothing else can” did the Chofetz Chaim not “write copiously that Torah learning which was abundant at the time of the Churban Bayis Sheni did not protect us from it because sinas chinam and lashon hara are the key factors that again and again bring calamity upon us? So speaking lashon hara about those Jews who by seeking to draft chareidim would reduce Torah learning is rejecting the Chofetz Chaim’s order of priorities.”

I quote her words because they illustrate several important points. The first is that as with any area of halachah lashon hara isn’t whatever we want it to be. It is what halachah as determined by poskim says it is. This magazine has acknowledged talmidei chachamim — baalei halachah — who review its contents for halachic permissibility. The recent column on the draft was also read by a revered gadol b’Torah who commented that he had “read no article as compelling and as powerful on this issue as this one. I hope it is spread far and wide.”

What in the eyes of an uninformed person may seem like lashon hara may actually not only be permissible to say but something one is obligated to say. Only once the halachic status of a statement has been clarified can we go on to determine whether to apply the Chofetz Chaim’s teaching about the destructive power of lashon hara despite abundant Torah learning. But this is no benign mistake well-meaning though it surely is. Invoking the Chofetz Chaim in this way is doubly problematic: First and most immediately it results in a stifling of the effort to protect Torah and bnei Torah from those who threaten them. But more generally it suggests a simplistic romanticized lens through which to view gedolei Torah.

I absolutely love stories about tzaddikim. I tell them at my Shabbos table and read them for my own inspiration and enjoyment. Yet there are those who take issue at times with merit with certain “gedolim stories” that they feel give no sense that a tzaddik had to struggle to achieve greatness as we all must. Airbrushed of these details they say such stories are at best uninspiring and perhaps even discouraging to the reader. Some time back this magazine featured a symposium in which several of my colleagues here addressed this very issue.

But there is a corresponding problem when we engage in another equally damaging form of romanticization by consciously avoiding those stories that show such giants to be willing to zealously safeguard Torah and Klal Yisrael even if it means going on the offensive in word and deed against those who threaten those precious trusts. It is shallow and indeed untruthful when we talk about how suffused these great people were with love for every single Jew but fail to note that it was precisely that overwhelming love that moved them to  vigorously oppose those who would harm us spiritually. Part of an adam gadol’s greatness is the ability to achieve balance between the varying even seemingly conflicting modes of feeling and behavior the Torah requires of us; and stories of gedolim if they are not to be caricatures need to reflect that balance.

So since we’ve been discussing the Chofetz Chaim here’s my contribution to providing such balance: Rav Dovid Frankel a long-time confidant of the Chazon Ish related that the Chazon Ish said that people are mistaken in believing that the Chofetz Chaim didn’t speak any lashon hara because “ehr hut geredt ah fulle lashon hara — oif d Bundisten (he spoke a full lashon hara — about the members of the [Socialist anti-Torah] Bund)” (Sefer Z’chor L’Dovid Yerushalayim 5760 p. 282).

The challenge is this: Can we be people of depth and nuance able to balance real emotions of love and its opposite each to be summoned when and where the Torah demands it or will we simply cater to our own need to feel good about our ever-tolerant selves by adopting an attitude of “all nice all the time?” One of the most powerful stories told about the Satmar Rav is one in which a fellow asked him why instead of castigating the Zionists at every turn he didn’t instead follow in Avraham Avinu’s footsteps who remonstrated repeatedly with Hashem on behalf of the wicked denizens of Sdom? The Rav responded “True we know from the Chumash what Avraham said to Hashem but do you claim to know what Avraham said to the Sedomites themselves about their behavior?” And then with tears in his eyes he added “And do you claim to know too what I say to Hashem on other Jews’ behalf?” That is an adam gadol whose facially contradictory actions are on a deeper level merely different aspects of an underlying unity rooted in being an eved Hashem all of whose faculties are placed at Hashem’s service. 

A while back I wrote in this space that the single best thing about being an editor and writer at this magazine is that it gives me the opportunity to speak well — and help others speak well — of Yidden. In the last several years I’ve written feature articles and columns about Jews across almost the entire spectrum of religiosity: from Satmar to Lubavitch to Sephardic from the founder of the OU’s NCSY to centrist Orthodox Jews to the  staunchly secular from great roshei yeshivah to clean-shaven pulpit rabbanim to a religiously diverse group of religious judges. And in each case I’d like to believe that readers can palpably sense in my prose the admiration and affection I feel for each of these special people.

But does that mean that when addressing real and dire threats that all Jews or frum Jews or the Torah world face from people without — but perhaps even more so from “within ” — that we must suddenly forget how to ask she’eilos in halachah and simply assume it’s lashon hara? No. It’s precisely then that we must inquire whether it is indeed prohibited — or perhaps imperative — to speak up not with name-calling or ad hominem attacks but with forthright and forceful declarations of the truth of the matter.  

In my column last summer about a yarmulke-wearer who was abetting the draft of bnei Torah I wrote that “I have been observing the Jewish scene for many years and here’s what I’ve seen: For the most part the people who’ve done the most damage to Torah and the Torah community are sadly those with yarmulkes.” That statement has been resoundingly confirmed by recent events in Eretz Yisrael in which yarmulke-wearers have been at the forefront of seeking to drag what they call “parasitic” bnei Torah from the beis medrash which they call “jails.” It was mutar — nay an obligation — to make that statement then and it remains so now.

Still should fending off of attacks from others be balanced by introspection about our own community’s failings and actions that may have contributed to those very attacks? Absolutely.   

Just in the last while I’ve written: “[I]sn’t it worth pondering whether there’s something for example about the way we comport ourselves at the Kosel or in our mikdashei me’at wherever they may be that might have brought about the possibility for [WOW] to act the way they have? And might the way others speak about — and slander — frum Jews have some relation to how we speak about our own?”

I also wrote of secular Israelis’ justified distress when frum Jews ignore the moment of silence which is a “slap in the face to huge numbers of Israelis with understandable sensitivities” and of the hoodlums who by their obtuse indecent actions at the Kosel undermine our arguments against WOW. And in the column on the draft I wrote of the greatest threat to Eretz Yisrael being “not an Iranian mushroom cloud but Jews — fervently religious ones ultra-secularist ones and everyone in between — acting un-Jewishly ” and I meant it.