In their recent book The Power of Bad,¹ (Allen Lane, 2019), 135. John Tierney and Roy Baumeister tell the following story. A young woman, Eliza Byington, took a job at a video production company on the West Coast of America. The office was open-plan, with individual cubicles, clearly designed to encourage interaction and collaboration, but it did not seem to work. The sales representatives who worked in the cubicles did not talk to one another. The managers, who had their own individual offices, kept their doors shut. People either went out to lunch alone or ate at their desks rather than using the communal recreation space. It was, she thought, a most unpleasant work environment.

footnotes: ¹ John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, The Power of Bad

Then one of the sales representatives developed a heart condition and started working at home for most of the week. Suddenly the whole atmosphere of the office changed. Sales representatives started wandering over to their colleagues to discuss progress and tactics. Managers started leaving their office doors open. Staff meetings were more creative. People contributed more new ideas. Someone brought in home-made biscuits to share with the others. Someone else brought in a radio to play classical music. People started eating lunch together in the communal room. Some evenings a group would go out to drink together before going home. All this happened only on the days that this sales representative was at home. When he was present, the office reverted to its chilly unfriendliness.

As Tierney and Baumeister describe him, the individual in question was not antisocial. He mixed and chatted with others, but his conversation was profoundly negative. When talking about clients, he made fun of them and dismissed them as stupid or tiresome. At meetings, he mocked others for the mistakes they made or for their lack of experience. He criticised and complained. Despite all this, Byington had not seen him as a problem until she saw the difference between the functioning of the team when he was present and when he was absent. A single individual, simply by the negativity of his speech, was able to prevent an entire group of people from fulfilling their potential and thriving while doing so.

The connection between this story and our parasha is straightforward. Parashot Tazria and Metzora are both about a skin condition known as tzaraat, which is usually, though almost certainly incorrectly, translated as leprosy. The Sages were puzzled by the phenomenon. First, it accords with no known disease. We know of no illness whose symptoms apply not only to humans but also to garments and the walls of houses. Second, the Torah is not a book of medicine. If it deals with one illness, why not others? Third, the language it uses is not of illness and health but rather of impurity and purity, something else entirely.

They therefore sought the explanation by examining the most conspicuous instance of tzaraat in the Torah: that of Miriam who was struck with it for seven days after speaking negatively about her brother Moses (Num. 12). Tzaraat was not an illness but a punishment. The Talmud takes metzora to be an abbreviated form of the phrase motzi shem ra, meaning slander.² To be sure, some cited other sins that might lead to it. The Talmud mentions, in addition to malicious speech, bloodshed, an oath taken in vain, forbidden sexual relations, arrogance, theft, and stinginess.³

footnotes: ² Arakhin 15b. ³ Ibid. 16a.

When a connection between tzaraat and evil speech is identified, certain features of the phenomenon begin to take on significance. First, the most obvious sign of tzaraat was a whitening of the skin. The phrase the Sages used to describe shaming someone was malbin penei ḥavero, someone who “causes his fellow’s face to turn white.”⁴ Thus the punishment was measure-for-measure. Negative words that could turn someone else’s face white are punished by the skin of the speaker turning white. Moreover, malicious speech is usually spoken in private, the fiction being that words conveyed confidentially will stay confidential. The punishment is the most public possible. No one, upon seeing a metzora, would doubt what they had witnessed. It was a visible mark of shame.

footnotes: ⁴ Mishna Avot 3:11.

One particularly poignant detail in our parasha is: “He shall be unclean as long as the disease is on him. Being unclean, he shall dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp” (Lev. 13:46). If tzaraat were a disease, then this provision would clearly be a form of quarantine. But if it is a punishment for malicious speech, then the Talmud has a simple explanation: By his malicious speech he created division between husband and wife, or between one person and another. Therefore he is divided from the rest of society, condemned to live alone outside the camp as long as the condition lasts.⁵

footnotes: ⁵ Arakhin 16b.

Though tzaraat had long ceased to be a reality by the time of the Talmud, its insight into the destructive power of negative speech is well illustrated by Eliza Byington’s story. One person, simply by the cynical and dismissive tone of his comments, was able to disrupt the normal functioning of what otherwise would have been a creative and successful team. His absence from the office – the behavioural equivalent of the metzora’s banishment outside the camp – allowed the group to thrive again.

This matters greatly in Judaism. Jews have always been a small and vulnerable people, whether as a tiny nation surrounded by great empires, or as a minority in exile surrounded by a majority population whose religion and culture were different from, and often hostile to, their own. High morale was essential to survival. The Torah makes just this point when it tells us how, in the battle against the Amalekites, when Moses lifted his hands and the people looked up to heaven, they prevailed. When they looked down, they began to falter. Speaking badly about people destroys morale and the entire group suffers.

Tierney and Baumeister cite another case of a clothing company that dismissed one of its most successful salespeople. His results were outstanding, but he often antagonised his fellow salespeople, refusing to help them, and at times tried to usurp them. After he was ousted from the company, none of the remaining salespeople reached his level of success, but the company’s sales nonetheless rose by some 30 per cent.

These are purely economic propositions. But Tierney and Baumeister have a much larger point, which is that bad is more powerful than good. We are predisposed to notice negative phenomena. They generate responses of freeze, fight, or flight, and these reactions are powerful and very fast acting. We notice threats more than reassurance. Bad news has greater impact than good news. In fact, often the good news does not count as news at all. It is easier to make someone believe something negative about another person or group than something positive. John Gottman, the doyen of marriage research, argues that for a marriage to succeed it must contain five times as many positive experiences as negative ones, since the negatives are felt so intensely. That is the ra in metzora, the evil of evil speech. Words have power, but bad words have the greatest power. They are a genuinely destructive force.

Bad speech has always been destructive. But its negative force has grown exponentially with the development of the internet, smartphones, and social media. These have fundamentally changed the nature of interpersonal communication. It is far easier to be rude, negative, critical, offensive, scathing, and destructive when communicating electronically because of the so-called “disinhibition effect” which occurs when people are not speaking face-to-face. They are not constrained by the humanising influence of personal contact. They can hide behind some form of anonymity. They are not around to see the effect of their words. So visible and vulnerable are we on social media that almost anyone can take or give offence and deliver a devastating comment with no forethought or self-restraint. A new and unlovely world is emerging, overwhelmed by cyberbullying, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, low self-esteem, loneliness, and withdrawal.

A 2018 survey in the United States, for example, showed that 59 per cent of teenagers have experienced online abuse, 42 per cent have been called offensive names, 32 per cent have had false rumours spread about them, and 63 per cent believe that online harassment is a serious problem.⁶

footnotes: ⁶ Pew Research Center: Internet and Technology, “A Majority of Teens Have Experienced Some Form of Cyberbullying,” https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/09/27/a-majority-of-teens-have-experienced-some-form-of-cyberbullying/.

Data compiled in 2018 by the Office for National Statistics showed that the suicide rate in Britain among children and young people aged fifteen to nineteen almost doubled in the course of eight years, a rise attributed by Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, to the effect of media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.⁷ A particularly frightening figure is that 22 per cent of fourteen-year-old girls in Britain have self-harmed.⁸

footnotes: ⁷ “Suicide rate almost doubles among teenagers,” https://inews.co.uk/news/health/suicide-rates-teenagers-young-people-social-media-141803. ⁸ NHS, “Nearly a quarter of 14-year-old girls in UK ‘self-harming’, char­ity reports,” https://www.nhs.uk/news/mental-health/nearly-quarter-14-year-old-girls-uk-self-harming-charity-reports/.

Imagine a world in which those who posted negative, hurtful, or malicious remarks about others on social media were publicly exposed, carried a visible mark of shame, and for a period were excluded from public places and the company of others – in short, suffered the fate of the metzora. This would be a world in which people would think twice before using speech to harm or damage other people. The by now well-documented negative effects of social media have made us vividly aware of how easily people can use evil speech if they think they can do so without paying the costs themselves, and how harmful that can be.

Hence the life-changing idea that the way we use words shapes our social environment. Speaking negatively about others harms them, harms us, and damages the delicate strands of relationship that constitute our common life.

אופן השימוש שלנו במילים מעצב את סביבתנו החברתית.

Life-Changing Idea 27 The way we use words shapes our social environment.