God made [hu]man[ity], because [God] loves stories. - Elie Wiesel
[In our religious school, we make sure each week to study the parashat hashavuah (the portion of the week) - the section of the Torah that will be read that Shabbat as we cycle through the whole Torah. Our purpose in this endeavor is to help our children “see the world through parashat hashavuah glasses”. Our hope is that, when they view their own actions, or try to understand the world we live in, that they use the metaphors provided by the stories in the Torah. Sigmund Freud made the choice, when he was describing psychological behavior, to use Greek mythology. We want to add to the palette of Western metaphor through examples that feature Jewish values and tradition.
However, there are many other stories beyond those we read in the Torah. I have decided to use this space this year to highlight nine Jewish stories from outside the Torah and the Bible. Some of these stories shine a light on all of Jewish understanding; some illustrate individual values in Judaism. In either case, my hope is that these stories will become a part of your vocabulary - of the way that you understand the world, and how you apply your Judaism in your life. This month’s story was one that our Director of Education, Jennifer Levine, shared with our JU students at their recent Shabbaton on the Jewish values of friendship.]
There is a Chasidic tale [of which I have also found a version ascribed by the Catholics to the 16th century saint, Philip Neri] about a member of a small village who came to the rabbi trying to engage in t’shuvah (repentance). The man explained to the rabbi that he had heard something about another person in the village and had spread the story to a few other people. Later, the person confronted him about spreading the tale and was quite angry. The man said that he had apologized and tried to make amends, but the other person still had not forgiven him. Wasn’t apologizing enough? The rabbi thought for a moment and asked if the man had a down pillow. He did, and the rabbi told him to bring it to the center of the town square. The rabbi and the man stood in the middle of the square on a windy day, and the rabbi told the man to rip open the pillow and scatter the feathers within. As the man did so, the wind took the small feathers and spread them all over the square. “Now,” said the rabbi, “you must gather up all the feathers and put them back in the casing, to repair the pillow.” The man said that this was impossible; that the feathers had spread all over the town by now, and probably out into the countryside. They were stuck in windows; blown up on rooftops; carried off by other birds. There was no way to repair the pillow. “Ah,” said the rabbi, “so, too, are your words. Once they have left your mouth, you have no control over where they may spread and your apology cannot gather them back together and repair the damage that you have done.”
The message of this story is both obvious and nuanced. Especially today, in the age of social media, we know that words, or even pictures, that we have shared or posted are very quickly outside of our control. Since the web never forgets, we may find that today’s gossip lasts far longer than even the physical memory of our friends and neighbors. We must be careful about what we say. Classically, Judaism has always considered gossip to be one of the worst sins. In the Talmud, the rabbis said that saying bad things about others was the reason that people got leprosy. They also compared shaming someone to murder - as it caused color to rise in the embarrassed person’s cheeks, which was analogous to spilling blood.
Why were the rabbis so exercised about gossip? Perhaps because it was such a common frailty in human beings. In some communities, one is told not to say even good things about someone else, as they could be misinterpreted, or may not be what the person mentioned desires, or even just as a fence around the law - a practice designed to prohibit the slippery slope. Reputation - a good name - is one of the mechanisms that helps society to interact. We rely on others and we are given consideration based on what they may think of us. Gossip chips away at that social glue.
However, there is a downside to this story as well. T’shuvah is such an important part of Judaism. There are very few sins which we believe cannot be repented. If it is truly impossible to gather all the original feathers back to repair the pillow, then is lesson that forgiveness is impossible for gossip? If so, human frailties will quickly lead to the complete deterioration of civil society. There must be a way to make things right; to reconstruct some kind of pillow, even if not the original stuffing.
The story exists to place a strong check on our to easily indulged in practice of spreading the latest about other people. But, we should not take this lesson so far as to abandon the practice of attempting to piece things back together. We try; we fail - and what makes society resilient is that we can apologize, we can do our best to make things right, and we can forgive others. We need not forget - there is still the patch where the pillow was re-sewn - but we can repair our relationships and move forward together.
Stories can be metaphors to teach us an aspect of behavior; to help us understand ourselves and each other better. We share stories as we share ourselves and our views of the world. Perhaps that is the meaning of Elie Wiesel’s quote above - that we were created so that God could see the created world in as many different ways as possible, to experience and enjoy the panoply of creation.
