Good Speech in a Bad World
Speech Ethics in Mishpatim
“You shall not revile God, nor put a curse upon a chieftain among your people” (Exodus 22:27)
“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. But “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. —E.M. Forster
Abaye taught: You shall not put a curse…Rava taught: among your people. (Bava Metzia 48b)
What is the relationship between cursing God and cursing a leader? The spare Biblical text leaves the causal and connective reasoning up to us. An obvious answer is that human leaders embody and represent a higher authority. To curse them is to curse God. But what about illegitimate leaders? Must we really hold our tongues? Bava Batra 4a teaches that we must. We must respect authorities—we must respect the “office” itself—even when they are in the wrong. The Babylonian sage, Abaye, also holds a version of this position. For him, it is wrong to curse not just leaders, but any Jew, since the word “chieftain” in his expansive (and somewhat democratic) reading refers to any member of the tribe. Cursing is beyond the pale, even when dealing with wrongdoers.
But shouldn’t we instead say that bad leaders have already created the conditions whereby God has lost legitimacy? Often people leave religion not because they have a theological crisis, but because they have a human one. A traumatic encounter with a religious authority spoils the entire endeavor. The verse is descriptively true, the cursing of God and the cursing of people often come together. Perhaps it is the corruption of leaders that is the first curse and the person reacting to that corruption is simply naming the damage that has already been done. Why lay the onus of “respect” on the victims?
In his disagreement with Abaye, Rava argues that authority can be lost. It is conferred only insofar as the leader acts on behalf of the people. Corrupt authorities must be cursed. While Abaye holds a certain basic level of decorum or, if you will, “civil discourse,” as requisite no matter what, Rava makes these norms conditional. There are times when one has a duty to curse—to speak out negatively—against evil, especially amongst leaders, especially amongst one’s fellows (where there is extra pressure not to air the dirty laundry).
The same text leads to two opposite conclusions. One says that when we engage in toxic speech—even speech not directed explicitly at God—we effectively engage in blasphemy. Another says that when we maintain a veneer of politeness when we ought to be turning the temperature up—we effectively engage in blasphemy.
The question of how to relate to people we disagree with, and especially people in authority (where power is unequally held) is not a question that cuts along partisan lines. Instead, it seems to be a question that separates moderates or centrists from radicals, Whigs from Revolutionaries. It’s a debate as much about temperament as it is about reason. Long before modern political thought enshrined a right to free speech, Jewish tradition has grappled with the question of “speech ethics”—when do we have an obligation to refrain from cursing (even when we think we are in the right) and when do we have an obligation to name the curses in our midst, even when doing so may feel as if it is we who are the ones causing the problem?
To qualify as a plot, says E.M. Forster, a story must show causation, not just sequence. The Torah, here, does not give a causal link between cursing God and cursing people, perhaps out of respect for the complexity of this relation. Sometimes, cursing God leads to cursing people; sometimes cursing people leads to cursing God; and sometimes, cursing people is the only way to protect oneself from cursing God. In Abaye’s interpretation of the verse there are two elements: God and people. In Rava’s there are three: God, the people, and individuals. You can’t curse the people as a whole, but you can curse individuals who endanger the people.
While Abaye’s reading seems closer to the plain meaning of the text, Rava’s reading feels inventive. What justifies such invention? Rava is well known (see Sanhedrin 74a) as a commentator who used “s’vara” (moral reasoning). Rava reads the text in such a way that it accords with his sense of justice and truth. Perhaps Abaye does, too. But at a meta-level, Rava’s inventive message matches his inventive form. Don’t let Torah be a curse, he seems to be saying. Don’t have a theology that leads you to curse God. If one’s theology is threatened by inconvenient realities, one has to change the theology, not hide from or deny the realities. Refraining from cursing a bad leader isn’t going to make the thing itself better, it’s just sugar-coating. Sometimes you have to say what seems blasphemous to save God’s name from degradation.
On the other hand, Abaye’s perspective is also good. A world in which there is no end to cursing, a world in which cursing is the norm, is one in which people cannot act or converse in good faith. It is a world in which we assume the worst of people, when what many people need is not to be cursed, but simply to be “informed”—this is Abaye’s argument—of their wrongdoing. Rava thinks people will only reform their evil ways in response to a threat. Abaye thinks they simply need to be educated. Both have their time and place. The difficulty is in the case by case application. Still, at a cultural level, their disagreement feels contemporary. Should leaders, or people in power, or simply people in general, be held in a priori suspicion, or in a priori trust? Nobody wants to be a dupe. But a world without trust is immiserating in its own way. Both worlds can end up feeling like ones in which God is cursed, religion poisoned. Human affairs are a theological affair and vice versa. Neither blanket trust nor blanket suspicion of people or leaders saves God’s name from effectively being cursed.
The law of not cursing leaders appears in parashat Mishpatim, the section of the Torah that directly follows the giving of the 10 commandments. We have already been told there not to take God’s name in vain. The follow-up law is thus seemingly redundant. Yet Mishpatim places a different emphasis on the law by giving us an implied backstory. If you want to realize the headline principles of the Ten Commandments you have to solve the interpersonal and social questions that vex people day to day. The Ten Commandments don’t get violated in a vacuum. And Mishpatim concerns the question of what it takes to build a good society—“a plausibility structure”—in which people can be faithful to the covenant. That matters as much, if not more, than the 10 commandments themselves.
The fact that the law of cursing leaders is contested and contestable raises a practical problem for anyone seeking to follow the law. It is an aporia, a situation in which reasonable, well-intentioned people fundamentally diverge on what is right. But the law could have been less ambiguous; it could have been more detailed. Perhaps the Torah is structured in such a way as to ennoble and challenge us through this meta-debate about what constitutes good speech. Perhaps it is structured in such a way as to curtail our tendency to absolutism. The answer doesn’t lie strictly with Abaye or Rava. There are circumstances when we ought not curse and times when we ought to. Torah can guide and inspire our decision-making, but it can’t relieve us of the burden of choice.
Some of us are naturally drawn to moderation; others of us have a more prophetic sensibility (Political theorist, Teresa Bejan dates contemporary “call out” culture to Martin Luther, but perhaps it goes all the way back to the Biblical Elijah.) Moderation in the face of evil is wrong. But speaking vitriolic truth to power doesn’t guarantee that things will improve; they may even get worse. Neither tactic or worldview can solve the problem of legitimacy. Nonetheless, a society in which leadership is perceived as illegitimate is one in which God’s legitimacy is also strained. Whether for God’s sake or our own, we have an imperative to build institutions that are legitimate. And to make matters more complex, in our modern age, that requires us to make room for people who question our legitimacy. The work is never done, but we are not free to desist from it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
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