parashat tazria Canonical Slander
The Torah portion read in synagogues around the world this week is parashat tazria. Parashat tazria runs from Leviticus chapter 12 verse 1 to the end of chapter 13. In Leviticus chapter 12, parashat tazria deals with the loss of life fluids. The loss of blood and reproductive fluids render the worshiper ritually impure, because the loss of life fluids threatens death. In Leviticus chapter 13 parashat tazria deals with tzaraat, a mysterious skin disease which, like loss of life fluids, also renders the worshiper ritually impure. After the person afflicted is cured of tzaraat, he or she is required to go through a ritual procedure in order to rejoin the worshipping community.
Jewish tradition has interpreted tzaraat to be the supernatural punishment for evil speech. This tradition may be based on the observation that in Numbers 12, God strikes Miriam with tzaraat for badmouthing her brother Aaron.
The Talmud [Arakhin 16b] whimsically derives the same idea from reading the word hammtzora “the one afflicted with tzaraat” as if it were hammotzi ra “the one who gives a bad (name).”
“Said Rish Laqish, ‘What is written, “This is to be the torah of the one afflicted with tzaraat” [Leviticus 14:2]. In other words, “This is to be the torah of whoever gives somebody else a bad name.”’”
Shmot Rabba interprets the miraculous sign God gives Moshe in terms of punishment for evil speech. Exodus 4:1-3.
“Moshe answered, saying, ‘Suppose they won’t believe me or listen to my voice, for they may say “HaShem did not appear unto you?”’ HaShem said to him, ‘What is that in your hand?’ He said, ‘A walking stick.’ He said, ‘Throw it on the ground!’ And he threw it on the ground. It turned into a snake, and Moshe recoiled from it.”
According to Shmot Rabba the snake indicates Moshe has spoken ill like the snake in the Garden of Eden. Moshe had doubted whether the children of Israel would believe. Quoting Shmot Rabba [3.12].
“Moshe had mimicked the deed of the snake who spoke ill of his Creator.”
Whatever its origin, this is how the Jewish tradition understands tzaraat: supernatural punishment for evil speech.
Evil speech is morally wrong because it injures other people. Reputations are vulnerable. Furthermore, physical violence is always preceded by verbal violence. Evil speech and HaShem’s worship are fundamentally incompatible. Evil speech is a form of ritual impurity from which HaShem’s worshipers must be cleansed, like contact with death.
Today I’d like to address a form of evil speech peculiar to Christians. What should we do with statements in canonical Scripture which vilify and defame other people? Because such evil speech is found in the Christian Bible, is it immune from the Torah’s requirement for cleansing? I’m talking about statements like Titus 1:12.
“One of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretins are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true.”
Was everybody on the Island of Crete really a liar, an evil beast, a lazy glutton? What about people living in Crete today, are they also all liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons? This statement is incorrect. People living in Crete are created in God’s own image and likeness. Whatever their present condition, all people living in Crete have the potential to repent and be transformed from liars to truth-tellers, from evil beasts to good neighbors, from lazy gluttons to hard-working weightwatchers. We can’t dismiss all people on Crete with a blanket statement.
Titus 1:12 is an example of ancient slander. The fact is, during the 1st century it was common practice for Hellenistic philosophical schools and rival Jewish sects to engage in slander. In competition with one another, representatives of such schools often uttered violently abusive slander. Slander permeated public discourse. The point is that such ancient slander as we have in Titus 1:12 is not a factual accusation, but a standardized depiction of opponents. Like slavery and gladiatorial combat in the arena, it is one of the less attractive features of ancient Mediterranean culture.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are full of such slander, which one Jewish sect hurled against another Jewish sect. In the Christian Bible too, Christians sometimes slander fellow Christians. An example would be 2Corinthians 11:13-15.
“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Mashiach. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his servants also transform themselves into servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.”
Is it accurate for the Apostle Shaul to say that Christian teachers who disagree with him deliberately transform themselves into apostles with the intent to deceive? Whether rival teachers were right or wrong, they were most probably sincere. 2Corinthians 11:13-15 is invective. Christians during the 1st century engaged in the polemical conventions of their time. They plastered one another with rhetorical exaggerations.
We need to understand how slander functioned. Polemical speech was used to combat opposing interpretations of the truth. Polemic served to fortify the boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders.” Polemic creates a straw man which can be attacked to make your own position appear invincible. Proselytizing also depended on polemics. Missionary speech basically says you’ve got to look at things our way and join us or go to hell. Polemic deploys explosive language that compels the listener to take a stand.
We do well to remember that faith communities are forged in the heat of conflict. Groups develop a sense of their own identity by drawing lines and by highlighting distinctions between “them” and “us.” Without the capacity to make and maintain boundaries, dissonant voices would be smothered by the majority. Offensive as polemic language may sound, polemic language isn’t meant to be offensive. Polemic is verbal self-defense. Ancient slander wasn’t meant to vent unruly passion, but to differentiate insiders from outsiders. Vilification and infective are about group identity. The rhetorical ferocity is indicative of the degree to which the community perceives its survival to be at stake.
Unfortunately, Christian origins are not entirely pure and holy. Christianity had its origin in sectarian conflict. Christians and Jews today belong to different religions because our spiritual forbearers allowed disagreements to escalate to antagonism and antagonism to escalate to exclusion. Our separateness is the result of disobedience. Jews and Christians are separate today because our spiritual forbearers allowed themselves to be governed by ancient cultural conventions rather than by the Holy Spirit. Some of those ancient cultural conventions were ugly. They would have bad repercussions. The ancient cultural convention of slander was loaded with toxic possibilities for the future.
Back when Christians were a minority struggling to define themselves over against other Jews, harsh rhetoric against the Jewish majority may have been excusable. But when that minority became the majority under Constantine, they continued their old slander as if they were still the minority asserting their rights. Language, which once might have been justifiable in the mouth of a persecuted minority, was no longer appropriate once the tables were turned. Unfortunately, Christians kept right on singing the same old tune. But when the power relationship was reversed the old language became deadly. The old language egged Christians on into acts of physical violence against defenseless Jews.
We need to ask the question at what point does the language of self-definition and self-defense become evil speech? I think the position of the speaker is crucial here. It depends whether the speaker is in a position to harm others. When invective and castigation come from the margin, it is defensive. When invective and castigation come from the seat of power, it is oppressive. When the heirs of marginal language become the new establishment, their old language loses its legitimacy. If they continue to repeat their old language, the once rhetorical outsider, who is now the real outsider, will be placed in jeopardy.
When the new group in power sought to put its old rhetoric into practice the context changed. At that point the polemic ceased to be merely the culturally standard abuse of one’s opponents and came to be taken literally, as expressing truth — a truth the church was now in a position to enforce. The result was centuries of libel, racism, and genocide. The fruit of evil speech has been bitter indeed.
Let’s look at an example where the Christian Bible has been used to demonize Jews. In John 8:44-47, Jesus is described in an embittered dispute with “the Jews.”
“You are of your father the Devil, and the desires of you father you desire to do. He was a murder from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks his own language, for he is a liar and the father of lying. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears God’s words. You do not hear because you are not of God.”
For centuries Christians understood this polemical language to mean Jews aren’t human beings and can be exterminated like vermin. Devils, after all, don’t have human rights. Christians took rhetorical language literally. Jesus says Jews aren’t from God, so Jews aren’t created in God’s image and likeness. Jews were martyred because the Bible says Jews are children of the Devil.
This passage serves as a very sobering reminder that once written down, words leave their writer’s control; that nobody can expect to utter violent words without facing violent consequences. The Bible demonstrates that, with minimal effort, “the good news” can be twisted into the bad news.
Christians today must defang and declaw this language. We must recognize that canonical slander is not an absolute statement of revealed truth. Being written in the Bible doesn’t make slander right. Christians who claim anything and everything written in the Bible is the voice of God speaking directly to them are simply mistaken. They don’t understand that God has chosen to work out his purpose through frail human instrumentalities. There are ethical, historical, and theological considerations to discerning God’s voice. We cannot read the Bible straight off the page. Morally, there’s no excuse for evil speech, not for evil speech based on the Bible, not even for evil speech in the Bible.
In reading our sacred Scriptures, we discover who we are and what God has called us to do. We stand under the judgment of a text that calls the ethos of our surrounding culture and our attachment to it into question. At the same time, Christians are also responsible for a Bible that comes wrapped in polemical discourse. The challenge of taming dangerous speech demands a carefully nuanced relationship with the Bible. As Christians our Bible not only joins us to the story of our God; our Bible also joins us to his people Israel. The same Bible that slanders certain human beings as evil beasts, deceptive angels, and children of the Devil, also teaches that all human beings are brothers and sisters. The same Bible that slanders outsiders also teaches us to love our enemies. We would do well to attend to the words of Yaaqov. James 3:2-10
“For we all stumble in many things. If someone doesn’t stumble in word, he is the perfect man, able to bridle the whole body. If we place bits in horses’ mouths so that they obey us, we turn the whole body. Behold also the ships: though so large and driven by fierce wind, it is turned by a very small rudder wherever the impulse of the steersman desires. Thus also the tongue is a small member who boasts great things. Behold, how great a forest how big a fire ignites! Indeed, the tongue is fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue sits among our members, defiling the whole body and inflaming the course of existence and inflamed by Gehinnom. For every specie of beast and bird and reptile and marine life is tamed and has been tamed by the human species. But the tongue no human is able to tame. An unruly evil; full of death-bearing poison. By it we bless HaShem our Father; by it we curse humans made in God’s image. From the same mouth proceeds blessing and curse. My brothers and sisters, these things ought not to be so.”
As Christians we should not depend purely on sociological dynamics for self-definition and group cohesion. The Church cannot continue to be based on the exclusion of outsiders. If the story of Jesus teaches us anything, it teaches that God treats outsiders like insiders, and ultimately we must learn to do the same. The kingdom of Heaven is precisely about that: learning to treat outsiders like insiders. Our self-identity must come to be based on our distinctive mission task, not on our differences with rival faith communities. We’re certainly entitled to our differences, but we cannot allow them to define us. When we define ourselves by our differences, we’re allowing others to control us. This diminishes God’s sovereignty. We must be defined by God’s call to us, not by our differences with his other children. Our distinctives are important enough in their own right, but we must refuse to be controlled by them.
A further reason we cannot take canonical vilification of outsiders as absolute, is because the Apostolic Writings are not God’s final word to his people. At the time they were completed, Jews and Christians might have supposed that their respective additions to the Hebrew Bible were all that God would need to say. Jews might have supposed the Mishna was the only addition necessary. Christians might have supposed the Apostolic Writings were the only addition necessary. Subsequent history has shown this assumption to be premature. In order to remain faithful to God’s leading under new circumstances, Jews and Christians have both required further normative decisions beyond their initial additions to the Hebrew Bible. God’s word continues to accompany his people in their walk with him. While the canon is definitive, the canon is not final. The Apostolic Writings have turned out to be limited. The way we read the Apostolic Writings must respect their limitations. Vilification of outsiders is a canonical limitation, not a canonical norm.
Today the Bible challenges us as never before. Christians must find ways to dismantle the violent polemic against outsiders without destroying the Church created, in part, by violent polemic against outsiders. We don’t want to discredit the Church. God loves the Church, even though the Church’s origins aren’t squeaky clean. The Church is a human product as well as a divine creation, and no human product is entirely untainted by sin and strife. It would be a mistake to judge the Church strictly in terms of its origins.
Evil speech is not a problem confined to the pages of Holy Writ. In our personal speech, as well as our speech together as a body, we have a problem with slander. Christians have systematically misrepresented Jews and Judaism. As Seventh-day Adventists we’ve been reluctant to face the issue because we don’t wish to undermine Ellen White or the authority of inherited tradition. But if we don’t fess up, we will undermine the moral integrity of the Seventh-day Adventist movement. Nobody said truth comes cheap. Particularly those of us interested in building bridges with the Jewish community must candidly come to terms with anti-Jewish slander in our midst.
Let me give an example chosen almost at random from the writings of Ellen White. Any passage where Ellen White discusses Israel or Jews or the Pharisees contains similar misrepresentations.
“Among those whom the Jews styled heathen were men who had a better understanding of the Scripture prophecies concerning Messiah than had the teachers in Israel. There were some who hoped for his coming as a deliverer from sin. Philosophers endeavored to study into the mystery of the Hebrew economy. But the bigotry of the Jews hindered the spread of the light. Intent on maintaining the separation between themselves and other nations, they were unwilling to impart the knowledge they still possessed concerning the symbolic service.”
That is from Desire of Ages, page 33. Ellen White’s depiction is sheer slander. There’s not a shred of historical evidence for what she claims. On the contrary, it flies in the face of everything we know about 1st century Judaism.
Seventh-day Adventists are big on the Decalogue, but we act as though we had special immunity to number nine. The ninth precept of the Decalogue expressly forbids false witness against the neighbor. Seventh-day Adventists must come to regard Jewish people as neighbors. False witness against our Jewish neighbors should be considered a flagrant violation of the Decalogue.
In order to repair the damage we will need to dismantle some of our past rhetoric against outsiders. We also need some safeguards in place to prevent further slander. We have to realize that not everything we’ve been taught, even by good Christian teachers, is necessarily so. I would suggest we must be willing to submit old assumptions, old stereotypes, and doctrines to critical examination. We must be willing to verify. Accusations and assertions which don’t hold up to public scrutiny must be dropped. We must be willing to implement the gift of discernment. It’s not that we don’t know better, but we allow exceptions. Too often we let Seventh-day Adventist speakers and writers off the hook with the excuse that since they’re addressing a low-brow audience, they’re not accountable to high standards of truth-telling. This is demeaning both to our leaders and their listeners. Seventh-day Adventists should tell the truth, even when they can get by with less.
Words are dangerous and have long-term risks. In parashat tazria evil speech is a form of ritual impurity from which God’s worshipers must be cleansed. We all need cleansing, not only new mothers and people who’ve been healed from the skin condition called tzaraat. parashat tazria is for all of us.
