Do you know the secret of the Chafetz Chaim?
When I say “the Chafetz Chaim,” you think of a person, the saintly Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan who passed away in 1933 and authored many important works including the one that was his greatest pride, the Sefer Chafetz Chaim.
That work is on the laws of proper speech and it carries this title because of a passage in Tehillim 34, “Mi ha’ish hachafetz chayim… Who desires life, loving each day to see good? Then guard your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit….” This verse describes one who is careful in speech as one who desires life, implying that somehow careful speech is the key to life. The Talmud and the Midrash in fact tell parallel stories of a sage who used to go into the marketplace and say, “Man ba’i chayei…Who desires life? Who desires life?” People would crowd around, expecting a miracle drug, but instead he would read to them this verse and tell them that within it lies the real secret to longevity.
During the Yamim Noraim, we used the term chafetz chaim in our initial insertion into the Amidah addressing the “Melech Chafetz ba’Chaim—the King Who desires life,” asking Him to inscribe us for life. What can we derive from the Chafetz Chaim’s life’s work that will help us meet our own desire for life?
The first slanderer, the first baa’al halashon, was—according to our Sages—the snake of the Garden of Eden. The snake came to Chava and tried to get her to defy God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, a tree that could have accurately been called the Tree of Death as God had warned that eating from it would render them mortal.
But the snake did not quite represent the truth. Instead, the snake said to Chava, “Didn’t God tell you to refrain from eating from all of the trees of the garden?” That would have been hard. After all, this was the Garden of Eden— Paradise. The trees were attractive and delicious. But God does not want you to enjoy them.
God is out to get you.
“No,” responded Chava, “He wants us to eat from those trees. He wants us to enjoy the beautiful world He created for us and He told us to eat from those wonderful trees. It is only this tree, the Tree of Death, that He warned us to avoid because He wants to protect us from harm.”
The snake did not accept this. “No, you will not die if you eat from it, you will actually grow greater than you are now and become like God Himself. God does not want you to have it because He wants to hold back from you that which is most precious.” If the snake could not get Chava to see God as withholding from them everything, at least he could get her to see that He would withhold from them the really good stuff.
That was it— the first bit of Lashon Hara. The snake slandered God. The snake took a relationship of giving and goodness and twisted it in Chava’s mind so that instead of seeing herself as blessed to live in Paradise, provided by God with everything wonderful, she would see herself as cursed for not having the one thing that was withheld from her. And her loving Creator became instead—in her mind—an insecure villain. That perspective—that God and religion deprive us of opportunity rather than provide us with endless possibilities—has led so many away from following Hashem’s word.
This perspective drains us of the desire for life. Life is nourished by a sense of gratitude, of satisfaction, of feeling like you are in a good place, blessed, cared for and nurtured. When instead you see yourself as stuck and manipulated, limited and deprived at every turn, when the cup is always half empty because the host kept the other half for himself, then life is not sweet and the host is nobody you want to be around.
Yes, on the day they ate from that tree they would die. Not because its fruit was poisonous, but because if they ate it, it was a sign that they were feeling cheated without it. If they ate it, it was because they felt that God was really out to get them. That worry and insecurity, that sense of being deprived and cheated, would eat away at their kishkes. That kind of thinking does not spell life. If we want life, “oheiv yamim lirot tov,” we will open our eyes to the good and blessing in our lives, to see the good and blessing that Hashem is always seeking to give us and the good and blessing in the people around us.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer is executive vice president of the Orthodox Union (OU), the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization.
