“Guard Your Tongue:” Lashon Hara and the Rhetoric of Chafetz Chaim

Abstract

This article explores an understudied aspect of Jewish rhetoric—restrictions against speaking lashon hara (evil speech, libel, gossip)—to contribute to the field’s understanding of Jewish rhetorical traditions. In reading Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s (1838-1933) treatise Chafetz Chaim (1873), this article shows how Jewish speech laws function as an ontological, nonagonistic, and ethical community-oriented rhetoric. In reading the Chafetz Chaim, this article shows that Kagan’s exigency in compiling the speech laws was in response to anti-Semitism and Enlightenment era Haskalah Judaism. The dialogic rhetoric found in Chafetz Chaim provides ethical and methodological lessons for contemporary rhetorical scholars, lessons that resonate with important twentieth century Jewish rhetorics.