The story of Miriam speaking to Aharon about their brother Moshe is the Torah's central cautionary tale of lashon hara, and many understand this to be the reason for the dedicated commandment to remember the incident (Deut. 24:9; see Nachmanides ad loc.). If that is the case, a significant question emerges from one Midrashic opinion (Sifrei, Bamidbar 99) which maintains that Moses himself was present at the time. Apparently, this did not change the classification of the conversation as lashon hara.
The detail is significant because of a remarkable statement that appears in the Talmud (Arakhin 15b-16a): "any matter said in front of the subject is not lashon hara." The statement is hard to understand. While the disloyalty of speaking against another behind his back is clear, doing so in his presence would seem to compound the offense, since the subject is being disparaged and humiliated at once. There are indeed some authorities who assume that the statement is merely a minority view and not the accepted legal conclusion, an approach that appears to be the position of Maimonides (Hil. Deiot 7:5, with Kessef Mishneh; see Resp. Mahari Bruna, 38). Accordingly, the Chafetz Chaim (Hilkhot Lashon Hara 3:1) rules that speaking lashon hara about another is a transgression, and doing so in the presence of the subject is significantly worse. Others, however, have taken the statement to be normative, and have offered conceptual readings that endeavor to explain how it could be that speech in front of the subject is excluded from lashon hara.
The medieval authority Rabbi Eliezer of Metz (Sefer Yereim 191), drawing on a verse in Jeremiah (6:28), "walking with slanders, they are bronze and iron," understands the imagery to mean that the speaker of lashon hara has two facades: one which is "bronze," glimmering and pleasant, and one which is "iron," the deadly material of the sword. In other words, the connotation is one who is two-faced, friendly in the presence of the subject but baring his weapons when the subject is absent. Thus, the speaker who openly disparages the subject to his face, while guilty of many things, is nonetheless not engaged in lashon hara.
The rabbinic philosopher Rabbi Judah Lowe (1520-1609), known as the Maharal of Prague, in his Netivot Olam (Netiv HaLashon, ch. 7), posited a theory along similar lines. The Maharal's language is somewhat difficult, but his position appears to be that Lashon hara does not apply when the subject is present because that prohibition is directed specifically to speech as a unique tool of harm that can be perpetrated from a distance. In the presence of the subject, there are other ways in which one can directly engage that target; the importance of speech as a weapon is less. Also of significance is the fact that the subject can respond to the allegations.
The Chafetz Chaim (Hil. Lashon Hara Klal 2, BMC 2) challenged the Maharal based on the paradigmatic case of Miriam's comments. If, according to that view in the Sifrei, Moses was present, then the central biblical example of lashon hara is itself a counter-example to the Maharal's principle. Addressing this dispute points to an essential understanding of what lashon hara is.
The Offense of Unfair Judgment
One way to address the question raised by the Miriam case is to note that the Maharal's theory rests on the expectation that the subject of the speech, if present, would defend himself, thereby neutralizing the threat. Moses, however, was a unique exception, since the Torah describes him in this very passage as exceedingly humble, with the implication that he would not respond even when his presence ordinarily would have made a response possible (see Harchavat Gevul Yaavetz, pp. 92-93). On this reading, Miriam's words constituted lashon hara despite Moses's presence because the usual mechanism of protection did not function in his particular case.
Others take a different path of explanation (see R. Yitzchak Hutner, Pachad Yitzchak, Shavuot, ma'amar 3, as well as Iggerot, p. 268, and Sefer Zikaron LeMaran Baal HaPachad Yitzchak, pp. 333-334; R. Moshe Miernik, in Torat HaAdam LeAdam, V, pp. 178-186, and see as well his essay in R. Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht, Asufat Maarakhot, BeMidbar, pp. 169-179; R. Moshe Schapiro, in BeYad HaLashon, pp. 373-379. A similar approach can be found in Zera Chaim, pp. 318-319, and a more expansive version of this approach, in the context of a broader analysis of the lashon hara prohibition, authored by R. Ephraim Natan Rothschild, appeared in the journal Kol HaTorah, LXIV, pp. 157-164. A critique of this approach, and an alternative, can be found in R. Avraham Gurewitz, Ohr Avraham to Hilkhot Taaniyot, Kuntres Seder HaKinot, #2).
They note that there are essentially two forms of lashon hara. One is the conveyance of a damaging factual statement about another, an exposure of harmful material. In this form, the presence of the subject would indeed neutralize the threat, since the subject can correct, contextualize, or otherwise respond to the factual claim. This may be the form the Maharal has in mind. The other, however, goes to the essence of what the prohibition is about, and is probably the reason that the first form is treated as severely as it is: the conveyance of unfavorable judgment. Factual episodes are merely vehicles by which such judgments travel. With this second form, the presence of the subject offers no real protection.
What Miriam said about her brother was not a misstatement of fact, and there does not appear to have been any factual matter for Moses to correct. The Torah does not explicitly say what Miriam said. The commentaries discuss the offense in terms of judgment, an assessment of Moses as comparable to others without regard for his unique status, or a failure to extend the benefit of the doubt to him. The offense lay in the interpretive frame Miriam imposed, not in any datum she conveyed.
When the judgment is the offense, the subject's presence offers no real defense, because there is nothing concrete to rebut. The subject can correct a misreported fact. He cannot easily correct an inference, a tone, a framing, an implication. An unfavorable judgment can be both false and unfalsifiable; the listeners have already been given the lens through which to view the subject, and no statement from the subject can make them unsee the image that framing has painted.
The contemporary case of Israel and its critics displays this in a particularly damaging fashion. Israel is, in a sense, perpetually "present" in the global conversation about its conduct. Every charge is heard, and every accusation can be engaged and contested by its spokespersons. By the Maharal's logic, this should be the most protected position imaginable. The reality is otherwise, because the disparagement is not at the level of fact, where defenses can engage, but at the level of subjective and often arbitrary or biased judgment, which is essentially immune to defenses. Each rebuttal is itself absorbed into the interpretive frame and read as further evidence of the trait being charged. This is the precise terrain on which lashon hara does its most lasting damage, and it is the terrain where no defense can help.
The Tosafists' Perception of Human Nature
A different reading of the talmudic rule, addressing it together with a closely parallel statement that what is spoken "in front of three," in other words in public, is not subject to the prohibition of lashon hara, was offered by the Tosafists (Bava Batra 39b s.v. leit, and Arakhin 15b s.v. kol milta). They limit both cases to a speaker whose statement is genuinely ambiguous, and could be heard as either positive or negative. The negative reading is plausible when the speaker is talking in private, where his words might be taken either way; in public, and especially in the subject's presence, it is unimaginable that the speaker would have intended his words to be heard as malicious, and the listeners will assume he meant the positive reading.
The Chafetz Chaim (Hil. Lashon Hara 2:2) formalizes this in two possible models. In one, the audience functions as a check on the speaker, who will hold himself to a positive message because of who is listening. In the other, the audience functions as a clarification of the speaker's intent, since the listeners will assume the positive reading from the fact that the speaker was willing to say it openly. Either way, the operative premise is the same: public speech, in the presence of the subject, is reliably more decent than private speech, because no one would be malicious in such a setting.
The Tosafists are predicating the rule on a feature of human nature, that the visibility of the subject and the presence of an audience exert moral pressure on the speaker, who will modulate his language accordingly. The whole rule rests on the assumption that this pressure is real.
What happens, however, when that pressure no longer exists?
The New World of Social Media
Social media has produced, on a vast and accelerating scale, a counterexample to the Tosafists' premise. The subjects of disparagement, in many cases, have full access to what is being said about them; they may also be tagged or addressed in the second person, which only intensifies the dynamic. The audiences are larger than any the Tosafists could have imagined. By every external metric the Tosafists' license should apply with maximal force; one would expect the language to be at its most measured.
The opposite has happened. Psychologists refer to the "online disinhibition effect" to describe the observed reality that one who is operating behind the protection of a computer screen often becomes disconnected from ordinary inhibitions such as moral standards, sensitivity, and empathy towards others, and becomes capable of egregious interpersonal behavior that he would otherwise abhor (the term is associated with Dr. John Suler; for an extensive treatment, see Elias Aboujaoude, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, pp. 40-42).
Several factors converge. Being physically disconnected from the subject decreases the ability to empathize. The context deemphasizes personal identity, a phenomenon psychologist Philip Zimbardo identified decades ago and termed "deindividuation," in which the assimilation of a person into a larger crowd loosens his attachment to his personal standards. Anonymity, where it exists, insulates the speaker from external consequence and from internal self-recognition. Studies (described in detail by Francesca Gino in her Sidetracked, pp. 199-203) have shown that even minor cues of anonymity, such as a darkly lit room, can produce a marked increase in dishonest behavior, despite the fact that the participants are not actually less visible. The mere sense of being unseen alters conduct.
One example is particularly telling for the question of presence. The empirical evidence of online disinhibition can be observed in the comments sections of news sites when a tragedy is reported. The commenters are aware that the family members will usually see these comments, and yet allow themselves to write things that they would never express verbally to a mourner. The Tosafists' check fails completely. The presence of the subject, which was once understood to constrain the speaker, has become a feature of the spectacle rather than a brake on it.
Empathy itself appears to have eroded under these conditions. A 2010 University of Michigan study found that college students are forty percent less empathetic than their counterparts thirty years prior, a finding the authors associated in part with social media (cited in Susan Cain, Quiet, p. 141). Adam Smith observed two and a half centuries ago that a man who would not sleep at night over the loss of his little finger would "snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren" so long as he never saw them (Theory of Moral Sentiments). The internet was once imagined as a corrective to this distance, allowing exposure to the suffering of strangers far away. Often, the actual effect has run in the other direction; the screen restores the invisibility that Smith identified as the enabling condition of moral indifference, even when the subject's name and face are technically visible on it.
The cultural changes of the internet have also weakened the process of repair that normally follows an offense. As Sherry Turkle observes in Alone Together (pp. 233-234), the conditions of online communication blur the line between confession and apology, allowing the speaker to discharge an obligation in a medium that can require very little of him. Forgiveness, she notes, follows from the experience of empathy, in which one sees that another has acknowledged having caused hurt. When the channel through which the acknowledgment travels strips out the cues by which empathy is experienced, the entire transaction is impoverished; both parties get used to getting less. This matters greatly for lashon hara, which presupposes not only a culture in which speech is bounded but also a culture in which the rupture caused by improper speech can be genuinely mended.
The medium also corrupts the message itself. In his book Mindwise, the psychologist Nicholas Epley describes a study in which communications through text were correctly understood only about half the time, in contrast with the same messages transmitted over the phone (pp. 108-109; a similar finding, also at fifty percent, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is reported by John Freeman in The Tyranny of E-mail). What is most striking is that, regardless of the error rate, the speaker consistently felt he was transmitting the message clearly, and the listener equally frequently believed he was interpreting it correctly. The exchange becomes, in Epley's phrase, one in which both sides are "amazed that the other can be so stupid".
The authors of Cyberbullying: Bullying in the Digital Age (pp. 87-88) note that this same dynamic plays a substantial role in the escalation of online cruelty: what may begin as innocent teasing over text or instant messaging can be read as something other than what was intended, and the absence of contextual cues, the wink or the smile that softens a remark, allows even a benign comment to be received as an attack.
This is avak lashon hara, the category that the Talmud (Bava Batra 165a) said is impossible to fully escape, scaled by orders of magnitude. Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Hil. Deiot 7:4) defines avak lashon hara as positive statements that unwittingly yield negative interpretations, statements made with benevolent intent that are nonetheless heard as malicious. The whole question presupposes a communication environment in which the listener has some access to the speaker's tone and bearing. Strip those away, and even the most innocent statement is one click away from being read as the worst version of itself, and is then forwarded as such.
There is a further inversion of the Tosafists' premise to note. It might be assumed that the wider the audience, the more its presence would moderate the speech, since the listeners would calibrate their interpretation against one another and against the presence of the subject. Contemporary research on group polarization suggests the opposite. As William H. Davidow notes in Overconnected, the internet is unmatched as a vehicle for thought contagions, since "potential believers can find like-minded groups just by doing a simple Internet search," and the resulting clusters reinforce rather than challenge each other's interpretations (pp. 156-159). The likeminded group does not moderate; it amplifies whichever reading the group is already inclined toward, almost invariably the less generous one.
The responsibilities of the listener are correspondingly transformed. The prohibition of "accepting" lashon hara presupposes a recipient who exercises some judgment about what he hears. On the internet, clicking on a link, sharing a post, and forwarding a message function as endorsements and as further amplification. The line between merely receiving a message and actively participating in its spread has been blurred almost to vanishing. Every reader is, by the small motion of his thumb, also a publisher.
A final irony deserves attention. The premise of lashon hara is that even factually true information can present an incomplete or unjustly harmful picture; the prohibition therefore demands a balancing of context, intent, and proportion that goes beyond the question of whether a statement is technically accurate. The internet, however, has produced a parallel commitment to comprehensive factual recording, on the assumption that more information always serves truth. Technology critic Evgeny Morozov, in To Save Everything, Click Here (pp. 270-280), argues that the very thoroughness of online archiving can be at odds with the deeper truth a complete picture requires, since the act of preservation favors what is easily recorded and underrepresents what is not, producing a hyperaccurate record that is nonetheless misleading. The point is precisely the one lashon harahas always pressed: that an item of speech can be true in the narrow sense and unfair in the larger sense, and that the obligation runs to the larger sense.
The Contemporary Challenge
The world has changed. This is not a call to discard the benefits of the internet and social media, which include the rapid sharing of Torah, the extension of kindness across distances, and the protection of the innocent through the transmission of information that might otherwise be suppressed. It is, however, a recognition that the conditions presupposed by some of the halakhic categories no longer hold in the most common arenas of contemporary speech.
The Tosafists found in the presence of the subject and the publicity of the audience a guarded license, resting on assumptions about what people will and will not do when they can be seen and answered. The contemporary environment has tested those assumptions and revealed them to no longer be true. The presence that once operated as a check no longer operates as one. The audience that once moderated now amplifies, in the worst direction. The subject who once could rely on his presence to discipline the speech around him now finds his presence noted as a feature of the disparagement rather than a deterrent to it.
The eternal relevance of the categories of lashon hararequires an awareness of what has changed in the realities to which those categories apply. When the older intuition was that presence and publicity would restrain the speech, the newer reality is that they will often encourage it. Acting responsibly under the current conditions means treating presence and publicity not as safe harbors but as the locations where the most damage may now be done.
A single narrative detail in the story of Miriam, the question of whether Moses was present, yields insight into both the nature of the prohibition and the world in which its values are needed more than ever. The story shows that the heart of lashon hara is the conveying of unfair judgment, against which presence offers no certain protection; while our experiences show that previous assumptions of decency and discretion can no longer be taken for granted. The commandment to remember Miriam, therefore, is also a commandment to remember what lashon hara truly is, and to bring that awareness along as one navigates a new world.
