As Rabbi Daniel Travis tells it, a not yet frum cab driver
that he knows on first name basis
complained to him that he often drives seminary girls and teachers in the
various seminaries, and all too often the ride is laced with loshon hora from
pick up to drop off.
That it is an ongoing Chillul Hashem there's nothing
to talk, but what motivates otherwise presumably very religious and respectable
people to carry on this way? Rabbi Travis
says that they have no nachas ruach or
peace of mind until they have spoken their loshon hora.
Very nice, but why is this?
He tells us in the name of the Gra (the Vilna Gaon) that
anytime a person does something it creates a ruach. In the same vein, Rabbi Chaim Volozhin states
in Avos that every time you do a mitzvah/aveira you create your Olam
Haba/Gehenom. As you do the mitzvah/aveira
it pushes you to do more of the same according to the principle of mitzva gorreres
mitzva (one mitzva leads to another mitzva) and aveira gorreres aveira.
The bigger the aveira, the bigger the ruach that is created
and consequently, the bigger the taiva (desire) for that aveira.
Rabbi Travis informs us that the biggest mitzvah a person
can possibly involve himself with is Limud HaTorah with the flip side being
letzones, devarim b'tailm, and loshon hora which are the opposite from Torah. And the reason that people constantly repeat
loshon hora and get great satisfaction from it is because the ruach that people
initially create with their loshon hora gives them a geshmack in coming back
for seconds, thirds etc., which for some unfortunates translate into and
endless loop.
So at the end of the day it comes out that it's an addiction
of sorts because the more a person
speaks loshon hora the more he feels pushed to repeat the performance. And it's an addiction that one is liable for by
virtue of putting himself in such a position to begin with.
Given what we have put forth it should be obvious why the
basic principle of loshon hora (or the first line of defense, as it were) is
not restraint, for how can we talk
about restraint when a person's urge
to speak loshon hora is in a certain sense out of control?
The emes is that the numero uno foundation of loshon hora is
self-respect. It's below us to dwell on
the negative and you do so by speaking derogatorily about a fellow Jew.
It's a sin against yourself.
