Lesson #78: The Investigation
Let us imagine an eighth-grade boy who is applying to high schools, confident that he will be accepted to the high school of his choice. After all, he is well-behaved, receives excellent grades, has outstanding middot, and spends time learning Torah. However, to his and his parents’ astonishment, the school which they assumed would happily accept him sent him a rejection letter.
The father phones the school and asks why they rejected his child, despite his outstanding academic record and behavior. As he speaks with the administrators, the father gets the sense that the high school received an unflattering report about the boy from the elementary school.
Fuming, the father begins an all-out investigation, determined to get to the bottom of the matter. He speaks to everyone in the elementary school – the principal, the Rebbe, and all the teachers – intent on finding out who sent the negative report about his son that led to his rejection from the high school. He demands that they tell him who said what about his beloved child.
This man, essentially, is trying to force people to speak רכילות, to divulge information about what others said about his son. As we have seen, the prohibition of רכילות forbids telling somebody about how another person spoke negatively about him, or did something to harm him. But not only is it forbidden to speak רכילות, it is also forbidden to urge or coerce people to speak רכילות. By pressuring the administrators and teachers in the school to divulge who gave the negative report about his son, this father has violated a halachic prohibition. And if somebody indeed divulges this information, then the father violates also the prohibition against intentionally listening to רכילות. He transgresses yet a third prohibition if he accepts and believes the information told to him.
In short, it is forbidden to speak רכילות, to listen to רכילות, to believe רכילות, and to apply pressure upon somebody to share רכילות.
When we suspect that somebody spoke negatively about us, our reaction should not be to start investigating in an attempt to find out who it was and what he said. Such investigating is strictly forbidden. We should instead forget about it and move on, reinforcing our belief that no human being can determine our future; our success depends solely on Hashem, and nothing that anybody says about us can have any effect on Hashem’s decision. We should be at least as worried about what Hashem thinks of us than about what other people think of us.
When we live with this outlook, we will not be bothered by what other people say or think, and we will direct our efforts toward the fulfillment of Hashem’s will, rather than being distracted by what other people are saying.