Good morning. Welcome back to Torah Tuesday. Our 11.45 session Eastern Time involves proper speech. We should study it every day. We review it every week. In the cycle of the Chafetz Chaim, we have a daily calendar developed many years ago. And we try to keep close to it in this weekly session, picking highlights of the current week.
Today, I want to talk about something we learned about before: if someone has been hurt physically, financially, or emotionally by another person, and he wants to reclaim his loss, or you want to prevent a recurrence, depending on the nature of the hurt, the Chafetz Chaim says you're allowed to invoke self-defense. Now, besides being allowed, this allowance is not an open Heter (permission to do so); it's a situation where a person can in fact do something, can in fact speak negative facts about someone else, and yet have permission to do so. But the restrictions are also important to follow. Otherwise, it's straight out, says the Chafetz Chaim: one must be extremely careful that none of the seven conditions of To'elet (constructive purpose) are omitted. He has to be extremely careful, or he will be easily trapped in the snare of the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination) through this license.
So the Chafetz Chaim, at that point, reviewed the seven conditions. But now we get to the point where, okay, I'm doing it purely for constructive purpose. I have no animosity against the person. I checked out the facts. They're accurate. I heard it firsthand, not from someone else. The seven things we discussed, I believe we did last week.
Now comes a situation where someone has hurt me in business. Someone took a loan and didn't pay it back. Someone is inflicting verbal abuse. What do you do? How do you control it? The answer is, very often, you have to tell somebody. You have to tell somebody that this particular person is inflicting harm or hurt on you or another, especially you in this case, through whatever activity they're doing. And you can't stop it, so you need them to stop it.
For example, telling someone's rabbi what that person is doing. Telling someone's father, "This is what that person is doing." Now, guess what? It's permitted. It's permitted to go to someone who can, in fact, stop the hurt, stop the pain, stop the damage, and tell them, "This is what's going on. Can you help me?"
Now, of course, we said there are parameters. You can't exaggerate like any other To'elet. You can't go there just to air your own grievance. You have to actually believe that this person could help, meaning you know this person has influence.
I got a call the other day, for example. Somebody was complaining about something an unnamed person was doing to them. I refused to hear the name. I didn't want to hear it, and my first question was, "Who is the person's rabbi?" Or, if he won't listen to a rabbi, "Who is it that can influence this person's behavior?" That is proper self-defense: to seek a way to remove the problem, to get the repayment, or to eliminate future recurrence.
It's to speak out the facts in a private way, in a constructive way, in a non-emotional way, to try and invoke the assistance of someone who can influence the perpetrator and prevent all those things you don't want to continue happening or to happen again. It's not so easy. Picking the person has to be on target. Speaking to them in a way that's within the confines of the seven rules has to be on target. And following through anything you can do to also help prevent the reoccurrence.
If you're giving somebody credit, I say, "I don't give credit anymore. What do you want? Fool me once, it's your fault. Fool me twice, it's my fault. I should have known better to stay away, not be involved, not open the door."
So these are the types of things that a person has to realize in order to invoke help, to set up walls of self-defense in a situation where maybe they themselves cannot do it, but perhaps—or there's a good chance, I should even say—that someone else can.
So you are permitted to relate it, but only in a way that will get the job done with the minimal amount of talk, with the least amount of negative information. We have to know this. We have to do this in a way that minimizes it. It's negative speech without the negatives; there's no reason for the person to take action. You have to tell somebody what's wrong, but that same person only has to know so much before they can help. That's what you're allowed to tell them in a discreet, quiet way and pray for the best.