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Speaking of contrasting Maimonides’s writings with those of early 20th century Aharonim, I was recently reminded of a sermon I delivered on Rosh Hashana a year and a half ago. When you read Maimonides’s summation of the laws of lashon hara, he connects the prohibitions thereof to the commandments to love fellow Jews, to love the unfortunate, and to rebuke transgressors, and to the prohibitions against bearing grudges and taking revenge. He defines the relevant terms, i.e., slander, gossip, libel, and innuendo, and concludes with homiletic teachings about the gravity of the sin. In total, the laws take up all of six paragraphs in the entire Mishneh Torah.

The Chafetz Chayim, however, wrote two books on the subject. After acknowledging the paucity of relevant material in the Mishneh Torah, he writes that his intent was to bring together all the scattered halachoth from the numerous sources in order to raise awareness of the issue, and hopefully to reduce the lashon hara spoken throughout the world. However, his plan may have backfired.

The notion that the existence of a full length book on a halachic subject will bring the masses to better observance of the matter is not entirely logical. Lashon hara is forbidden. Does the fact that it has many detailed halachoth matter to someone who may be deciding to speak it? Would a detailed work about the minutiae of the forbidden relations or bloodshed reduce the instances of both sins? Maimonides and the Vilna Gaon both considered it to be the gravest and most common sin, but they did not need to elaborate on it. The fact that there is much to be studied about a particular subject is, unfortunately, only provincial to those who really like to study.

But, most unfortunately, the Chafetz Chayim’s intellectual honesty may have been his undoing. If you look at the table of contents to common printed editions of the book Chafetz Chayim, you will see that the title of Principle 10 is, “Some details regarding lashon hara between a man and his fellow, that is, if someone stole from him and or cheated him or his friend, and similar cases, in what situation(s) would it be permissible to reveal this to people.” The book contains something Maimonides would never have included in his halachoth, hetterim, instances of permissibility, because lashon hara did not need a thorough halachic treatment. It should not be spoken, period. What this has wrought, and I have seen this a few times, is that people who have tendencies to want to meticulously keep the halacha and to meticulously study the halacha, end up finding excuses (or in their minds: justifications) for themselves to speak Lashon Hara!

That was then. Now I came across a perfectly relevant passage that drives home this point. Principle 8:8. (Easy to remember: Chafetz Chayim 8:8. In Hebrew, it would be ח”ח ח”ח!) There the Chafetz Chayim writes about the hetter, held of by some of the Rishonim and only under certain specific conditions, for someone to speak lashon hara about a ba’al mahloqeth,* in order to save the others from said ba’al mahloqeth‘s machinations. The source for this rule is at the beginning of the Yerushalmi Peah: Nathan instructed Bathsheba to inform David of Adonijah’s plot to take the throne. (Elsewhere, I have the heard that Moses’s warning the people to stay away from the tents of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram also teaches us this lesson.) Now, The Chafetz Chayim also notes that the codifiers, The Rif, the Rosh, and Maimonides, all omitted this hetter from their summations. In my humble opinion, there are two very good reasons for their doing so. 1. No one has the right to grant himself a hetter to speak Lashon Hara. If we find an instance where Nathan the prophet (or Moses for that matter) used such a hetter, we have to figure that they did so because they positively knew that that is what God wanted. If only all of us were prophets, but until then we cannot do like they do. 2. The Rif, the Rosh, and Maimonides may have realized the danger in recording hetterim to speak lashon hara. Once again, I know of a few who have used this hetter for themselves to speak lashon hara against others. Of course, they checked the conditions for themselves and justified their behavior in their own minds. Perhaps it would have been better had these and other hetterim not been included.

* In the strictest sense, a ba’al mahloqeth is someone who speaks and acts against those chosen by God to lead. Therefore Korah was a ba’al manhloqeth because he challenged Aaron’s being chosen for the priesthood, Dathan and Abiram challenged Moses’s authority as lawgiver, and Adonijah challenged God’s choosing Solomon to reign after David. In all these cases, the ba’al mahloqeth takes issue with that which is explicit from the words of the prophets. Ba’al mahloqeth is not an appellation for someone who is argumentative, nor for someone who disagrees with a particular rabbi.