Both And/And/And...

The Tongue

I had a much longer post here trying to make my own sense of the events of this week in America. After reading another post from another rabbinic colleague saying something like, “I never agree much with Charlie Kirk but I admired his ability to engage with contentious debate civilly and the fact that he was gunned down was reprehensible,” I shifted direction. Because in my mind, two out of those three thoughts track for me. I rarely agreed with Kirk and the fact that he was gunned down was reprehensible….and his whole focus of civil debate never really struck me as all that good natured or civil. The tone may have been but the contents of his messages were deleterious. That’s the both/and/and of it. All of that can be true.

But I digress because the truth is, what was at front of my mind was that if law enforcement released the names of minors, I would have liked to have shared the names of the high school students who were injured at yet another school shooting two days ago in Colorado to open this up. They don’t; so I can’t. But I think it’s important to note that two young people were shot at their school two days ago

Both and. That event is tragic and the event in Utah is tragic, and their is a link.

That link, in my humble opinion is the image of the tongue and the words that we express with it. Charlie Kirk understood the power of words. It’s why he amassed the following he did at such a young age and why he had entered into halls of power that most 30somethings dream of. His understanding and particular wielding of language speaks to the ancient rabbinic understanding of the power of our words.

In Proverbs 18:21, we read:

מָ֣וֶת וְ֭חַיִּים בְּיַד־לָשׁ֑וֹן וְ֝אֹהֲבֶ֗יהָ יֹאכַ֥ל פִּרְיָֽהּ׃

Death and life are in the power of the tongue;
Those who love it will eat its fruit.

It’s a text that begs to be deciphered. How exactly are death and life in the power of the tongue? And what does it mean that its lovers will eat its fruit? Here are a couple of explanations:

Rashi tells us that if a person studies Torah and speaks Torah, they cause life and reap rewards. Ibn Ezra hauntingly offers the following:

יאכל פריה - כנגד תבואת שפתיו, כלומר אם ידבר רע - יבואהו מות, ועל דבר טוב - ישיג חיים

One eats their fruit according to the produce of their lips, which is to say if they speak wickedly, death comes to them, and for good words, they grasp life.

As is our wont here, I want to take us to the chasidic realms. Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev interprets the beginning of Parshat Emor where the command is given to ‘speak to the sons of Aaron. He comments on this focus on speech through the lens of our world being broken down into four elemental levels, one of which is olam ha’yetzirah, the world of creation. In his words:

we can visualize “life” and “death” in the עולם היצירה, the world of creation, which for want of a better term we will call the world of speech, דבור, seeing that according to the Torah. God had created it with verbal directives. When man abuses the power of speech, uttering vain things or lies, he is perceived as “killing” life in that domain. When man employs the power of speech constructively, he is considered as giving life to that domain. This condition is called חיים, “life,” and has been alluded to by Solomon in Proverbs 18,21 where he wrote: חיים ומות ביד לשון, “life and death are within the power of one’s tongue.” Abuse of the power of speech is the most important element to guard against when serving the God.’

So you see, he says, just as the world was created through speech, our words that we use operate on the same creative level. They have the power to create life and death. Both and. Words exist in that duality. When we operate constructively, lifting people up, not at the expense of others but with a sense of shared purpose, we bring life. But if we deal in vanity and untruths, we have the potential to bring death to the world.

Both and, and. All of these commentators understood that there was a connection between the words we use and the potential violence they caused. That was live for them. Their comments remind us of the power of the tongue as an instrument. It activates life and death and yet, it’s not on the same level of a gun. Because again, Charlie Kirk’s words did not mean he deserved to get shot. Both/and/and.

While he argued that he was a champion of bringing healthy discourse and debate back into American culture and campuses, I am not sure that’s exactly what he did. He is being lionized as a civic exemplar of ideal discourse in our fractured world, but I am hard pressed to believe that a man who diminishes the black community, demeans the trans community, and dabbles in antisemitic conspiracies is a model. Charlie Kirk had convictions and those convictions were incendiary, with intent.

The last exchange of his life modeled much of what I thought was wrong with his approach. An audience member asked him:

Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

Kirk responded, Too many.

The questioner followed up:

Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

Counting or not counting gang violence?

After Kirk’s ‘too many’ comments, there were audible chuckles and whoops from the audience because he knew exactly what he was doing. Kirk was never shy about his issues with the very notion of transgenderism. And in his last answer, literally the last words of his life, Kirk dog whistled an answer because anyone hearing it understood the implication of what kind of gang he was talking about.

That’s the power of words. We don’t know what drove the person to shoot Kirk nor do we know what drove the 16 year old to shoot his classmates but we can be damn sure that both of them acted in some way because they were activated by the devastating power of negative language that weaponized thought diversity to adversarial.

We need some semblance of sanity in this country. Levels of mistrust are at unprecedented levels. I am not sure how we get where we need to be. What I feel pretty confident about is that most of the people reading this are unified that the idea of someone being murdered for their political views is morally and ethically reprehensible.

One other thing I do feel some certainty around (and that I hope you do too) is a push for spaces that reward actual nuanced conversations, not ones in which words are used to belittle but ones in which words are really truthfully debated. Part of Kirk’s whole enterprise was to build a platform that got rewarded because of the incendiary takes that got the clicks, including my own. I recognize that irony. But we need a dialogue that wasn’t Charlie Kirk’s. We need the both and…and…and, the conversations that reflect multiple truths.

The sliver of hope that I have for something to change is still there because I know that humans have the capacity to change, despite our misgivings about it. In my little circle of the world, I can keep at the work of reminding people how precious our tongues are. Beyond any of our other physical tools, our tongues have the power. Charlie Kirk knew that. He made his mark by choosing his words very carefully. One wonders, had he survived, what he would say in response, but we’ll never know.

So in the meantime, I grieve for his wife and children. Both and. I grieve for all the people even younger who have been killed by people wielding guns who have been duped by a lobby of people who place guns on a pedestal above human life. And I remember the words of Proverbs:

Those who love it will eat its fruit.

The fruit of using our tongues wisely is more life. That’s the end game for all of us. We need people who bring more life to our world, especially in words. Instruments of destruction, be they metal or flesh don’t push us to our highest ideals. May the victims in Colorado have a speedy recovery of body and mind.

Shabbat Shalom