Normal Gossip Versus Lashon Hara

So there's this podcast I found called Normal Gossip and it's got me thinking about what constitutes "gossip." Most people who appear on the show start off by mentioning that they grew up religious and in their religion "gossip" was highly discouraged and now as adults they've "come to appreciate gossip" and how "gossip can be healthy and good."

Of course, none of these people so far have been Jewish, all some denomination of Jesus Followers, but Judaism is a religion which "forbids gossip" and which I am, of course, very profoundly in agreement with that the things forbidden under Judaism as "evil speech" are, indeed, unhealthy for a community.

On the show, they always mention that "people can use gossip for evil" and "there's a difference between gossip and being a gossip" which I suppose is like in Judaism the difference between lashon hara and being a ba'al lashon hara.

But what stands out to me is that Judaism never uses the phrase gossip in the definitions of "evil speech" (which makes sense since our mother tongue is not English and all of our laws are written in other languages like Yiddish, Hebrew, or Aramaic.) The phrases we use are lashon hara, rechilut, and libel (which translates so directly to the English word libel we don't bother using the Hebrew.) There are forms of "speaking about other people" which fall under "gossip" in the anglosphere but which are permissible under Judaism.

Because there's many kinds of gossip which are not lashon hara. For instance, talking about who is fucking whom is not lashon hara. Talking about people's breakups is generally not lashon hara. Matchmaking gossip (like "those two would make a great couple") is not lashon hara, and is in fact, actually a mitzvah. Talking about tragic things that happened to other people is not lashon hara, and in fact is actually encouraged so that someone does not have to personally tell every single person that a loved one passed away etc. which can be painful. Lashon hara is only when you are making someone look bad and attacking their character with no intent to hold them accountable and cause them to do t'shuvah. Lashon hara isn't gossip it's shit-talking. And, of course, libel is libel. Most people don't consider libel to be gossip, but Judaism considers it in the same category as lashon hara, with the only difference being that libel is not true. Libel is lying about other people to make them look bad. Lashon hara is telling the truth about other people to make them look bad, but with no well-meaning intention to confront them about it, hold them accountable, and get them to change their behavior.

Rechilut is sometimes translated as gossip, though the translation more common is "tale-bearing." But I really don't think it is gossip. Because the prohibition against rechilut comes from the story of Doeg the Edomite in Samuel I 21-22, in which he told King Saul that the priest Achimelech of Nob gave David food and weapons as David was fleeing from Saul, and Saul, who hated David, commanded that the entire Priestly City of Nob be annihilated. In this sense, rechilut is perhaps better translated as "snitching" or "having loose lips." In interpersonal settings, the most common example is telling someone that somebody else was shit-talking them. It's being the person who delivers the gossip back to the person it's about, and telling them that other people are secretly being hurtful towards them. The reasoning is that it's one harm to spread lashon hara, and it is yet another harm to tell someone that someone is doing it, causing emotional pain they wouldn't have otherwise felt and stirring up conflict in the community that could have been better avoided by telling the ba'al lashon hara not to spread lashon hara, than by telling the subject of lashon hara that they were being spoken about.

So rechilut is not gossip, it's bringing the gossip back to the subject. Lashon hara is gossip, but it's only a subset of gossip. Libel is not generally considered gossip.

I, once again, you know me, completely agree with these three kinds of "evil speech" being prohibited. I think rechilut especially is useful when thinking about "bragging" about "cool things" your friends are doing which are actually illegal. Many activists get in trouble with law enforcement because someone couldn't keep their mouth shut about wheat-pasting with their friends and naming names, or how their crew is so cool and does all this hacking, or how a friend of theirs is so cool and has all the drugs. This seems very directly comparable to Doeg. Doeg was just saying how Achimelech did something nice for David, but he said it to King Saul, who punished an entire city for this action because King Saul was the law and Achimelech was opposed to him. Don't post about cool activist crimes on Twitter for followers, right where the FBI can see it. Perhaps this is gossip? But it's a very specific subset.

Now, going back to the goyish podcast Normal Gossip. Normal Gossip is a podcast where listeners send in very long very dramatic stories from their lives about themselves or people they know. It's always anonymous who sent it, and the host always changes the names of everyone involved, changes the location of where it happened, and changes one identifying feature about each person. So these stories are, in theory, very hard to trace back to who they're about, but also are not entirely true since this story did not actually happen to Nora in Oregon who works in accounting. It happened to Janet who lives in Idaho and works in auditing. Though this does remove the lashon hara aspect of the show. It, theoretically, cannot damage the reputation of anyone being spoken about. At the same time, the stories are so specific that if it got back to whoever is being featured, they would absolutely be upset about having had their story shared and being portrayed so poorly, and they would definitely try to find out who sent it in. If someone heard an episode and thought "this sounds like someone I know" and sent it to them, that would be rechilut. It would cause harm where, if it never got back to them, it could be harmless.

But the people on this podcast don't seem to have any distinction between different kinds of gossip. There's "how you use gossip" but what kinds of stories you share is not a consideration. They don't think about how relationship drama and people doing misdeeds are very different kinds of gossip. I agree with them that some gossip can be healthy and normal. Even among Jewish friends we do often talk about who would make a good couple, which couples should probably break up, etc. We do not abstain completely from speaking ill of other people either, we just are very careful and intentional about it and don't make it into like, a "fun" thing to do, to just talk about how people we know all suck. Usually, we avoid recreationally speaking ill of our friends who we share spaces with.

One person on the Normal Gossip podcast even said that gossip "deconstructs power" and said that union organizing is "gossip" and I just don't understand how goyim are defining gossip. Speaking ill of your boss in order to unionize and hold them accountable isn't really gossip is it? It's definitely not lashon hara, since you're doing it for a very good reason, like this is hardly recreational or just for fun. You're trying to improve your workplace.

I think maybe a reason so many goyim got so into my lashon hara thread was because goyish culture seems to have a very poor definition of what kind of speech is not ethical and why. There's "gossip" which is "good" or "bad" and then there's everything else. I think they would benefit greatly from unpacking this word and thinking about the different kinds of speaking about people behind their backs and their functions and impacts and have a more complex understanding of it than "it's good" or "it's bad." I've certainly found the framework of the chofetz chaim helpful in identifying when sharing stories of people being messy is just light fun and when it's actually very harmful to a community. Because sometimes sharing stories of people being messy is not harmful. Sometimes it's useful, or fun. But that's not the case for all gossip. A lot of gossip, the kind I'd call lashon hara or shit-talking, is destructive and causes paranoia and a defensiveness of one's image that's unnecessary in a community where it's discouraged.

Anyway, it's kind of a fun podcast. It's a lot of stories of straight strangers I'd never ever know being messy in entertaining ways. I just also often am like "are you being mindful about how you think about gossip? Is all gossip really the same?" but maybe that's just a cultural difference. It definitely hasn't changed my mind about lashon hara and evil speech. But also, perhaps that because evil speech is simply not the same thing as gossip.