THE INTERNET: LASHON HARA JUST A CLICK AWAY Amy Scheinerman

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.’

“Death and life are in the hand of the tongue.” Does the tongue then have a hand?

This comes to teach us that just as the hand can kill, so can the tongue kill? Flying Feathers Carried Through The Ether of the Internet

The classic image of words of gossip as feathers scattered by the wind is a stallion in the stable of Jewish folklore. In the story, often attributed to Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev(1740-1809), the irretrievable feathers symbolize irreversible utterances. The message is that lashon hara, rechilut,’ and motzi shem ra can be neither repealed nor nullified, and atonement is not truly possible because their damage can never be fully mitigated. One who slices open a feather pillow and scatters its contents even in a windstorm knows that the feathers will travel only so far. With the advent of the Internet, this image is outdated. The information revolution has connected human beings as never before. Feathers loosed on the Internet can span global distances almost instantaneously, multiply indefinitely, and reach far more people than ever before. Imagine one person sending an email to ten others, who in turn send it to ten people, who do the same. Within an hour, the message could reach one million people, and this presumes no one has a distribution list greater than ten names. The Internet as high-speed highway provides us with more vehicles for communicating lashon hara and rechilut than ever before: email, texting, IM, blogs, tweets, and comment for example, to name but a few. The Internet has the potential to transform the quaint story of the feathers into a high tech version of Hitchcock ’s“The Birds .”