It's only words

Pirkei Avot has much to say about words: essentially ,it's best to say nothing (1:17), one should minimise one's words (1:15) and keep them honest and truthful (). Idle chatter should be avoided (5:9, 6:6); questions should be to the point and answers to them should be relevant (ibid).

All of the guidance stated above was formulated within the context of personal relationships. These might be within the family, the community or in the course of commerce -- but the words of the Tannaim can and should be a yardstick against which promotional and material and advertisements are measured.

Last week I received an email from my bank which opened with the following news about my account:

Hello Jeremy,

Some exciting new changes are on the way. We’re switching all our customers over to Debit Mastercard and your shiny new card will be with you soon, so look out for it in the post.

The email did not list these exciting new changes but invited the reader to click through to a web page that provided further particulars. I clicked the link, sat back and prepared myself for the excitement that was sure to follow. What I read was this:

We’re switching to Debit Mastercard and all our customers will soon receive a shiny new replacement debit card. Nothing is changing with your account, and your card will work in just the same way.

So the "exciting new change" that the bank is offering me is that there will be no change.

The best one can say in favour of this sort of promotional pitch is that, in an era when so many changes are for the worse, a change that makes no change is quite exciting in its own right. While that might sound cynical, I recall a previous communication from the same bank informing me that, for my happiness and peace of mind, the spending limit of my credit card was to be reduced since it was not my practice to use it to the hilt when making my purchases. On this basis, the fact that I faced no obvious personal detriment from this change was definitely welcome, if not literally an excitement.

In reality this sort of promotional puff looks more like sichat hayeladim (Avot 3:14, per Rabbi Dosa ben Horkinas). That phrase, which literally means "the chatter of children", is understood by Midrash Shmuel to mean the childish, immature chatter of adults. Rabbis Avraham Azulai (Ahavah beTaanugim) and Yaakov Chagiz (Etz HaChaim) explain that this is vain or exaggerated speech, words that have no purpose or inherent worth.