Pirkei Avot speaks twice about what we might call ordinary day-to-day conversation. At Avot 1:5 Yose ben Yochanan Ish Yerushalayim cautions men engaging in too much casual chatting even with their own wives—and how much more so should they not converse overmuch with other people’s wives. The consequences, which are grim, are listed in this mishnah:
כָּל
הַמַּרְבֶּה שִׂיחָה עִם הָאִשָּׁה, גּוֹרֵם רָעָה לְעַצְמוֹ, וּבוֹטֵל מִדִּבְרֵי
תוֹרָה, וְסוֹפוֹ יוֹרֵשׁ גֵּיהִנֹּם
One who excessively converses with one’s wife causes evil to himself,
neglects the study of Torah and ultimately inherits Gehinnom.
Responses to this teaching range from bristling hostility at
its attitude towards women in general to warm endorsement of the need for a man
to respect boundaries in his dealings with his own and other people’s wives.
Some also focus on the word שִׂיחָה (sichah, here meaning “chatter”),
urging men to treat women with respect as their intellectual equals rather than
refuse to engage them on matters of a more serious nature.
Conversation also features in a later mishnah that focuses
not so much on quantity as on quality. At Avot 3: Dosa ben Horkinas teaches
שֵׁנָה שֶׁל
שַׁחֲרִית, וְיַֽיִן שֶׁל צָהֳרָֽיִם, וְשִׂיחַת הַיְלָדִים, וִישִׁיבַת בָּתֵּי
כְנֵסִיּוֹת שֶׁל עַמֵּי הָאָֽרֶץ, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם
Morning sleep, noontime wine,
children's talk and sitting at the meeting places of the ignoramus drive a
person from the world.
I believe that the children’s talk referred to here is children’s
talk between adults, not between adult and child. Speaking to a child in a
childish manner is so often a vital part of the child’s education in the use of
language, the art of communication and the gradual acquisition of cognitive and
conceptual understanding. But it can be an embarrassment to listen to adults
speaking with one another as though they were children.
Some of the more serious Torah scholars of bygone
generations took the limitation or even the avoidance of ordinary conversation
to extremes. Thus Rabbi Asher Weiss (Rav Asher Weiss on Avos vol.2) states,
citing Midrash Shir HaShirim Rabbah, that for every piece of unnecessary speech
that enters a person’s ear, a Torah matter leaves. But Rabbi Weiss then tempers
this extreme position with an observation about life in the real world:
“…[T]his is not the way for most
people. We may infer from Chazal’s expression “limited conversation” that we
are only to lessen our involvement. … Human nature dictates that we cannot
completely withdraw from light conversation and the way of the world”.
The need to speak to other people cannot be denied but, like
so many other things in Avot, the difficulty lies not in the principle but in
the practice. Here it is difficult to draw firm guidelines. One person’s being
polite or friendly is another person’s being flirtatious or suggestive. And I
would not be as brave as Rabbi Weiss as to write the words “human nature
dictates…”, bearing in mind that so much of the challenge that we face in our
own lives lies precisely in the battle to resist what human nature dictates.
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