Not infrequently I find myself trying to resolve a conflict between my children. One called the other “stupid” or something else and the aggrieved party comes to complain to me. My not so Solomonic response is, “Well, are you stupid?” Invariably that person says, “No”. So then I ask them what are we talking about, just ignore them.

I was thinking about it this week when reading this week’s Torah portion, Tazriah– Metzora. There we read about laws of purity and most interesting is a condition described called tzara’at. It seems to be a symptom of lashon ha’rah, saying something bad about someone else. Contrary to what most people think, lashon ha’rah is not about saying something bad that is not true. It is necessarily true but not nice.  It is about drawing attention to someone’s perceived flaw. This is the opposite of my children fighting.

In the words of Rabbi Ebner, ” You never call a fool a fool.” It would only be lashon ha’rah if they were actually stupid.

Somehow the Torah understood that there was a physical manifestation to treating people poorly. When we were little we made people feel bad by proclaiming that they had “coodies”. The Torah proclaims that you have this condition when you make other people feel bad.

The Ba’al HaTorim, in his commentary on Tazriah, points out something very interesting. He says that this portion mentions the word Torah in reference to tzara’at five times corresponding to the five books of the Bible. This is meant to teach us that not speaking poorly about people is tantamount to keeping the entire Torah.

So, just because it is true does not mean you need to say it. I could give you many examples, but as my mother always says, “If you have nothing nice to say…”