Shaming someone verbally, causing a person pain by pointing out something that is embarrassing to them, making them feel badly about themselves by something you say or insinuate – this is ona’at devarim, a type of wrong that is considered by the rabbis to be among the worst of sins, far worse than its corollary in the financial realm, ona’at mamon, cheating someone economically. The one merely damages her property; the other gets at her heart, her very essence, her sense of self worth.
We do need to be aware of how we speak to other people, what damage we cause. But looking inward, I want to suggest that we also need to take notice of how we speak to ourselves, that far more prevalent than external abusive speech is internal abusive speech. We say things to ourselves all the time that we would never in a million years dream of saying to another person.
Think of the last time you said something harsh to yourself. It might have only been a few minutes ago. Sometimes it is triggered by an event – a social interaction you felt uncomfortable about or something that you did that you weren’t entirely happy with or some general way of being that parts of you judge constantly – why are you so lazy, incompetent, stupid, . . . It’s worth spending some time bringing this subconscious negative self-talk into conscious awareness, becoming aware of the insults, the hurtful words that often habitually repeat, the harsh way of speaking. The first step is just noticing, shining a light on the shaming that goes on inside.
Ona’ah, wronging another person, is associated with those who are weaker than you. Elsewhere in the Torah, the verb is used to instruct us not to wrong a ger, a stranger. And many of the classical rabbinic examples of ona’ah – such as giving someone bad advice or asking them to speak about a topic they know nothing about or reminding them of their lowly origins – concern playing on someone’s relative weakness in a certain situation, whether because of social status or ignorance. When we investigate, we find that the same is true of our internal critics and shamers; they tend to prey on the weak and the vulnerable inside, often young parts, parts that are not fully competent or knowledgeable or capable. Would you call out someone else’s weakness the way that your inner critics shame your own weakest parts?
Many of us think that we need this internal shaming activity in order to grow and improve, but is change actually the result? More often, the result is a woundedness inside that hurts and aches and if anything, makes us feel more stuck, a woundedness that makes us lose our sense of self worth and limits our capacity to act with confidence and strength. Moreover, if you look closely at when the shaming comes, most of the time what is being shamed is not a moral sin per se but perhaps at most an imperfection or indiscretion or even sometimes a characteristic that is perfectly laudatory but has not been deemed acceptable by family and culture. This verbal abuse is neither useful nor appropriate. As the Torah understood, it hurts people on a very deep level, ourselves as well as others.
But there is another way, and the Torah gives us a glimpse at it. The prohibition against verbal abuse is said in the context of the Yovel (jubillee) year. During the yovel year, we are given the opportunity to return to our original land holdings. Veshavtem ish el achuzato. What is our ultimate inheritance other than our fullest divinely granted selves? This command to return can be understood as a command at self-realization, at returning to the pure whole precious self that God implanted in us, to return and fully actualize that divinely granted potential. This greater divine self is precisely what the inner critics stop us from even seeing about ourselves, our divine essence. With gentle compassion, we can invite the inner critics to see this side of us, to see our original and ultimate holding, who we really are, and to stop preventing us from accessing this self and fully becoming who we are meant to be. The activity of shaming is ultimately an activity of ignorance, of not knowing this truth about ourselves. We can return to this greater holding and let the inner critics see and understand: we are not who they think we are.
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
