Back to Basics
Now, to understand that we have to go back to the foundations of Torah. That’s the rule, by the way. If you want to understand things in this world it’s important to refer back to the fundamental principles at the beginning of the Torah. And one of the great principles, one of the greatest, is the creation of ‘The Speaking Man’.
You remember when Hakadosh Baruch Hu made man, how He did it? ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים – Hashem blew into his nostrils the breath of life (Bereishis 2:7). The ‘breath of life’? What’s that? It can’t mean that He gave man the ability to live because it doesn’t say that by animals and they also have life. Hashem didn’t breathe into the nostrils of horses. He didn’t breathe into elephants. And they’re alive anyhow. So you must say this procedure was something beyond the mere gift of life.
The Living Word
What was the result of Hashem’s breath? ויהי לנפש חיה האדם – Man became a living spirit (ibid.) And the Targum says it means a רוח ממללא – man became a spirit capable of speech. You hear that? The uniqueness of man, the greatness that he achieved when Hashem blew into him the ‘living spirit’ was the gift of speech. He can talk! Nobody can talk in this world except human beings.
Don’t believe the fools, the academicians, who try to foist on us their childish fantasies; how over many eons we ‘learned’ how to speak and that monkeys can do it too only they’re a little behind yet. It’s as silly as could be! First of all, they don’t have the machinery. We have a complicated voice box, the larynx, that’s made especially for speaking. And our teeth and lips and tongues are assistants to the larynx; they’re especially made to function in tandem with the voice box.
If a man chas veshalom lost his larynx in an operation, his lips won't help him. His teeth and tongue won't help him. The lips and the teeth and the tongue are only assistants to the larynx. And so man was created from the beginning with a voice box to be able to speak. The larynx of the monkey was made to grunt and hoot, that’s all.
The Gift of Speech
But more than that, Hakadosh Baruch never blew into them the רוח ממללא, the spirit that makes us capable of speech. It's not merely that a man learned how to use his lips and his tongue and his palate and his teeth to express certain things that used to be mere grunts. No; it was the ruach of Hashem that made him a ruach memalleluh, a speaker. And it happened that way so that we should understand that it is words that make a man. We’ll see soon that your words are your ticket to greatness.
Only that it’s such a powerful tool, such a dynamic implement, that we have to study how to use it. It’s dangerous otherwise. That, by the way, is why we don't thank Hashem every morning for speech. You know, we thank Him for our eyes. We thank Him for the ability to walk. We thank Him for the fact that we are able to stand up. Why don't we thank Him for talking? We should say baruch atah Hashem Elokeinu melech haolam meisiach ilmim.
The Gift of Dynamite
The answer is we should make such a brachah but because it’s such a powerful gift, it’s also the most dangerous. It’s like dynamite; if you’ll give dynamite sticks into the hands of shotim, it’s big trouble. People who don’t understand the subject so for them talking is one of the biggest calamities. When they get to the Next World they’ll wish they had been incapable of speech like the monkey.
It’s a fact that most suffering in the world is a result of talking. Wars are fought because of words. All the fights going on in the homes are because of talking. Murders are committed because of talking. How many people became sick because of their mouths? How many became blind because of their mouths? How many died young? The mouth is the cause of all emotional disturbances.
And therefore although the mouth deserves a very big brachah – it’s one of the greatest blessings – however we are forced to postpone that brachah. In the Next World you’ll be able to thank Him – after you see that you succeeded. But in this world we have to be reminded, ‘Be on guard! When Hakadosh Baruch Hu created you, He gave you a most powerful tool. So powerful because it came from His breath!’
Divine Speech
That's what we are learning as a foundation of Torah. Man is not just a speaker. He’s a Divinely created speaker! And that’s why his words are so weighty, so powerful. We have no idea of the measure of the profundity and the sublimity of a human being's words. They reverberate forever.
Now don't think it's such a surprising thing because actually, in the physical world it reverberates forever. You know that? Sound energy goes out into space and it lasts forever. Only it becomes so dissipated you can't measure it anymore. But if you had the right instruments even if you'd be standing way up in the Andromeda, way past the solar system, you could measure those sound waves. It might be very faint, diffused, but it’s there. It’s scientifically true.
Now, I'm just saying this example to be mekarev el haseichel. But now we come back to the bigger truth because a person’s words are tremendously more powerful than even the sound waves. Because not only in the sense of physics is it true that the energy of your word doesn’t go lost, but also in the sense that it’s forever in a spiritual sense. A man's words are tremendously more powerful than the sound waves. The fact that they travel out into space forever, that’s only a mashal for what your words are actually, for how powerful they are.
Now that's a very big doctrine. It's such a tremendous principle that it’s hard for us to assimilate. It's difficult to think such thoughts because we live with gashmiyus and so we tend to forget the yesodos haTorah. But that's what we learn in Torah; that the creation of man meant the creation of a man whose words are most powerful – words that reverberate in very many ways.
