You’ve likely heard the cliché that “actions speak louder than words.”
Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, tells a different story.
One of the main element of the Yom Kippur prayers is the “confessional,” a list of 44 sins we confess to having committed. This list is repeated 5 times over the 25 hour fast. Of the 44, a full quarter of them relate to sins of speech:
We atone for the sins committed before God
- by an utterance of our lips;
- in speech;
- by insincere confession;
- by impure lips;
- by foolish speech;
- by deceit and lies;
- by bribery;
- by evil speech;
- by idle chatter of our lips;
- by gossip;
- by taking a vain oath.
The emphasis on speech is a testament to the power of words to shape our reality and the reality of those who hear our words.
The words we hear and the words we speak become our thoughts. They shape our perspective. They influence how we see things.
Once spoken, words are hard to retract. When we speak something aloud, we don’t control how the listener will repeat what we said, or whether someone else has been listening who will repeat it.
It’s not just falsehoods that are the problem.
Consider a situation where you’re speaking about someone to another person. The listener doesn’t know the subject, so you think there’s no harm. But what happens when the listener eventually meets the subject. They’ve already been biased by your words, predisposed to think a certain way about that person.
Whether you’re speaking about someone or making a commitment that you know you can’t keep, words can tear at the social fabric, rupture trust, and damage relationships.
But words also have the power to heal, to mend, and to uplift.
In ancient times, Yom Kippur was viewed as a time of mending relationships.
The confessional on Yom Kippur reminds us that these words matter.
It’s a lesson we need now more than ever.
The internet era created a situation where anyone can posit about anything without being fact-checked, and their words can spread virally within moments. Even if you take something down, it’s possible for people to find it or record it while it was up.
Now the AI era is poised to take that further. The line between what is real and what is fake is blurred, and falsehoods get perpetuated because LLMs are trained on them.
When anyone can say anything without repercussions or without even being fact checked, when it can all be anonymous, there’s no accountability
Those falsehoods become the implication of truth. And perception influences reality.
We are creating a new reality with every sentence we publish and word we speak in public.
The focus on “sins of speech” reminds us of the power of our words to weave or tear the social fabric that binds us, to rupture or mend relationships, to distort or create reality.
It invites us to examine and be more conscious of how we speak to others, how we present our opinions, and what we say.
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