38 | APRIL 20 • 2023
Words That Heal
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
A
t the risk of disclosing a spoiler,
I would like to begin this week’s
Covenant & Conversation
by discussing the 2019 film A
Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
Tom Hanks plays the beloved
American children’s television
producer/presenter Mr. Rogers, a
legendary figure to several genera-
tions of young Americans, famous for
his musical invitation, “Won’t You Be My
Neighbor?”
What makes the film
unusual is that it is an
unabashed celebration of the
power of human goodness
to heal broken hearts. Today,
such straightforward moral
messages tend to be confined
to children’s films (some of
them, as it happens, works of
genius). Such is the power and subtlety of
the film, however, that one is not tempted to
dismiss it as simplistic or naïve.
The plot is based on a true story. A maga-
zine had decided to run a series of short pro-
files around the theme of heroes. It assigned
one of its most gifted journalists to write the
vignette about Fred Rogers. The journalist
was, however, a troubled soul. He had a
badly broken relationship with his father.
The two had physically fought at his sister’s
wedding. The father sought reconciliation,
but the journalist refused even to see him.
The jagged edges of his character showed
in his journalism. Everything he wrote
had a critical undercurrent as if he relished
destroying the images of the people he had
come to portray. Given his reputation, he
wondered why the children’s television star
had agreed to be interviewed by him. Had
Rogers not read any of his writings? Did he
not know the obvious risk that the profile
would be negative, perhaps devastatingly so?
It turned out that not only had Rogers read
every article of his that he could get hold of;
he was also the only figure who had agreed
to be interviewed by him. All the other
“heroes” had turned him down.
The journalist goes to meet Rogers, first
sitting through the production of an epi-
sode of his show, complete with puppets,
toy trains and a miniature townscape. It is
a moment ripe for big-city cynicism. Yet
Rogers, when they meet and talk, defies any
conventional stereotype. He turns the ques-
tions away from him and toward the jour-
nalist. Almost immediately sensing the core
of unhappiness within him, he then turns
every negative question into a positive affir-
mation, and exudes the calmness and quiet,
the listening silence, that allows and encour-
ages the journalist to talk about himself.
It is a remarkable experience to watch as
Hanks’ gentleness, immovable even under
pressure, slowly allows the journalist — who
had, after all, merely come to write a 400-
word profile — to acknowledge his own
failings vis-à-vis his father and to give him
the emotional strength to forgive him and be
reconciled to him in the limited time before
he died. Here is a fragment of their conver-
sation that will give you a feel for the tone of
the relationship:
Journalist: You love people like me.
Fred Rogers: What are people like you? I’ve
never met anyone like you in my entire life.
Journalist: Broken people.
Fred Rogers: I don’t think you are broken. I
know you are a man of conviction. A person
who knows the difference between what is
wrong and what is right. Try to remember
that your relationship with your father also
helped to shape those parts. He helped you
become what you are.
Note how in a few brief sentences, Rogers
helps reframe the journalist’s self-image, as
well as his relationship with his father. The
very argumentativeness that led him to fight
with his father was something he owed to
his father. The film reflects the true story of
when the real Fred Rogers met the journalist
Tom Junod. Junod, like his character “Lloyd
Vogel” in the film, came to mock but
stayed to be inspired. He said about
the experience, “What is grace? I’m
not certain; all I know is that my
heart felt like a spike, and then, in
that room, it opened and felt like an
umbrella.
” The film is, as one reviewer
put it, “a perfectly pitched and played
ode to goodness.
”
THE POWER OF SPEECH
The point of this long introduction is that
the film is a rare and compelling illustration
of the power of speech to heal or harm.
This, according to the Sages, is what Tazria
and Metzora are about. Tsara’at, the skin
condition whose diagnosis and purification
form the heart of the parshiyot, was a pun-
ishment for lashon hara, evil speech, and the
word metzora, for one suffering from the
condition, was, they said, an abridgment of
the phrase motzi shem ra, one who speaks
slander. The key prooftext they brought was
the case of Miriam who spoke badly about
Moses, and was struck with tsara’at as a
result (Num. 12). Moses alludes to this inci-
dent many years later, urging the Israelites
to take it to heart: “Remember what
the Lord your God did to Miriam along the
way after you came out of Egypt.
” Deut. 24:9
Judaism is, I have argued, a religion of
words and silences, speaking and listening,
communicating and attending. God created
the universe by words — “
And He said …
and there was” — and we create the social
universe by words, by the promises with
which we bind ourselves to meet our obli-
gations to others. God’s revelation at Sinai
was of words — “You heard the sound of
words but saw no form; there was only a
Voice” (Deut. 4:12). Every other ancient reli-
gion had its monuments of brick and stone;
Jews, exiled, had only words, the Torah they
carried with them wherever they went.
The supreme mitzvah in Judaism is Shema
Yisrael, “Listen, Israel.
” For God is invisible,
and we make no icons. We can’t see God; we
can’t smell God; we can’t touch God; we can’t
taste God. All we can do is listen in the hope
of hearing God.
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks