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