Search Google for the definition of Twitter and the first result will tell you that, “Twitter is a free social networking site where users broadcast short posts known as tweets.”
Twitter, though, also appears prominently in the Sefaria English translation of Rashi on our Parsha, when explaining the remedial Korban of the afflicted Metzora.
Vayikra (14:4) “The Kohen shall order two live pure birds, cedar wood, crimson stuff, and hyssop to be brought for the one to be purified.”
Rashi explains why birds are at the core of this spiritual remedy, “...because the plagues of leprosy come as a punishment for slander, which is done by chattering, therefore birds are compulsory for his purification, because these chatter, as it were, continuously with a twittering sound (Arakhin 16b).”
If you persist through the Google results, you’ll eventually find the dictionary definition of, ‘twitter’ - “to utter successive chirping noises; to talk in a chattering fashion.”
The chattering of the birds comes to atone for the chattering of the metzora.
Surely silence is the remedy to bad speech? Why not bring a mute animal? There are many Kosher animals that don’t have vocal cords and others that are not audible to humans. A giraffe is kosher and doesn’t make sounds that we can hear! A goldfish is completely silent and happens to be Kosher?! (Warning: please don’t try this at home and, in any case, sea creatures are not sacrifice-friendly.)
It’s very rare to be upset by the sweet chattering of birds. They are constantly in harmonious connection with one another and their environment. Working together, playing together and singing together - “the beautiful sounds of tweeting birds”. In Tel Mond, we’re privileged to be able to walk through an orchard and feel restored by their sweet music. How interesting that our Beit Knesset is located in ‘Shchunat HaTzipporim’?
The clear lesson is that we are indeed called upon to engage and connect with each other ‘successively’ but also ‘successfully’. May we only tweet with one another in ways that support, uplift and enhance ourselves, the people around us and the environment we live in.
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