Our Gemara on Amud Aleph references an incident whereby Rav Ashi raised a hypothetical question, which involved a halachic dimension of a student’s inheritance, Mar son of Ameimar. The power of Rav Ashi’s words were so great, that his mere mention of Ameimar’s possible death somehow induced his actual death.

Our tradition, among many ancient traditions of the world, believes that words have extraordinary power to create and shape matter. 

The situation in our Gemara is even more unusual, because the comments made by Rav Ashi were not even meant as a curse nor even a prediction. This is more subtle than the more familiar idea that the Rabbis cautioned against, such as predicting one’s demise, effectively cursing oneself, characterized by the phrase, “All tiftach peh le-Satan - do not give the heavenly accuser (Satan) an opening argument.“ (See Kesuvos 8b and Moed Kattan 18a “Beris Kerusa”.)  Here, the concern is that the words have a prophetic power, and even influence the future. (See Maharsha, “Beris Kerusa”, on Tosafos Moed Kattan 18a, “Ve-istayya.”) 

Rav Elchonon (Kovetz Shiurim, Kesuvos 208) explains that a righteous person such as Rav Ashi never contaminated his speech, thus it retains a full spiritual power. An ordinary person’s speech may not be as strong because, much as a knife used too often becomes blunt and less sharp, so too, speech that is overused and made profane loses some of its intensity.

Psychologically speaking, as very young children observing the world around us and watching our parents, we get the universal impression that words are magic. Mother says, “I will warm up the bottle“, and moments later a warm bottle of formula miraculously appears. Father says, “Be careful with that glass, it’s going to drop and break“, and miraculously, father‘s prophetic prediction comes true, and the glass falls and breaks.

But it’s deeper than that. In the Hebrew language, a “word” is called a teivah,” which also means box or container. Words are the way in which people contain and express thoughts and ideas. Words are a system by which we use to develop our own thoughts and inner dialogue. Lev Vygotsky, the “Russian Freud”, is most famously known for his final work, “Thinking and Speech”, which asserts that thought and speech are a social process. Through his observation and research of young children and how they talk to themselves and others, he concluded that there is a reciprocal relationship between speech and thought. The child learns through social interaction how to identify and construct the experiences recalled and imagined with the words used by caregivers who interact and respond. But then the words are internalized, and the child uses the dialogue he learned externally to organize his own internal norms and ideas. Using Vygotsky’s theory of thought and speech, we can define the sphere of Speech as the idea and concept learned initially from the social input, and the sphere of Thought might be the internalization of the idea in personal dialogue and terms. Words are how reality is described, but even more, they become how reality is defined

Speech is therefore sacred from a spiritual, but also a psychological perspective and should be given due reverence and recognition regarding its multi-dimensional impact.

Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation

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