Suddenly, just two days before Yom Kippur the man an avid jogger was taken to the hospital. There was the ambulance, the emergency room, the resident, and finally his doctor who arrived only to confirm that he had a panic attack. It sounded most humiliating because in his head he could still hear the ambulance siren and his own barely audible voice, “I am having a heart attack.” His doctor, a young man, young enough to be his son, asked what was going on in his life since physically he was in excellent shape; did he experience any stress, did something unexpected happen, was he worried. The man just nodded his head and said, “No.”

He was discharged from the hospital with no medication, but a suggestion to see a psychiatrist, a thought that he instantly dismissed. And so it was on his way home that a second appalling thing happened. He was possessed by an urge to see his rabbi. He didn’t particularly like the rabbi, yet he knew that he hadn’t liked too many people. He especially disliked people who held different opinions from his, and the rabbi was a bleeding heart who always talked about Tikkun Olam and social justice; in the past and on more than one occasion, the man insinuated that the rabbi was not Jewish enough and that his last name, Abulafia, sounded more like an Arabic name.

His new obsession that he must see the rabbi right away was as frightening as the earlier pain in his chest, something he could not control. Making the phone call he knew he sounded strange, high-pitched and not very coherent. The rabbi said he was already home and invited him to come over.

The rabbi’s study was what the man expected, lined with books and paintings, and on the large wooden desk was a tray with two cups of tea and a large plate of cookies. The rabbi said, “You should have some tea.” He drank his tea with shaking hands and could not speak.

“You said on the phone that you had a heart attack and went to the hospital,” the rabbi reminded him. “It turned out to be just a panic attack,” the man said, still feeling the sting of shame.The man thought that his sudden phone call and visit must have been as much a surprise for the rabbi as it was for him. He placed the cup on the tray and the words flew out of his mouth, “Yom Kippur,” he said. The rabbi nodded. “I spoke disparagingly about people.” He knew that he had done worse, he sometimes artfully stitched truth and fabrication so that it was difficult to tell fact from fiction; he had done it to groups he found objectionable; he defamed a political rival who lost the election. He really didn’t want to enumerate each of his transgressions and even in this strange surreal moment when he had so little control over the words that crossed his lips he could not tell the rabbi that he had also maligned him. “Rabbi, I have not killed anyone, have not cheated in business dealings, I just occasionally used hurtful words about people.” He was amazed at his ability to sound quite reasonable. “I want to feel better before I turn to God on Yom Kippur. Can you help me?”

The rabbi seemed suddenly energized. In a cheerful voice he said, “Do you think you could come back tomorrow morning with a pillow?” So there was the third bewilderment for a man who prided himself on leading a perfectly lucid life. “A pillow? What kind of a pillow?” “Do you have one with feathers? Good. I will see you tomorrow morning at 7:30.”

When the man got home he took his feathered pillow and put it next to him and touched it throughout the night, caressing the puffy pillow, seeking comfort from what has been a wild surreal day in his life. At 7:30 the next morning the man stood at the door with a pillow that seemed to have attached itself to his body. The rabbi took him up the stairs all the way to the roof of his house where the man saw an amazing garden of many pots of flowers and herbs, an urban field in full bloom. And from there and in all directions, the view of the city was undeniably beautiful though he had not paid much attention to it in the past. It was a sunny fall morning hinting of the end of summer with a light breeze.

The man began to feel better, he could breath more easily, he could smell the aromatic flowers and the herbs and that was a good omen. The rabbi led him to the railing and told him to open the pillow. As soon as he ripped a perfectly good and expensive pillow, feathers began to fly out and the rabbi encouraged him to put his hand inside and take out more feathers and let them all loose. The man felt young, like a little boy again as he saw the sea of soft feathers flying into the air, floating with the gentle wind finally going down. It was a sight to behold and he said, “Rabbi Abulafia, thank you. I feel so much better.”

This was the first time that he called the rabbi by his name and it pleased him. The rabbi said, “Now comes the second part, Jonah.” The man still taken with the sight of the white feathers asked, “is there more?” Yes, said the rabbi, reminding him that he had come to see him not about killing or stealing, just using words spreading rumors. “Jonah, now you have to put all the feathers back in the pillow.” The man looked around and felt sick again. “Surely, rabbi you must be joking. Once I let out the feathers, there is no way that I could retrieve them.” The rabbi, leaning forward as he would do when he would give a sermon said, “Words are like feathers in the wind, once you let them loose you can’t take them back.”

The man opened the palm of his hand trying to catch just one feather, maybe the one about the rabbi’s name, and saw his empty hand turning away in shame.

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*My midrash draws on a famous Hassidic tale. It is a midrash on the Torah’s prohibition of spreading rumors (Leviticus 19:16), a reminder to Americans who use the bible to restrict human rights to also read about the destructive power of rumors. We routinely witness disparaging words flying out in public life, and a current scurrilous one is the ongoing slander of Planned Parenthood by Republicans in Congress, a defamation that is so harmful to the health of millions of underserved women.