Who Doesn't Love Steve?

Last night, I was talking to Steve. He just randomly said something along the lines of, "you know why Meshiach isn't here yet? Because I have baseless hatred for this guy I know."

Gasp.
Give yourself a few minutes for that to sink in.
You can read on now.

Steve used to be my secular Jew friend and now he's frummer than I am! I went to an old classmate's wedding last night and spent lots of my time there speaking lashon hara. Then I came home only to hear Steve's theory on the Meshiach's delayed arrival.

I once heard this beautiful thing about lashon hara. I can't remember who said it, but I'm pretty sure it was a rebbe of somewhere. Anyway, he said the following: "There's no reason to speak poorly about another person. You don't accomplish anything but to point out what is bad about the subject of your conversation to HaShem. And in today's day when so much random suffering happens to people, why would anyone want to remind HaShem that someone might be "worthy" of any of it?"

Uh, hello? I stopped speaking lashon hara practically cold turkey after that. But then I forgot, and then it was fun to poke fun at other people, and then I just fell back into my habit of being a really, really mean girl.

I find that mussar usually comes from the weirdest places. I needed my Catholic hairdresser to remind me of what tznius is all about a few months ago. Now I needed Steve to remind me of the power our emotions, let alone speech, has in this world.

So there you go, Steve. You might not have gotten the honor of "conversation of the day" :), but you sure did a good job reminding me that everything we do should have a pretty damn good reason.