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i am working on avoiding loshon hora, and often people start saying something and then unfortunately mention a name. totally unnecessary and wrong. then they get mad at me for not allowing them to continue. i also get flack for being “{dan le kafZechut”
how do you stop or avoid loshon hara without everyone complaining that you are ‘holier than thou.”
Excuse yourself that you have to leave, as soon as you smell the conversation even might veer into loshan hora.
“Excuse yourself that you have to leave, as soon as you smell the conversation even might veer into loshan hora.”
It is your obligation that others not speak L”H as well.
Try implementing a Machsom L’fi amongst your friends and co-workers (if possible) hopefully you can teach by example.
That’s one way.
Second way is not to care what people think. Chofetz Chaim writes that in his sefer, Better a person be considered a fool one moment on this world, than an everlasting fool in the world to come.
An additional benefit of this approach is that once people get the hang of your new commitment, they’ll feel uncomfortable talking evil in your presence. They’d actually look up to you. You’d get a share in their shmiras hadibur!
If you know the person will not respond well to telling them outright not to speak L”H, often the best thing to do is to quickly change the topic — it is actually easier then it seems to interrupt someone with “Oh! I just remembered I really wanted to tell you. . .” — at worse they’ll think you are being rude, but if your new topic is interesting enough then the moment will pass!
I stumbled on this approach many years ago by accident when I was in camp. There was a big push to be careful, and one thing going around was that if someone is starting to say something that sounds like L”H, you can use a hint to stop it. A popular one was “I smell smoke.” Well, I was with a group of girls who started speaking some L”H and I said “I smell smoke.” What I didn’t realize was these particular girls had never heard about this phrase, so they took me literally, and decided to go out of the bunk and check around. I didn’t bother explaining because the purpose was served anyway — everyone was distracted and the conversation was over!
Since then I discovered that you don’t usually need something that dramatic — conversations naturally change course all the time (just look at a typical CR thread!).
Obviously this won’t help if someone is specifically trying to tell you something — that would probably require a more direct approach, as ZeesKite discussed. However for the L”H that is constantly just coming up in conversation this works.
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