The following D’Var Torah was presented to the Spring Meeting of the Commission on Social Action on Sunday, April 25.
Our Torah is a great repository of euphemism. Read any sentence of Scripture and you will learn numerous interpretations of its meaning, for the words themselves are the first of countless levels of nuance and connotation. Euphemism is, in fact, a cherished device in the narrative toolkit of our tradition. Providing a linguistic veil over the most sacred expressions of our faith, euphemism is our lexical armor, the invisible fence guarding the soul of our people. In Proverbs we read the maxim of the wise King Solomon, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in vessels of silver” (25:11). Writing on this passage to his student R. Joseph Ibn Aknin, Maimonides expounded,
“It shows that in every word which has a double sense, a literal one and a figurative one, the plain meaning must be as valuable as silver, and the hidden meaning still more precious; …Just as a golden apple overlaid with a network of silver, when seen at a distance, or looked at superficially, is mistaken for a silver apple, but when a keen-sighted person looks at the object well, he will find what is within, and see that the apple is gold.”