I am not sure if it counts as a guilty pleasure, but I really love the Normal Gossip podcast hosted by Kelsey McKinney. According to its description:
Normal Gossip delivers juicy, strange, funny, and utterly banal gossip about people you’ll never know and never meet. Host Kelsey McKinney discusses reader-submitted comedic gossip with guests, diving into the lives and decisions of complete strangers.
Not gossip in the way we usually think of it, the podcast is actually a master class in storytelling. McKinney brings us into family dynamics, friendships, and romantic relationships with wit and curiosity – and never meanness. According to pop culture site Vulture, “The idea for Normal Gossip first percolated during the pandemic, when the physical separation from others caused McKinney to feel the stinging absence of mundane gossip that doesn’t involve, say, a celebrity. Additionally, one listener commented that “It really makes you more aware of the fact that gossip isn’t always Mean Girls stuff from that movie. It changed my whole perspective on the word.”
One of the questions that McKinney asks each of the guest hosts who joins her for episodes is this: “What is your relationship with gossip?” Each time she asks it, I am brought immediately to the Torah portion from this past Shabbat--B’Haalotcha. In it, there is a well-known scene in which Miriam and Aaron, Moses’s siblings, have what to say about the woman Moses married. We do not know exactly what was said, but Rashi, the great medieval commentator, is certain that it is not kind. His reading seems borne out by how the story continues: Aaron and Miriam are called out by God, and Miriam (yes, only Miriam) is punished with a skin affliction, which our rabbis had already–from the book of Leviticus–identified as a punishment for gossip.
“What is your relationship with gossip?” Kelsey McKinney might ask. It’s complicated, one might say, largely thanks to texts like these and the many rabbinic interpretations thereof.
But, it is not black and white. Our tradition wants to say that it is; it paints gossip, lashon hara, is unequivocally bad. And I think that the way the rabbis are understanding it – as evidenced by their use of the term “evil tongue”– makes that unilateral understanding a fair one. Damaging gossip, hurtful gossip, the kind of stories that ruin lives and reputations–that’s bad, unequivocally. And–that’s not all there is. McKinney writes that “gossip is so deeply human in that what we’re actually doing is looking at the behaviors of others and measuring it against our own moral yardstick and then drawing judgments about ourselves and others.” I am not trying to write a defense of gossip, but I am trying to understand–as Normal Gossip does–the grey area between gossip and storytelling, and what we learn about ourselves and others in that space.
One day, I will write the much longer essay I want to write– about the way that only Miriam is punished despite the text clearly stating that Aaron was an equal participant, about the ways that the word and concept of gossip is female-coded, and about the ways that “gossip” has both bonded women and saved their lives over the centuries.
But for today, I’ll just leave you with the tagline from Normal Gossip: Remember folks, you did not hear that from me.”
-Rabbi Sari Laufer