Would the Talmud have told Jeffrey Goldberg to stay in the Signal chat?
If a journalist is added to a group chat discussing matters of national security, should they stay?
A few of the members of the group chat on Signal, made to plan a strike on the Houthis: Mike Waltz, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and, of course, Jeffrey Goldberg. Courtesy of Getty Images/Mira Fox
By Mira Fox March 25, 2025
“I’m not supposed to be here,” seems to have been Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s first thought after he was accidentally added to a group chat.
That would be a normal response to finding oneself in the midst of, say, strangers planning a dinner party. But the group chat in question, on the encrypted messaging app Signal, was composed of members of the Trump administration planning a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen. And Goldberg, a journalist, had just been given an inside look that any reporter would die to have.
Goldberg’s viral article about the incident highlights many of the important issues with the chat he was suddenly privy to, including violations of the Espionage Act and federal records laws, risking national security, and being sloppy enough to accidentally include someone on all of the above.
But another part of the story’s virality, at least online, is the fact that Goldberg politely removed himself once he realized the chat was real.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons for doing this. For the same reasons that Pete Hegseth and JD Vance should not be texting about national security matters — phones can be hacked or stolen — having that information on Goldberg’s phone is dangerous for American military and intelligence personnel. It may pose legal issues for a journalist to receive a government leak in this way. Also it’s just considered bad form to stay somewhere you aren’t supposed to be.
As a society, we generally agree that eavesdropping is bad. It’s rude. It’s sometimes illegal. (Though one could, of course, very reasonably argue that Goldberg was not eavesdropping; he was invited!) We frown on nosiness, culturally. In Judaism, gossip is referred to as lashon hara — literally “bad speech” — and is strongly prohibited; even if the gossip is true, it is forbidden to share it, whether it’s positive or negative.
Still, however polite it may have been, people cannot stop clowning on Goldberg for leaving the chat. It is, after all, the job of a journalist to be nosy. Why, people online keep asking, did Goldberg not seem to think that the gains from staying in the chat would be worth the impropriety?
Even the Jewish laws prohibiting lashon hara in strong terms have exceptions. The sages of the Talmud knew that sometimes we need to know what’s going on, regardless of how we find out. In fact, sometimes Jewish law actually requires gossip, if sharing the information will right a wrong.
In the Chafetz Chaim, a work of Jewish commentary on slander, conditions for good gossip are laid out. The person must first inform and admonish the wrongdoer themselves. There must be certainty that the gossip is true. There must be a clear good that results from the telling. And there must not be ridiculing or defamation past the revelation of truth.
Goldberg met all of these requirements: He contacted the administration officials, he confirmed his information, the public needed to know about the malpractice of its government, and he shared it factually without embroidering.
But beyond this, should he have stayed, to glean more information? Of course, one of the foremost wrongs being done was the existence of the group chat itself, which Goldberg would have needed to keep secret about in order to continue receiving information. Still, one could certainly make the argument that revealing whatever information continued to emerge from this group chat would do good and right wrongs done by the government.
Here, we can look to one of the sillier — yet most revealing — stories from the Talmud. In it, a rabbi’s student follows him around in an effort to learn everything his wise mentor has to offer. He even lies under his rabbi’s bed as he has sex with his wife. Upon discovery, his teacher is, of course, horrified. “But this, too, is Torah,” replies the student.
The point is that learning lies in all places, even unexpected ones or ones that the rules of good manners might prohibit from us. Without pushing some boundaries, we can never learn everything we need to know. Goldberg certainly revealed important information about the Trump administration’s practices and decision-making processes. But had he pushed farther, perhaps he could have learned more. And that, too, would be journalism — at least by Talmudic standards. A court of law might call it espionage, though.
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