ירמיהו, פרק ט׳, פסוק ד׳

A functioning society relies on a foundation of trust. When lies and betrayal take over, the most basic human connections fall apart. Daily life turns into an endless cycle of deceit, where doing wrong becomes second nature and, ultimately, an exhausting effort. In this broken reality, people constantly mock, fool, and ridicule their neighbors.

This moral decline is not just a matter of occasional dishonesty. Instead, it becomes a permanent habit. People actively train and condition their tongues to speak falsehoods, practicing deceit with relentless persistence [מצודת דוד, רד״ק, ביאור שטיינזלץ]. The peak of this corruption is reached when individuals actually become worn out from doing wrong. The primary approach among commentators is that this serves as a poetic description of a society that has grown tired and exhausted from the sheer volume of twisted, unjust, and evil deeds they have committed [רש״י, מצודת דוד, ביאור שטיינזלץ].

Adding a deeper layer to this exhaustion, [המלבי״ם] points out a distinction between two types of lying. Typically, a person who wants to spread slander needs to hear at least some piece of information from their neighbor. They then put in the effort to twist and distort those words to cause harm. However, the people of this generation grew so tired from the effort of twisting the truth that they moved on to an even worse stage. They began inventing absolute lies from their own imaginations, spreading rumors about people they had never even spoken to. Because they no longer bother to base their distortions on anything real, their words consist entirely of complete falsehoods, lacking even the smallest trace of truth.