Reply To: Kabbalas Loshon Horo

My father’s immediate reaction when I told him that I was moicheh was that I need to ask this guy mechilah, because I had and have no right to make any assumptions about him, and to the best of my knowledge (?) he is an upstanding Jew who did nothing wrong.

I was very mesupak about this, like I wrote above. In a comparable scenario, if I hear that somebody is coming to kill me [without meeting the conditions of תועלת] in a situation where I have no halachic right to believe it, yet I instinctively believe it – am I mechuyav to escape or otherwise prepare myself מדין סכנה? Or would you say that על פי תורה, there is no reason to be suspicious? I don’t doubt the halacha in that case. So I’m not sure what my sofek is in the first case.