Mussar sobre Provérbios 25:27

And the fourth section: The dust of evil speech. Our Rabbis said (Bava Batra 165a), “Most of the world stumbles upon theft and a minority upon sexual prohibitions, but all of them [stumble upon] the dust of evil speech.” And they said that the content of the dust of evil speech is when a person causes people to speak evil speech due to his words. And they said (Bava Batra 164b), “A person should never speak favorably of his fellow, as out of his [praise] comes his disgrace.” And behold we need to explain this statement - for it is known that speaking the praises of the sages and the righteous is from the proper traits, as it is stated (Proverbs 25:27), “but it is honorable to peruse honor.” And it is said about a fool that he does not speak the praises of the world. Rather this is the nature of this matter, that one should only speak favorably of a man face to face. That is to say, when a man speaks to his companion - and not to the larger community and in an audience of the masses, unless he knows that there is no one in that grouping who is an enemy of that man whom he wants to praise or one who is jealous of him. And if he wants to praise a man who is already assumed by the people of his nation to be a proper man and no evil or guilt is found about him, he should be praised even in front of his enemy or one jealous - for they will not be able to disgrace him. And [even] if they do disgrace him, everyone will know that [such a man’s] mouth spoke in vain, such that his mouth will be a trap for himself.

We have discussed elsewhere that the צדיק is linked to the emanation יסוד, and that this emanation is linked to מלכות through the covenant of circumcision. Noach's position in the world was demonstrated by the fact that he was born circumcised, i.e. without foreskin, according to Avot de Rabbi Nathan 2,8. Our sages say that "he guarded the covenant," and that though he did not succeed in reversing the decline of mankind to the extent of restoring man's stature to what it had been prior to Adam's sin, i.e. to have man clothed in garments of light so that individual immortality would be restored, at least he succeeded in restoring the immortality of the species. The reason that Noach did not succeed beyond this is that he drank afterwards from the vineyard he had planted, something not unlike Adam who had squeezed the juice from the grapes of the tree of knowledge. Actually, when he planted the vineyard (the tree that G–d Himself had planted in גן עדן), Noach had intended to repair the damage done by Adam, but he sinned by indulging in too much wine. Proverbs 25,27: "It is not good to eat too much honey” alludes to that incident^{Author's comment}The author mentions in an annotation that Pardes Rimonim describes the whole subject matter of the vineyard, wine, etc as something that can either be a fountain of spirituality or a source of debauchery, drunkenness. Although Noach strove to regain the יין המשומר, the reservoir of spirituality which Adam had lost by imbibing from what had been forbidden to him, Noach debased himself when he planted that vineyard; the fruit of its wine did not become his כוס ישועות, cup of salvations, but turned out to be the גפן סדום, the vineyard of Sodom, and its grapes turned out to be ענבי רוש and אשכלות מררת למו, "the grapes for them are poison, a bitter growth their clusters" (Deut. 32,32). In short, Noach had drunk the wrong kind of wine..