[Avodah] a troubling halacha

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

I asked:
> Could it be  that this halacha is based on the presumption
> that people would prefer to observe the relatively easy
> halachos of delayed information, and that they did not
> want to observe the relatively difficult halachos of
> timely  information?
> If so, then the next question is: What changed? Why do we
> prefer the full burden of the timely-information halachos?

R"n Toby Katz suggested:
> Perhaps it was because premature death was so common that
> people would have been constantly sitting shiva for
> parents, sibling and r'l children in the old days.

I must be misunderstanding your answer. To be "constantly sitting shiva", a person would need literally dozens upon dozens of siblings and children, AND to outlive them. Quite unlikely. The way I calculate it, if their family size was approximately the same as our family size, then the only effect of premature death would be to mourn the same number of people, but over a shorter period of time.

I wrote:
> I really can't imagine that modern communications are the
> cause of these changes. Halacha does prescribe certain
> brachos to be said when close relatives or friends see each
> other after being out of touch for a long time. But those
> cases were rare. The common case was that people *were* in
> communication with their relatives.

R"n Chana Luntz suggested:
> I don't think you are right here.  I think communication was
> often sporadic at best.  Even your assumption that the postal
> system worked is something relatively recent (last couple of
> hundred years).  Before that I do not believe it was anything
> like that reliable.  People basically remade their lives with
> only extremely limited communication with where they had come
> from.

I concede that communication between distant places was unreliable. But how often were these relatives in distant places?

I've been led to believe that until the Industrial Revolution, it was quite common for a family to stay in the very same town for many generations. Those who did move out of town would still be only a few towns away at most.

Yes, there were people who moved very far away, even many countries away. And communication was so poor that upon seeing each other, they would have such a feeling of "Baruch Mechayeh Hameisim!" that Chazal required them to say a bracha on it. But as I wrote, these cases were very rare. In most cases, even the poor communication was good enough that relatives two towns away were not totally out of a person's awareness.

"People basically remade their lives" -- Did they really? Back in the Mechaber's day? Let's not confuse the last 200 years with the many centuries before. OTOH, if I am mistaken, please correct me.

RCL brought many stories and personal experiences, including:

> If my mother had lost a parent in those early days, there
> would have been nobody in Australia who would have known
> that parent to offer comfort except my father (and he did
> not know them well), and she would not have been able to
> receive any sort of comfort from mourning together with her
> brother and sister.  I can well see the logic, in that case,
> of not necessarily imposing the full burden of aveilus on
> her then, whereas it seems to me inconceivable that she
> should have been deprived the opportunity to sit shiva with
> her brother and sister in South Africa when in fact her
> parents pass away a few years ago.  That to me is the
> difference.

I totally agree with everthing you wrote, the only exception being how relevant it is to Life In The Old Days. I would be very surprised to learn that in the Mechaber's day, so many people lived so far from their families that the standard halacha was "They have no family to mourn with, so let's withhold the info so they can follow the easier halachos."

In fact, I think it is reasonable to say that even today, most people do live near their families. My evidence is in your own post, which says that "in the case of my husband, his immediate family all live within a short distance of each other", in contrast to several people of your family who are very distant from the others.

R' Danny Schoemann told us about his grandfather:

> He was rarely in touch with them and - when in his 70's - he
> had to sit Shiva twice in a year for a "forgotten" sibling
> he was not impressed.
> So for the 3rd sibling we simply didn't tell him until it was
> "old news" at which time he only had to sit for an hour. He
> really appreciated that.
> Maybe we're simply too young to appreciate not having to sit
> Shiva every few months for people we barely know.

I totally sympathize with such a situation, and I'm confident that you are grateful for this halacha which allowed you to withhold the info until it was "old news", and in fact, which would have allowed you to withhold the news forever, had you so chosen. My only problem is that the halacha does not include any sort of qualifications which suggest doing this only in cases such as your grandfather's, but seems to say that withholding the news forever is Standard Operating Procedure.

Akiva Miller

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