[Avodah] a troubling halacha

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Danny Schoemann wrote:
> Why don't we simply assume that it has nothing to do
> with the Avel, but rather with the bearer of the news.
> Shlomo Hamelech asserted: Being the harbinger of bad
> news is foolish. Why would anybody want to be the town
> fool? So now you have to weight being a fool vs. doing
> the guy a "favor". Now we can understand why the
> Poskim sometimes suggest that the "favor" outweighs
> the foolishness.

Yes, I think we all agree that doing a favor outweighs the foolishness. The problem is that many  listmembers (myself included) presume that the daughter would emphatically want to be told about her parents' passing, but it seems that for many centuries, the general presumption is that the daughter would NOT consider that to be a favor. Ditto for a sibling, spouse, or parent. And in fact, ditto for the son too, except that he has an obligation to say kaddish.

As I see it, the questions we're trying to answer are: Can it be possible that human emotions have changes so much? Is it true that we care more about our family than they did? Or are we missing some key point?

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.

I can't suggest a specific number of times-per-year that they would write letters to each other, but it is safe to presume that it was often enough that the aforementioned brachos were said only rarely. If I am correct about that, then the next step is to presume that the "foolishness" would be in his trying to hide a relative's death, because it would eventually be discovered anyway.

And if I'm correct on that point as well, then I think I may have stumbled on the answer to this thread. Consider the following:
-- The presumption is not to tell someone about a relative's passing
-- This applies even though they did occasionally communicate with each other
-- Despite hiding this informaiton, the truth would come out anyway
-- The average person did not prefer finding out right away
-- The average person preferred finding out eventually

Okay, here's my guess: 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? It can't be because of the general trend towards stricter halachos, can it?

Akiva Miller


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