[Avodah] a troubling halacha

[Chana Luntz]

RAM writes:

> 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 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.  Of course, the situation when there was war made that even worse, and
of course the Shoah even worse - but I would point out that my grandfather
never ever knew when or even if his parents passed away (when my father and
I looked back on it, after I had gone to Lithuania and found the ghetto
records with my great grandmother and two cousins of my father on them, and
the information that the most likely scenario was that my great grandfather
and my father's uncle, sister-in-law etc were killed at the shooting pits
when the Nazis first invaded, we realised that there was almost a conspiracy
of silence.  When I had conversations with my grandfather, somehow it was as
though the Lithuania he had left still lived, somehow, and somehow nobody
put two and two together - I even dare say, nobody would permit themselves
to put two and two together, until after he passed away).

But I think even more critical than the advent of the telephone and the
ability to transmit instantaneous news is the advent of the aeroplane.

One of the things that was very clear to me as an observer of my husband
sitting shiva, is that there were two things that were particularly
emotionally important - a) he sat shiva with his brothers and his uncle (and
in the case of sitting for his father, with his mother) all together in the
same house; b) he sat shiva within a community who knew not only him but his
parents, so that many of the people who came to the shiva did not come so
much because they knew him, but because they knew his parents and wanted to
pay their respects (and were able to tell him wonderful things about them).

Now in the case of my husband, his immediate family all live within a short
distance of each other.  BUT the same thing was true when my mother sat
shiva.  a) She sat shiva with her two siblings and b) she sat in a community
that knew her parents.  And that was only possible because of the aeroplane.
Because my mother, my uncle and my aunt live on *three different continents*
and yet when the news came through, my mother and my aunt jumped on a plane
and were there in time for the levaya.  Yes it was the telephone that
enabled that to happen, but it was the aeroplane that meant that they sat as
a family.

Similarly RET when discussing his mother and how important it was for her to
be told, made a very telling comment - he described her distress if she had
not been able to sit shiva *with the rest of the family*.  Because, today,
being told means as a consequence, that unless one is unwell or
incapacitated (or one is caring for someone who is), then one can join the
mourning community that is found in the shiva house and receive comfort from
the community of which the niftar was a part.

But this was not true even within living memory.  If my Lithuanian born
grandparents in South Africa had found out that they had lost a parent in
Lithuania - even were it possible for the news to travel within the 30 days
to make it a shemua karova (and even pre Shoah), there is no way they would
have been able to get to Lithuania to sit shiva.  Even when my parents went
to Australia from South Africa - they went by boat and it took six weeks to
travel (and a day to get connected on the telephone, you would receive a
call in the morning from the operator telling you to expect a call in the
evening).

But because news was so sporadic, and because when you left you left, and
you built a new and different life where you were, I think that aveilus
would be much more disruptive and less therapeutic - sitting shiva alone
without a single person who really had any understanding of what you had
lost.  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.  That
today anybody can afford to, and obtain a ticket and fly anywhere any the
world within the space of a day pretty much at most.  It changes a
tremendous amount.

> Akiva Miller

Regards

Chana