[Avodah] informing on death

[Jay F. Shachter via Avodah]

> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 18:13:03 -0400
> From: Micha Berger via Avodah <avodah at lists.aishdas.org>

> I never heard of such a thing. The permissibility of not telling a
> daughter, yes, eg if she is a cholah she'ein bah saqanah (which
> might be YD 337:1), but an actual ban on informing? News to me.

> Mar'eh meqomos?

I suspect that the source is one with which you are certainly already
familiar, but which someone else reads differently than you do, namely
Shulxan `Arukh Yoreh De`ah 402:12. There, as you no doubt know,
the Shulxan `Arukh rules that there is no obligation to tell a family
member of a death (and, parenthetically, does not except sons who are in
a position to say Qaddish -- the Rema says that, but the Shulxan `Arukh
does not), to which he then applies the phrase in Proverbs 10:18 which has
already been cited in this discussion. Now, although the Shulxan `Arukh
technically does not forbid telling the family member, it is possible to
view that as a hyperliteral reading, if the Shulxan `Arukh says that an
act is not obligatory, and then cites a verse that says that someone who
performs that act is a fool, one could read that as a ruling that the
act should not be performed. Apparently you did not read it that way,
which led to your request for a source that the act is forbidden.

Note that the Shulxan `Arukh does not permit lying, only refraining
from telling the truth, which we would know anyway even if it were not
explicitly stated, but in fact it is explicitly stated in Yoreh De`ah
402:12 that you may not lie and say that someone is alive when he is not.
There is a member of another mailing list who boasts that he lied to his
parents about the death of his son, but there is no hetter for that in
Yoreh De`ah 402:12.

                        Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
                                jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                                http://m5.chicago.il.us

                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"