We’re talking about neighbors. Clansmen. Fellow religios.

It’s a big Mitzvah to turn that into friendship, but until then we still have communal responsibilities, including KOSHER nosiness.

Like Hey, how are you? You don’t look so well today, can I be of help? Would you like to join us for Shabbos? Oh, it’s health? Were you aware of the medicine gemach…

Some do it better, some worse. It’s an art we must help each other perform.

True friends should be beyond that.

I wasn’t at the shiur but I know of her kav quite well. There’s great humor in her anectdotes and tons of paradoxical truth. The concern for the other forgetting his kashrus is undoubtedly coming fro chessed. But as we all know, the Torah also uses the term chessed to refer to incest!

There’s a need for limits and close knit Yiddishe communities are notorious for stumbling in this. That’s what is meant by the Yenta label.

Well intended looong noses!

It’s a problem, but emanates from a very good place.

We NEED our neighbors to remind us of kashrus timing and baby hats… but in ways that work for US.

Indeed I suspect that for some ladies, a l-i-t-t-l-e inquiry into their “abnormal” situation might at times be very meaningful. But all must be done with delicate interest in the other first.

Ashrei ha’Am sh’kakha lo!

Her basic point was is that you should not ask in general, out of curiosity, but you should always be looking to help people out. If you have something to offer, you may ask in order to possibly offer help.

She gives no credence to being a Yenta, but inquiring about somebodies welfare with the intent to help makes you a Baalei Chesed and not a Yenta.

She also points out that different cultures/communities have different sensitives to questions or comments of a private nature.

She tells about when she was first married she was strolling her baby and a neighbor says, “Without a hat, that’s how you take out a baby, without a hat”. Her initial reaction at that time was to take offense, but after living in the community for many years and seeing how much people really do care, she realizes it was just a culture differences in how people express themselves.

I can identify with your feelings of hypocricy about the holy culture of kvoda bat Melech being squeezed of its essence. I believe, however, similar to R’ Heller, that the big problem is not the excessively exuberant interest in each private other’s life, per se. That’s akin to the jewlery of our modest princess. In and of itself it doesn’t take away from her modesty.

When that’s all that’s left of her, however, that’s another story. There are those who might appreciate seeing her graddaughter playing around with them as a way to connect with the past. And there are those who will react violently to see her granddaughter take that holy jewlery to wear in the red light district, chv”sh!

Back in the properly functiong Shtetls, Yentas were a great commodity. For those who long for even just a whiff of that holy atmosphere of yore, it’s emminintly tolerable (though in need of limits).

Aliza, this was an excellent post. Thank you for the clarity and courage to share it, and maybe instruct us.

Mark, if that really is the gist of Rebbetzin Heller’s shiur in 6, I respectfully but adamantly disagree. I think that is covering up for old-fashioned nosiness. And even if one can offer advice, it may not be their place to do so. At the very least they should be respectful and hesitant enough to first ask if they may even inquire, etc. I suspect, though, that Rebbetzin Heller would agree with that.

In addition to the obvious (it should be!) rudeness and poor taste of being nosy when uninvited, there are risks of embarrassing someone publicly or privately (halbanat panim or onaat d’varim), lashon hara potential, and …?

Bilaam praised us for our sense of privacy and modesty (ma tovu ohalecha, see Rashi). The halacha deals at length with privacy issues such as when building or renovating next to someone else’s property. All that respect and sensitivity gets forgotten when we excuse and defend behaviours such as Aliza has very candidly written about. I found Rebbetzin Heller’s joke to be just the opposite of those values embedded in halacha and mussar. The neighbour shouldn’t even have known what’s going on next door.

That sort of yentish behaviour is what I always disliked about many of my parent’s generation; though no disrespect intended. I was horrified to realize later in life that was one of the last vestiges they maintained from some of the Jewish communities they came from.

I’m sure this isn’t unique to us; but it is especially unsuitable for us as I understand it. How does anyone argue ‘kol kvuda bat melech pnima’, that a woman’s dignity is in her privacy, and then stick their noses far (and often publicly) into their personal biological and emotional business?

I apologize for the strident tone. This is a sore point with me.

i say this not to soften aliza’s point in the least, because my heart goes out to her and any other woman whose privacy has been thus invaded, whose trials have been so trampled or boo-boos bumped…but i add this statement just to put in my two cents by saying the following, with respect: there are certain communities where people will talk about personal issues in this way, and others where they members view this as a deeply personal, non-tzanua way of communicating. generally, i think it’s fair to say that the moe to the right one travels, the less talk there will be that is in your face about bodily functions of any sort – let alone one like reproduction which is, after all, at the very heart of the intimacy of a jewish marriage. rather than pointing fingers, i say this with the hope that as we grow, we move away from this secular-speak and towards more supportive, more respectful relationships.

aliza, thanks for sharing this so that we can all become more sensitive human beings and jews.

NO ONE ASKED HER ABOUT HER UTERUS.

Ron:
This use of a coarse, albeit accurate, term is a page out of radical feminism

I don’t think there is anything course or undignified or shocking about using the word uterus. It’s no more course or undignified or shocking than using the word “liver.” There’s certainly nothing radically feminist about using the correct terms for body parts.

The Tsnius of pregnancy

Privacy – a Major Torah Value

Curiosity vs True Interest in the Other

Pregancy is NOT a Communal Affair!

I’m sure someone can find a great one. Actually, it seems like a powerful excercize in verbal Kashrus to work on choosing our titles well.

“Uterus” is a technical biological term. It’s not like she used a slang or rude word for a body part.

There are lots of words that are “technical biological terms” that we don’t use here, and particularly ones that refer to reproductive organs. Again, it is a rhetorical device and I understand the rationale, but I don’t agree that it is appropriate for this space or even for discourse among dignified people of the opposite sex who are not in a clinical or academic (i.e., relating to physiology or biology) relationship.

Of course its indelicate- that’s the point! She used the term ‘uterus’ to highlight just how personal the inquiry is. Your uterus shouldn’t be up for discussion. Period.

Again, I don’t believe any of the comments she reported, or that any of the similarly offended (justifiedly) commenters reported, involved discussions of her uterus, or any other bodily organ.

This use of a coarse, albeit accurate, term is a page out of radical feminism, wherein the discussion of the pros and cons of abortion is reduced by what was once a shocking demand that the subject — thought by many people to implicate the interests of at least two lives — be considered no more than a matter of gynecological hygiene, entirely personal. Of course the Torah does not endorse this approach on that topic.

Here the demand for personal space and the insistence that discussion of the topic (“Why aren’t you pregnant?”) is far more appropriate from our point of view. It truly is no one’s business. So why debase the discussion by borrowing coarsening political rhetoric from such quarters? I don’t personally consider, “Yeah, it’s shocking, that’s the point!” to be an answer for observant Jews.

I don’t mean to suggest anyone was up to anything wicked or subversive here. Just making a very weensy point about how we choose our words and the effect it may have on the quality of our discourse.