Dear Editor,
I will keep it short & to the point.
Earlier this week, I read a story on a Frum news-focused website that a leading Rov in Eretz Yisroel had knee replacement surgery.
I am beyond appalled. Have we as a society stooped so low that we are now tabloid reporting?
What about medical privacy? Has that become a non-issue? What if the medical condition was embarrassing? Where do we draw the line?
We are not talking about some politician or celebrity here, we are talking about an Adam Chashuv.
There is room for discussion on this subject if there was a Tehillim request for a major surgery of an Adam Chashuv; but this story was reported POST surgery.
There will be people who will argue with my reasoning. Just consider this: If it was your family member, how would you think about it?
Benny Abrams – Lakewood, NJ
NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.
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2 Responses
First of all, I know nothing about the report other than what I read in this article.
Second of all, I have no idea whether or not the patient objected – or objects – to the information reported.
Third, recovery from knee surgery takes a fair amount of time, and the patient will be getting about on crutches, or in a wheel chair, for a few weeks, at least. If he resumes his usual – or a modified – schedule, everyone who has contact with him will know that he had a medical problem. No shame in that.
If the knee problem was because his wife kicked him, or creditors kicked him, or he was genuflecting, the report might be inappropriate. But otherwise, I do not see anything inappropriate about reporting about a prominent rav’s health, especially if it is improving.
I did not read the story reported in the opinion article. Maybe the purpose was to ask to read tehilim for the Rav, maybe not.
But I wanted to comment on the tabloid-reporting of the so-called frum websites.
1) I don’t know how it works in the US but here in Israel, the Frum websites are not that frum. Some years ago, the Gedolei Hador in Israel forbid to run these kind of websites. The real frum stopped immediately running news websites. The others, continued. If one does not follow Gedolei Hador, how can he pretend to be frum?
I was recently told that the only israeli website with a rabbinical committee is JDN. The reason why I am in US websites is only because I am not fluent enough to read in Hebrew.
2) Unfortunately, the trend to tabloid-reporting in many Jewish websites pretending to be frum is a sign of the broader contamination of the outer non-jewish/non-religious environment. I frum website should take pride in allowing the frum public to know the important news while spending the least time to avoid waste of time and bitul torah to the readers. A real frum does not need daily news. What a frum needs is a Jewish and religious version of The Economist pages “business this week” and “politics this week” without pictures, lashon hara or useless time consuming paragraphs without added value: in 5 min of reading, you know what happened the whole week.