Q&A: Changing Circumstances in the Laws of Seclusion
Changing Circumstances in the Laws of Seclusion
Question
According to what is stated here, would it be permitted for a Jewish woman to be in seclusion with a non-Jew when his wife is with him? (Since perhaps nowadays they are embarrassed.)
And more generally, what is the law regarding a Jewish man being in seclusion with a non-Jewish woman when her husband is with her, even without the insights that emerge from this article?
And is the law for a secular Jewish man/woman the same as the law for a non-Jewish man/woman with respect to the laws of seclusion?
Answer
I didn’t understand why this is connected to that article. The question is whether the law of seclusion is determined by the circumstances, such that a change in them would change the law. This is open to discussion, since there are indications that seclusion is a prohibition whose boundaries were fixed, and there are other indications pointing the other way (for example, Rabbi Yosef Engel writes that seclusion is a Torah-level safeguard). Bottom line, it seems to me that this is a circumstantial law. On that assumption, that the law depends on an assessment of reality, it would seem that the law for a secular Jew is the same as for a non-Jew.
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Questioner:
In Maimonides it says that it is forbidden for a Jewish woman to be in seclusion with a non-Jew even when his wife is with him, because they are not embarrassed to have intercourse even in front of their wives. Maybe, in light of the approach you present here, one could say that in fact they are embarrassed, and permit seclusion of a Jewish woman with a non-Jew (and a secular Jew) when his wife is with him.
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Rabbi:
I still don’t understand what this has to do with what I wrote. If the law depends on embarrassment, and now they are embarrassed, then it is void. The novelty in what I wrote is that the laws concerning relations with non-Jews depend on their conduct, not that if it depends on their conduct then when the conduct changes the laws are void.