98 Mark Washofsky

as it originated as a report to the Israeli government commission charged with preparing that country’s official privacy legislation (Chok haganat hap'ratiyut, the Protection of Privacy Act, 1981).

In both the introductory and concluding sections of his work, Rakover frames the theoretical problem confronting any attempt to locate a protected value(in his terminology,“erekh mugan’) of “personal privacy” in the halakhic tradition. The sources, he tells us,“seemingly contain no general protection for this value; rather, they protect against specific intrusions into an individual’s privacy, such as protection of confidential information or the safeguarding of an individual in his home.” It is of some interest to note that this situation in the halakhah parallels that of the common law as Warren and Brandeis described it in 1890: the sources contain specific provisions that relate to what we might call“privacy” but make no mention of privacy as an independent legal concept.” Nonetheless, Rakover says, the Judaic teaching on privacy is hardly confined to these specific provisions,“for our sources also include the prohibitions of tale bearing(lalekhet rakhil) and of slander(lashon hara).” He singles out for special mention the halakhot concerning prohibited speech because, unlike the other specific provisions in our list, they cannot be included within the rubric of tort law(n’zikin).® Torts involve the duty of compensation for material damage that one actually causes to another. By contrast, the Torah forbids the very act of ordinary gossip(r'khilut) regardless of its effect, even if the gossip does no damage at all to the reputation of its subject.” The prohibition of gossip, in other words, is to be classified under the heading of ritual law(isur v’heter) rather than of monetary law(dinei mamonot), the province of torts such as hezek r’iyah, which are more easily definable as transgressions upon property interests. Rakover’s invocation of the rules of forbidden speech is an interesting parallel to the use that Warren and Brandeis made of the right not to publish one’s thoughts. The American authors cited that right to support their claim that not all privacy interests recognized by the law can be subsumed under the heading of property and that, therefore, there must exist a more general tort of