Internet, Privacy, and Progressive Halakhah

(16"-century Turkey) released a husband from a vow to divorce his wife in part on the grounds that“gadol k'vod hab riyot.”'® R. Moshe Isserles performed a wedding on Friday night when the acrimonious financial negotiations between the couple’s families delayed the ceremony, which had been scheduled for Friday afternoon. A major argument he gives for this leniency(since weddings are normally prohibited on Shabbat ) is gadol k'vod hab’riyot: the humiliation that this bride would suffer should the community learn of this sordid affair would amount to an intolerable insult to her dignity."” And in the name of k'vod hab’riyot, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook permitted women to stitch the parchment sheets of a Torah scroll one to the other, even though women are traditionally ineligible to write a Torah scroll.'”“Human dignity,” in other words, has retained its vitality as a legal principle, as a rationale for actual halakhic rulings, long after the close of the formative Talmudic period of the halakhah. Contemporary Orthodox scholars continue to cite it for halakhic purposes.” Rabbi Daniel Sperber , for one, has recently argued that, on the basis of k'vod hab’riyot, women be called to the Torah in Orthodox congregations that are receptive to that practice.'® All of this would support the contention that gadol k'vod hab'riyot retains its power as a robust Jewish legal principle and that it is much more than an abstract ethical maxim. The principle would seem therefore to offer an appropriate and sufficient conceptual basis upon which to base a claim for the existence of a Jewish legal value of individual privacy.

Not everyone, however, will agree with that assessment. Some will argue that“human dignity,” far from being a“robust” Jewish legal principle, is in reality the halakhic equivalent of the proverbial ninety-eight pound weakling. Such is the conclusion drawn by Ya'akov Blidstein in his comprehensive study of the role of k vod hab'riyot in the Talmudic and halakhic literature.'”® The principle, he informs us, is cited but rarely in the sources. As a purely Quantitative matter, it has been largely absent from Talmudic discourse; as a substantive matter, the Rabbis fail to invoke it even in cases where it might provide an effective solution to some