New York – It is now after Tisha B’Av and most of us are re-attuned to the issue of sinas chinam and Lashon haRah.  We are also more finely attuned to the notion of helping others out fulfilling v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha – and therefore the topic of providing shidduch information properly is a timely topic. 

But before a single halacha is examined, a foundational tension has to be set in place, because everything that follows depends on it.

On one side: every Jew’s zivug is min haShamayim. A person will marry the one intended for him, at the time intended, and nothing any human being does or fails to do will alter that. No amount of loshon hora spoken about a young woman will cost her the marriage she is meant to have. No family history, no episode in a person’s past, and no careless remark by a former roommate can take from a person what has been set aside for him. This is not a comforting sentiment. It is emunah, and it is true.

On the other side: a person operates entirely within the world of hishtadlus, of cause and consequence, and of accountability. His or her actions have effects, and that person answers for them completely.

Why Both Are Necessary

What happens when only the first is held? A person says something about a young woman. The young man turns away from the shidduch. Ten years later the two meet again, marry, and discover in the course of the conversation that the first attempt was derailed by a remark that was mistaken, or exaggerated, or true but wildly misunderstood.

It is an entirely correct hashkafa that this couple was not meant to marry until that later point, and that the delay was itself min haShamayim. That resolves the question of what happened. It does not resolve the question of who is answerable for it.

The one who spoke does not get to say: it was meant to be. Hashgacha explains the outcome; it never excuses the conduct. The decade is on his cheshbon. This is the standard rule wherever hashgacha and human agency meet — that an outcome was decreed has never yet exempted the person who brought it about — and there is no area in which it is more routinely forgotten than this one.

Held together, the two truths produce the correct posture: a person who speaks about a shidduch is fully accountable for every word, and at the same time is under no obligation to save anyone’s future by his own vigilance, because that future is not in his hands. The second half of that sentence removes the anxiety that drives most over-disclosure. The first half removes the carelessness that drives the rest.

The Two-Sided Mistake

The Chofetz Chaim made a sharp observation about shidduchim. When it comes to shidduch information, people talk when they should be silent, and they stay silent when they should talk.

He explained that the yetzer hora works both sides of the street:

• When a person has real, important information that ought to be shared, the yetzer hora fills him with fear of speaking loshon hora, so he says nothing at all — and someone gets hurt.
• When a person is eager to pass along some passing negative impression that means very little, the yetzer hora encourages him, warning him that if he stays quiet he will be guilty of standing by while his fellow’s blood is shed.

In other words, the same excuse gets used in both directions. That is exactly why a person cannot rely on his instincts here. He or she needs to know the actual halachos.

What a Person Must Know

Any one of us may be asked, at any moment, to give information about a person or a family for a shidduch. That makes learning this material an obligation, not an option. Five separate things must be understood:

1. What is permitted to say, and what is forbidden to say.
2. Who is asking. The same fact may be answered one way to a parent and another way entirely to a friend making inquiries on the family’s behalf. This distinction is unfamiliar to most people and is developed in Part Six.
3. How to say it — the correct way to transmit the details that halacha does permit.
4. How to ask — how to properly obtain critical information when a person needs it himself.
5. When to say it. Information that is permitted to share in the early stages of a shidduch may be forbidden to share later without a rav’s permission.

The Weight of Every Word

Dangers, however, run in both directions:

• Your words could easily be the one and only reason a shidduch is dropped.
• Holding back crucial information could allow a shidduch to move ahead that should never have moved ahead, causing tremendous pain to everyone involved.

Many people’s lives have been damaged by inaccurate information given about them, or by careless speech about their shidduchim.

The Presumption Is Silence

Most treatments of this subject begin with the conditions under which negative information may be released. That ordering is misleading, because it presents disclosure as the norm and silence as the exception requiring justification. The truth is the reverse.

Ain Zeh Derech: The Question Itself Is Wrong

Someone calls and asks: tell me all of her chesronos. What are her faults? Where does she fall short?

The instinct is to treat this as a legitimate question requiring a carefully calibrated answer. It is not. The proper response begins by rejecting the premise:

Do I go through the world looking for the worst in every person? When I look at someone, do I set out to find his failings? If you ask me about a person’s maalos, I will look for maalos and I will tell you what I find. But to go looking for chesronos — ain zeh derech. That is not the way.

The point is reinforced by turning the question on the one asking. Would he willingly recite his own chesronos to a stranger on the telephone? He would not, and he would be appalled to learn that someone else had done it for him. There is no basis on which a person may do to another what he would find intolerable done to himself.

This is not merely a matter of sensitivity. It reflects a real halachic posture. The one answering is not a repository of data with a duty to output it on request. He has his own obligations regarding what he searches for, what he retains, and what he transmits, and none of those obligations are suspended because a question was asked.

The Bell Curve Principle

This is the single most important practical idea in the entire subject, and it is the one most often absent from popular treatments.

Every human being has faults. Every person alive is, in some measure, lazy, or disorganized, or inconsistent about tefillah, or careless with other people’s property, or impatient, or given to speaking before thinking. These are not defects. They are the ordinary texture of being a person, and they describe not merely a minority but very often thirty or forty percent of any population one might name — frequently including the person doing the reporting.

Why Naming Them Is a Distortion

A trait shared by a third of the population is, in ordinary life, unremarkable. Placed into a shidduch inquiry, the same trait undergoes a transformation. The inquirer is listening in a deliberately critical frame, evaluating a stranger on limited information, and every negative datum received is weighted far beyond its actual significance. He does not hear “somewhat disorganized, like most people.” He hears “there is a problem here,” and the shidduch closes.

The statement was accurate and the impression it produced was false. That gap — between what was said and what was understood — is the mechanism by which most damage in this area is done, and it is done by people who were scrupulously honest.

The Practical Test

Before reporting any negative trait, a person should ask: what proportion of people I know would this same description fit? If the honest answer is a substantial fraction, the trait is inside the bell curve and is not reportable. It says nothing that distinguishes this candidate from the general run of humanity, and reporting it will nonetheless be heard as though it did.

A second question follows: does this description fit me? A person who would report another for a fault he shares has demonstrated that he is not applying a standard but reacting to a person.

What Falls Outside

Nothing in this section applies to matters outside the ordinary range — a genuine and unaddressed violent temper, actual theft, a serious untreated illness, a fundamental misrepresentation of who a person is. Those are treated in Part Five and must be handled entirely differently. The distinction between the two ranges is the organizing distinction of this entire guide, and a person who cannot confidently place a given fact on one side or the other must ask a rav rather than guess.

Ainee Yodea: Training the Default Answer

The practical technique that follows from all of the above is disarmingly simple and genuinely difficult: a person should train himself to say I don’t know.

This runs against a deep habit. People are uncomfortable being asked a question and having no answer, and will manufacture an assessment rather than admit the absence of one. The discomfort is worth overcoming for its own sake — a person who cannot say I don’t know is poorly equipped for learning as well as for life — and in this area it is close to indispensable.

Note that in the great majority of cases the answer is also simply true. Asked whether a young man is careful about his tefillos, a person who has seen him at various times and formed a mixed impression genuinely does not know. He has fragments. He has not conducted an assessment. Reporting a conclusion he has not actually reached is not honesty; it is invention delivered confidently.

Judging a Person at His Best

Alongside the presumption of silence sits a positive principle governing how a person should be assessed at all.

Suppose one was at the Kosel with a young woman a single time and saw her daven with unmistakable depth and sincerity. Should that be reported as characteristic of her, given that one has also seen her daven perfunctorily on many other occasions?

It should. The reasoning is precise: a person incapable of that depth could not have produced it even once. What was seen was real, and it belongs to her. The perfunctory davening reflects a person under ordinary conditions; the moment at the Kosel reflects what she is capable of, and capability is the more accurate measure of a person than average performance.

The principle generalizes. A person is most truly described by his best moments, because his best moments reveal what is actually in him, while his worst reveal only what circumstance drew out. This is a substantive claim about human beings and not a rule of etiquette, and it is the reason the positive framing required below is not a polite fiction.

The Asymmetry of Exaggeration

It is commonly said that one may not exaggerate. Stated flatly, this is imprecise. The rule is asymmetric, and the asymmetry matters.

A good model is the hesped. At a eulogy one is permitted — indeed expected — to amplify the good that was genuinely present in the person. One may not attribute to him qualities he did not have; a man who was not generous may not be eulogized as a philanthropist. But a man who gave what he could may be described in expansive terms, and this is not falsehood.

The justification is the same as the principle above. When one has seen a genuine good quality in a person, one has almost certainly seen only a portion of it. There is more behind what was visible. Amplifying is therefore closer to the truth than reporting the fragment, and understatement would be the actual distortion.

Applied to shidduchim: a person may present the good expansively and must present the negative with the strictest minimalism. In the positive direction, generous description is permitted and appropriate. In the negative direction, a single word of amplification is motzi shem ra. “He is quiet” and “he is very quiet” are separated by one word, and that word converts a description into a defect.

We Do Not Know What Anyone Needs

A final consideration undercuts the confidence of the person reporting flaws.

A young woman is meticulously organized. The young man being considered is not. It appears self-evident that this is a problem worth flagging.

But nobody knows what this woman’s life is meant to contain, what she is meant to develop, or what she is meant to contend with. It is entirely possible that this man is precisely the one intended for her and that the friction is the point rather than an obstacle to it. The one answering the telephone is not in a position to determine the appropriate match for anyone, and the assumption that he is — that his judgment about compatibility is sound enough to act on by releasing damaging information — is unfounded.

His role is far narrower than he imagines. He was asked a question. He is not the one deciding.

The One Trait Worth Asking About

If most of what people report is inside the bell curve and should not be reported at all, a fair question follows: what is actually worth knowing?

Rabbi Efram Goldberg explains that the Torah’s answer emerges from a puzzle. The ben sorer u’moreh is judged al shem sofo — for what he will become rather than for what he has done. Yet Yishmael, cast out and dying of thirst, is saved ba’asher hu sham, judged by where he stands at that moment, over the angels’ objection that his descendants will one day torment Israel. Two cases, two opposite rules.

The distinction is not the severity of the wrongdoing. It is that the Torah describes the wayward son, again and again, as einenu shomei’a — he does not listen. He cannot hear his father or his mother, and by extension cannot hear anyone. Yishmael had done wrong and remained reachable. The wayward son’s future is sealed not by his conduct but by his closedness.

Rabbeinu Yonah makes the same point directly: the first prerequisite for teshuvah is the willingness to listen — to remain open to the possibility that one is mistaken and must adjust. A person who cannot be influenced cannot grow, not by a rebbi, not by a friend, not by a sefer, not by a spouse, not even by his own conscience.

This is the trait worth asking about, and it is the one nobody asks about. Not whether he is bright, whether she is pretty, what the family is, what the yichus is. Whether the person can be reached. When shown he may be wrong, does he grow curious or defensive? Is this a finished product or a work in progress? Can he say: you may be right, let us think about it?

It bears noting that the modern research points the same way. Marriages in which one partner will not accept influence — who must always be right, always in control — fail at strikingly high rates, and this can be predicted from watching a single disagreement. Marriages in which both partners allow themselves to be shaped by the other are markedly more stable. The Torah made the point first, and made it sharper: closedness is not a flaw among flaws. It is the one condition that forecloses a future.

This Is Not “Permitted Loshon Hora”

Where negative information genuinely must be conveyed, one concept has to be clear, because almost everyone gets it wrong.

Negative information given for the constructive purpose of a shidduch is called toeles. When toeles information is spoken in the exact manner the Torah requires, it never falls into the category of loshon hora in the first place.

The Torah is not allowing loshon hora for the sake of a shidduch. The Torah is defining this kind of speech as something entirely separate from loshon hora.

A person should therefore not feel that he is bending a rule or receiving a special exemption. He is performing a different mitzvah — but only if he satisfies every condition. Miss the conditions, and it is plain loshon hora.

Where This Is Found

The primary source is the Chofetz Chaim, Hilchos Rechilus klal 9, which sets out the conditions under which negative information may be transmitted for a constructive purpose, together with Hilchos Loshon Hora klal 10 on loshon hora l’toeles. The Be’er Mayim Chaim printed alongside develops the reasoning behind each condition and should be learned with the text rather than skipped.

Shidduchim are not the primary case discussed in klal 9 — the Chofetz Chaim there treats business partnerships, hiring, and similar arrangements — but the poskim have applied his framework to shidduchim consistently, and the shidduch case is in some respects more stringent, since the relationship is permanent and the information ordinarily cannot be verified independently by the party who needs it.

Five Conditions Versus Seven

Popular presentations compress the Chofetz Chaim’s conditions into five. His own formulation lists seven. Anyone learning this seriously should know what the compression omits.

1. The speaker saw the matter himself and did not rely on hearsay.
2. He does not rush to conclude that what he saw constitutes a genuine fault; he considers it carefully first.
3. He first attempts to speak with the subject himself and correct the matter privately, where feasible.
4. He does not exaggerate or embellish the fault in any way.
5. His intention is purely constructive, and not the pleasure of speaking against another or the settling of a grievance.
6. The same constructive result cannot be achieved by any other means not involving negative speech.
7. The harm coming to the subject does not exceed what beis din would impose on him were the matter adjudicated there.

The Two That Get Dropped

Condition three — addressing the matter with the subject first — is generally inapplicable in shidduchim, since one is rarely positioned to raise a person’s character flaws with him directly. This is why most popular treatments omit it.

Condition seven is dropped for no good reason, and its omission has consequences. The principle is that a person may not, through his disclosure, inflict a penalty heavier than beis din would impose for the same conduct. Applied here: a disclosure calibrated to end one particular shidduch is within bounds, while a disclosure that will follow a person through the community and end every shidduch offered him for the next decade is not — even if every word is true. The measure of harm is part of the halacha, not a matter of sensitivity.

The Listener’s Misuse as an Independent Bar

There is a further principle, independent of all seven conditions, which in practice governs a very large share of shidduch cases and is rarely applied to them.

A person may not speak — even truthfully, even for toeles — where he knows the listener will take what is said and act on it wrongly. The standard case is an employer who would dismiss a worker over something that does not warrant dismissal. The information may be accurate and the speaker’s motive constructive; it is nonetheless forbidden, because the foreseeable consequence is an injustice that the speaker has enabled.

Why This Swallows Most Cases

Shidduch inquirers systematically over-weight negative information. This is not a failing of particular people; it is the predictable behavior of anyone evaluating a stranger on thin evidence with a decision to make. A minor fault delivered into that frame will not be received as minor.

The speaker therefore knows, in advance, that his accurate statement will be misused. That knowledge is itself disqualifying. Where a person can foresee that a true and modest report will be inflated into a decisive objection, the report is barred — not by prudence but by the halacha governing speech to a listener who will act on it improperly.

This is the formal basis for what Part Two established as a posture. The presumption of silence within the bell curve is not merely wise counsel. It follows from a rule.

Asking Questions for a Shidduch

Always Announce Your Purpose

When investigating whether to pursue a shidduch, a person must open the conversation by stating his purpose:

The reason I’m asking you for this information is that someone is considering a shidduch with this person.

Many people resist this, feeling that announcing the purpose will make the other person guarded and cost them the honest answer. That feeling does not change the halacha.

Reason #1: So That Nobody Sins

Certain information may be revealed only where the purpose is a shidduch. If the question is asked and answered without that purpose established:

• The person answering has spoken loshon hora.
• The person asking has violated lifnei iver lo sitein michshol — before a blind person do not place a stumbling block — having caused the other to sin.

Reason #2: So the Answer Can Be Phrased Correctly

Once the person answering knows this is a shidduch inquiry, he knows how to frame his answer so it satisfies the requirements of constructive speech. Without that knowledge he cannot possibly phrase it properly.

Sources and Situations to Avoid Entirely

• Do not ask an enemy. It is forbidden to seek shidduch information from a known enemy of the prospect or his family, or even from someone known to have had a disagreement with them. This source is tempting precisely because it will produce hidden negatives. That is exactly why it may not be used.
• Do not disclose to someone who will not listen. If a person is about to reveal unflattering details but is fairly certain the inquirer would not heed the advice anyway, the information should not be disclosed. No constructive purpose is served — only damage.

The One Asking Has Obligations Too

Nearly all discussion of this subject addresses the person answering. The person placing the call carries obligations of his own, and they are widely ignored.

Do Not Ask What You Do Not Need to Know

The heter to speak negatively exists because the inquirer needs the information to make a decision. Where he does not need it, the heter does not extend to it, and the question becomes a lifnei iver problem — the asker has manufactured a situation in which another person will speak loshon hora with no toeles to justify it.

A person should therefore know, before dialing, what he actually needs to establish. Questions asked from curiosity, from a desire for a complete picture for its own sake, or because everyone asks them, are not covered.

The Problem of the Checklist

The circulated shidduch questionnaire — the list asked identically of every reference about every candidate — is halachically troubling for a specific reason. It solicits ordinary-range and preference-level material in the same tone and with the same weight as genuinely essential material, and invites the person answering to render judgment on matters he was never asked to judge and often cannot judge.

Questions about what a family owns, what a girl weighs, what tablecloth is used on Shabbos, and what color shirt is worn during the week are not questions about whether two people can build a bayis ne’eman b’Yisroel. Where such a question reflects a genuine and firmly held requirement, it belongs in the third category described in Part Five and may be asked. Where it is asked reflexively because it appears on a list, it has no standing at all.

Do Not Shop for a Worse Answer

A person who has asked three references, received three favorable answers, and continues calling in the expectation that a fourth or fifth source will finally produce something negative has left the framework of toeles entirely. He is no longer gathering what he needs; he is looking for grounds to decline, and every subsequent call is an invitation to loshon hora with no constructive purpose.

Verification and shopping are distinguishable by an honest person: verification stops when the fact is established, and shopping does not stop until the desired answer arrives.

Do Not Ask Someone Who Should Not Answer

Consider who is being asked. A therapist, a physician, a school principal with access to confidential files, a former employer bound by agreement, and a person known to be in conflict with the family either may not answer or should not be placed in the position of deciding whether to answer. Putting the question to them is itself the michshol.

The Objection: Am I Not Giving Bad Advice?

Every reader of Part Two arrives at the same objection, and it deserves a direct answer.

The objection runs: a person calls and asks about a young man. I believe he is lazy. I believe this girl could do considerably better. If I answer positively, or answer that I don’t know, the caller hangs up under the impression that I endorse this shidduch. Have I not given advice I do not believe — and is that not itself lifnei iver, placing a stumbling block before someone seeking guidance?

The Answer

The premise is that the inquirer is relying on this single conversation to decide. If he genuinely is, that is a defect in his own approach — a failure of bitachon and of ordinary prudence — and it is not a liability the person answering assumes on his behalf.

The one answering was not asked to certify the shidduch. He was asked to contribute one fragment of a picture the family is assembling from many sources: a rav, a rebbi, a mashgiach, teachers, neighbors, and their own meetings with the candidate. He is not the decision, he is not the endorsement, and he does not become responsible for the outcome by having been on the telephone.

Matters of genuine seriousness surface through channels built for them. A rav who knows the young man will be consulted. Real problems do not stay hidden because one roommate declined to volunteer an assessment of laziness.

It should be said plainly, however, that this answer applies only within the ordinary range. Where a person holds knowledge of a genuine and serious matter, the analysis is entirely different and appears in Part Five. What is being rejected here is the notion that ordinary human imperfection must be surfaced lest the speaker bear responsibility for a marriage. It need not, and he does not.

What Must Be Said

Everything to this point has built a presumption toward silence. That presumption has a limit, and the limit is real. There is a class of information that must be conveyed, and the same yetzer hora that pushes a person to volunteer trivia will push him to stay quiet here.

The Governing Line: Inside or Outside the Range

The distinction that organizes everything is between ordinary human fault and genuine defect.

Inside the range: somewhat lazy, occasionally irresponsible, uneven about tefillah, disorganized, impatient, socially awkward, careless with belongings. These are not reportable, for the reasons developed in Part Two.

Outside the range: a genuine and unaddressed violent temper; actual theft or dishonesty being practiced; a serious illness, physical or psychiatric, that is untreated or concealed; a fundamental misrepresentation of who the person is or what he does. These must be conveyed.

The critical qualifier is that the matter be unaddressed. A person who had a serious problem, recognized it, sought help, and has dealt with it is not the same person as one who has the identical problem and is doing nothing about it. The first is frequently not reportable at all. The second is. Confusing them causes enormous and gratuitous harm to people who did exactly what they should have done.

The Three Categories

Category #1: Objective, Essential Information

This falls under lo saamod al dam rei’echa — do not stand idly by the blood of your fellow. Provided the conditions of Part Three are met, this information must be repeated, and must be volunteered even without being asked.

What belongs here? Only faults genuinely detrimental to building a Jewish home:

• Seriously flawed character traits, in the sense described above and not in the ordinary sense
• Immodesty
• A genuine lack of religious commitment, as opposed to inconsistency
• Definite health problems or emotional problems that are serious and unaddressed

A serious warning belongs here. Most people over-disclose because they believe everything they know falls under lo saamod al dam rei’echa. Withholding negative information does not always violate that commandment. Only faults of the magnitude described rise to that level, and the ordinary-range material catalogued above never does.

Category #2: Subjective, Essential Information

Is he bright? Is she personable? This covers middos, learning, intelligence, family, and age — important but not crucial.

• Do not volunteer negative information in this category.
• Answer truthfully if asked — subject to the graduated approach set out in Part Six, which governs how much detail is owed to whom.

When weighing whether to share something negative here, ask whether the fact would ultimately be detrimental to establishing a wholesome Jewish home. Where the answer is unclear, refrain until the matter is clarified.

Category #3: Unique, Personal Preferences

Many minor matters do not stand in the way of a good shidduch at all. Suppose a woman will not consider anyone who does not share her love of music. Withholding the fact that a candidate has no interest in music does not violate lo saamod al dam rei’echa, since no important factor obstructs a proper marriage.

A person who knows and is asked may answer, and does not violate lo seileich rachil, since the information serves a constructive purpose. Two firm limits:

• Under no circumstances may a person lie.
• A person may choose not to answer, believing the shidduch might succeed despite the detail, and has not violated lo saamod al dam rei’echa by staying silent.

The Strongest Argument for Disclosure: Mekach Ta’us

There is a consideration usually omitted entirely, and it is the most powerful reason why Category #1 material must be disclosed. It is not a matter of communal good order. It is a question of whether the resulting marriage is a marriage.

The Principle

A kinyan entered on the basis of fundamental misrepresentation is void — the transaction was never what the acquiring party believed. Kiddushin is a kinyan. Where a woman is married on the basis of a materially false representation about her husband, and the defect is one she demonstrably would not have accepted, there is substantial ground in the poskim to treat the kiddushin as entered in error and therefore as never having taken effect.

The Gemara in Kesubos discusses mumin that void a marriage, and the Rambam in Hilchos Ishus codifies the categories. The later responsa literature, particularly on agunah cases, developed kiddushei ta’us into a significant if narrowly applied tool.

What Has Been Treated as Sufficient

Poskim have addressed serious psychiatric illness concealed before marriage, impotence known and hidden, a concealed criminal history, and in some rulings concealed addiction. Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l addressed several such cases in Igros Moshe, and the responsa are instructive precisely for how carefully he limits them: the defect must predate the kiddushin, must have been concealed, must be of a magnitude no woman would accept, and the wife must not have continued living with the husband after discovering it.

The threshold is high and deliberately kept high, since easy annulment would undermine the institution it protects. Nothing here suggests that a disappointed spouse has a ready remedy. She does not.

Why This Belongs in an Article About Speech

The relevance runs in the other direction — toward the family considering concealment rather than the neighbor considering disclosure. A family that conceals a serious pre-existing psychiatric condition, a serious medical condition affecting fertility or life expectancy, a criminal record, or an addiction, and that brings the shidduch to chuppah on that basis, may have arranged a wedding that produced no kiddushin. Children born subsequently, the status of a later marriage, and whether a get is required all become matters requiring beis din.

This is the answer to the family that reasons: we will not mention it, and if it becomes a problem they will deal with it later. There may be no later. Concealment does not merely risk an unhappy marriage; in a narrow but real class of cases it risks a marriage halacha does not recognize, with consequences reaching into the next generation. A family weighing concealment of a Category #1 matter should be told this plainly and sent to a rav before, not after.

The Person Being Discussed

Every rule to this point protects the inquirer. The subject — the young man or woman whose character is assessed in a conversation he will never hear — has interests of his own, and halacha protects them.

He Has No Voice

The structural feature of shidduch inquiry is that the person discussed cannot answer. He does not know the call occurred. He cannot explain that the incident described took place the month his mother was ill, that the speaker has not seen him in six years, or that the account is simply mistaken. Every protection he has is one the speaker imposes on himself.

This is why the burden on accuracy is so heavy. In an ordinary dispute, error is correctable, because the other party contests it. Here, error is permanent.

Ona’as Devarim and Hezek

Words causing financial or personal damage engage the prohibitions of ona’as devarim and, in some views, the laws of hezek. A person who ends a shidduch through an exaggerated or careless report has caused quantifiable harm — years of a life, in some cases — and that the harm came by speech rather than by hand does not remove it from the category of damage.

The Chofetz Chaim treats at length the teshuvah required for loshon hora, noting that where damage was caused, teshuvah requires appeasing the injured party — which here would require informing a person that one spoke against him, a step that itself inflicts fresh pain. This should sober anyone inclined to speak freely.

A Person’s Reputation Is Not Communal Property

Entering the shidduch system does not place a person’s history at the community’s disposal. He has consented to evaluation by the specific families considering him, for that purpose, and to nothing further. Information gathered under that consent and then circulated has been taken without permission.

Who Is Asking

The categories of Part Five address what is being reported. A second axis, largely absent from popular treatments, addresses to whom. The same fact may be answered one way to a parent and an entirely different way to a friend calling on the family’s behalf, and confusing the two is among the most common errors in this area.

The Distinction

Consider a young man who is, by common knowledge in the yeshiva, a slacker — habitually absent from the minyan, outside during seder, not taking his learning seriously. Two calls come in on the same afternoon.

• A friend of the family, or an acquaintance of the girl, calling to help clarify: the answer is that one does not know. Not a hint, not a qualified remark, not a carefully worded suggestion that further inquiry might be warranted. One does not know.
• The girl’s father, or the girl herself, asking directly: a graduated answer is permitted, along the lines developed below.

Why the Intermediary Gets Less

Several reasons converge, and each is independently sufficient.

The intermediary is not the one deciding. Whatever he is told will be relayed — in his own words, compressed, with the qualifications stripped, to people who will hear it secondhand and weight it as though it were firsthand. Every structural problem identified in Part Two is magnified by the additional link.

The intermediary’s discretion is unknown and cannot be assessed. He may be entirely reliable. He may repeat it at a Shabbos table. The speaker has no way to tell, and the rule barring disclosure to a listener who will spread it applies with full force where the listener’s habits are simply unknown.

And it is not the intermediary’s business to clarify. He has taken on a task nobody assigned him halachic standing to perform. The family’s investigation is the family’s, and the friend who volunteered to make calls has not thereby acquired a right to information the family would receive.

Why the Parent Gets More

The parent or the candidate is the party actually deciding, actually bearing the consequences, and actually possessed of the toeles that permits the speech in the first place. The chain of transmission is as short as it can be. And the parent is in a position to do something constructive with a partial answer — to ask further, to check independently, to raise the matter directly — which an intermediary is not.

The Graduated Answer to a Parent

Where a parent asks directly about a matter within the ordinary range, three responses are available depending on the facts.

1. The candidate is solid on this point. Say so, expansively, per the asymmetry of exaggeration established in Part Two. He is one of the serious ones in the yeshiva; she is genuinely careful about this.
2. The candidate is uneven — sometimes yes, sometimes no. Say that you do not know. This is the honest answer as well as the required one, since an uneven pattern is precisely what a person has not assessed and cannot summarize without distorting.
3. The candidate is genuinely and notoriously deficient on the point. Here — and only to a parent — an answer that leaves a door open is permitted.

Leaving a Door Open

The third case requires a technique worth learning precisely.

The young man is known in the yeshiva as someone who does not daven with the minyan. Asked by the father, one does not say he is lax about tefillah — that is an assertion of a defect, delivered to a listener who will inflate it, about a matter within the ordinary range. And one does not say he is a solid davener, which is false.

What one says is something on the order of:

He doesn’t daven in the yeshiva minyan. He may daven later — I’m not sure of his arrangement.

Examine what this accomplishes. Every word is true: he does not daven in the yeshiva minyan, and the speaker genuinely does not know what he does instead. No accusation has been made. And the father, who is listening carefully because this is his daughter, has been handed something to pursue. He will ask the young man, or the rebbi, or someone else. If there is a legitimate explanation it will emerge. If there is not, that will emerge too — from a source better positioned than a telephone acquaintance.

This Is Not Deception

The technique might be mistaken for a polite evasion designed to mislead. It is the opposite. The speaker is not pretending the situation is other than it is; he is declining to render a verdict he is not qualified to render, while ensuring the person who must decide has what he needs to investigate.

The principle underneath: transfer the question, not the conclusion. A conclusion delivered by a stranger becomes a label and travels. A question handed to the person who must decide gets answered by someone who actually knows, and does not travel at all.

Serious Matters Are Not Subject to This Distinction

Everything in this Part concerns the ordinary range. Where the matter is genuinely outside it — the Category #1 material of Part Five — the obligation to convey it does not evaporate because the caller happens to be an intermediary rather than a parent.

What changes is the method rather than the duty. A person holding serious information and speaking to an intermediary should convey that he does not think the shidduch is appropriate, without detail, and where that proves insufficient should ask a rav how to reach the family directly. The obligation of lo saamod al dam rei’echa is discharged by ensuring the information reaches those who need it — not necessarily by telling whoever happens to have called.

A Word to Shadchanim

A shadchan occupies neither position cleanly, and should assume the more restrictive.

A shadchan speaks to many families and is believed by all of them. A remark made once by a shadchan travels farther than the same remark from anyone else, and a shadchan who forms an unfavorable impression can close a very large number of doors without any of them knowing why. The obligation to verify before speaking, and to refrain where verification is impossible, weighs proportionately more heavily.

Part Seven: How to Speak When Speech Is Required

Where the analysis of Parts Five and Six establishes that something must be said, the manner is governed by the five rules below — the practical form of the Chofetz Chaim’s conditions.

Rule 1: Think Through Your Response Carefully

Before speaking, be certain that what you are about to share is completely accurate. Ask honestly: is this something I know, or is it partly or entirely based on what someone else told me?

This requires real thought, because a large share of our impressions of other people are secondhand without our realizing it. Secondhand information may sometimes be shared — see Part Eight.

Rule 2: Do Not Exaggerate

Say only what is one hundred percent true. In the negative direction, do not exaggerate and do not embellish; a single word of negative exaggeration is motzi shem ra. The asymmetry established in Part Two applies: expansiveness is permitted toward the good and forbidden toward the bad.

A Practical Test

Most people exaggerate more than they believe. To counteract this, imagine that you are the subject of the inquiry and your own future hangs in the balance. A person will then attend closely to how any negative information is phrased and will give it no more weight than absolutely necessary.

Rule 3: Speak Only for the Purpose of Helping the Shidduch

The intent in transmitting negative information must be constructive — nothing else.

This is difficult when a person holds important information about someone he dislikes. The Chofetz Chaim taught that in such a case a person is obligated at least temporarily to uproot the negative feelings from his heart so that he can transmit with correct intention. If he cannot, he should refer the inquirer to someone else holding the same information without the ill will.

This is not limited to strong dislike. It applies to any ill feeling at all, however mild. In every such case one must analyze one’s own motivations with a suspicion one would not otherwise apply — the old slight, the rejected invitation, the competitive history between families, the business matter that ended badly, the sibling who was hurt.

Recommendation

It is recommended that a person decline to give information about someone he or she has dated.

Rule 4: Transmit in the Least Harmful Way Possible

If a shidduch genuinely needs to be stopped, ask whether it can be stopped without providing damaging details.

1. Start with the least damaging response available: I don’t think this particular shidduch is for you. Very often this is fully adequate.
2. Only if the inquirer presses — maybe I’ll want it anyway, please give me more, I don’t want you to be the judge — is it permitted to pass on the appropriate information, and only if every other condition is met.
3. Even then, keep negative information to the absolute bare minimum.

Stop the Moment the Purpose Is Achieved

If the inquirer decides against the shidduch after only a portion has been conveyed, stop there. Anything further is no longer given for a constructive purpose and is therefore forbidden.

Why Holding Back Matters So Much

A sincere effort to refrain from passing along another person’s flaws succeeds far more often than people realize, and that is the course to pursue. By releasing negative information a person always takes a chance on lowering another’s prospects of marriage and on substantially affecting his reputation and life.

Rule 5: Weigh the Harm Against the Benefit

Measure the damage the information is likely to cause against the good it is likely to accomplish. As established in Part Three, this is not merely prudential: it reflects the seventh condition, that harm not exceed what beis din would impose, and the independent bar on speaking to a listener who will misuse what he hears.

If the Listener Will Not Keep It Private

Where the person confided in is indiscreet and will spread the details beyond those directly involved, halacha forbids saying it. If the matter is serious enough that the shidduch truly should not proceed, achieve that by a different route — for instance by asking someone the family respects to advise strongly against the match.

Two Additional Safeguards

• Warn the listener. Tell anyone to whom information is related to be extra cautious not to spread it. The worst damage comes from information traveling beyond where it was needed.
• When embarrassment may result. If transmitting will cause humiliation, a rav conversant in hilchos shmiras haloshon should be consulted as to how to pass along the critical information and in what words.

Sources, Opinions, and Facts

Firsthand Versus Secondhand

The Torah views secondhand information as possibly inaccurate and therefore dangerous. This is the first of the seven conditions and the one most frequently violated without the speaker noticing, since impressions absorbed from a roommate’s complaint or a remark at a kiddush are stored in memory indistinguishably from firsthand observation and recalled with the same confidence.

Before answering, attempt to reconstruct the actual event that produced each belief you are about to transmit. Where no event can be produced, the information is secondhand.

When and How to Share Secondhand Information

Where secondhand information is serious and genuinely relevant, the Torah requires spending the time and effort to verify it. The prohibition against standing aside while one’s fellow’s blood is shed means checking out and reporting information that could create serious problems in a marriage.

If verification proves impossible and all conditions are otherwise met, convey it together with a clearly expressed warning that it is hearsay and that the speaker does not know personally whether it is true. The warning must be attached to the substance rather than stated once at the outset, since a qualification delivered at the beginning of a long account will not survive repetition.

Even Firsthand Information Requires Care

Personal experience is the ideal source and still cannot be reported without analysis:

• Long-term acquaintance, or a first impression?
• A recent encounter, or something from five years ago?

Age of information deserves particular weight where the subject was a teenager. A person is entitled to have grown, and conduct at seventeen is frequently not evidence of anything at twenty-four. Reporting it as current is a form of the exaggeration forbidden by Rule 2 even where every fact stated is accurate.

This is the counterweight to the principle in Part Two. A person is measured by his best, and by his present — not by the worst moment someone happened to witness during a difficult year.

Opinion, Fact, and Armchair Psychology

The Torah urges the greatest caution in delivering an opinion of another person. Labels such as unfriendly or disorganized rest on very little factual evidence and carry enormous power to derail a shidduch. The Chofetz Chaim stressed emphatically that the habit of labeling people and passing those labels on does immeasurable harm.

At the same time character assessments are useful — particularly where someone seeks a spouse of a certain type, outgoing or serious or warmhearted. Where an assessment is permitted, it must be identified as an opinion and never passed along as definitive.

Diagnostic Language Is the Worst Offender

The contemporary version of the label is the borrowed clinical term. Someone who has read an article describes a candidate as on the spectrum, as having ADHD, as narcissistic, as bipolar, as having anxiety. He has no training, has conducted no evaluation, and has never seen the person in a setting where such a judgment could be formed.

The clinical term carries an authority that ordinary description does not. He is quiet at gatherings invites the listener to weigh it. He is somewhere on the spectrum ends the conversation, and the label travels. This is motzi shem ra in its plainest form, and delivering it in the vocabulary of medicine makes it more damaging rather than less.

The rule is simple: a person may report what he observed. He may not name a condition.

Confidential Information

Confidential information is exactly that.

• A person privy to information about sholom bayis or health problems that nobody else in the community knows may not pass it on.
• A doctor, nurse, or mental health professional revealing information about a patient would violate professional confidentiality and, in most jurisdictions, the law.

What may be done instead: hint at a problem by saying that the shidduch does not seem appropriate, without further detail. If the confidential information falls into Category #1, a person is obligated to try to stop the shidduch without revealing the confidence itself — and where the hint is not working, the correct step is a rav, who may be able to reach the family through a channel that does not require the confidence to be broken.

Case Studies

The framework above is best tested against the situations that actually arise. Each of these can turn on facts not stated here, and none of what follows substitutes for a shaila.

An Illustration First: Anger

Someone raised in a calm home may interpret a higher level of emotion as anger or bad temper. To the couple involved, the same expressiveness might be entirely normal. On the other hand there is a level of anger serious enough to genuinely damage a person’s ability to build a peaceful home, and that must be reported.

Where is the line? There is a full continuum, and nearly everyone falls somewhere on it. Any assessment is subjective:

• Someone who shows anger toward employees may be calm at home.
• Someone who shows anger toward family may be on his best behavior at work.
• The temperament of the person answering colors what he sees.
• The temperament of the other party matters — impatience with slowness is no problem at all for a partner who also thinks and acts quickly.

The bell curve test applies directly: ordinary irritability, of the kind a third of people display, is not reportable. A pattern of frightening rage that the person is not addressing is outside the range and must be conveyed. The wide middle is where a rav is needed.

A Broken Engagement in the Family

A candidate’s older sister was engaged and the engagement broke eight months later.

This is Category #2 at most and arguably Category #3. A sibling’s broken engagement says nothing about the candidate’s own character, health, or religious commitment, and there is no obligation to volunteer it. If asked directly, one may not lie.

The analysis changes if the engagement broke for a reason bearing on the family — concealed illness, or conduct by a parent. In that case the underlying matter, not the broken engagement, requires evaluation, and it may be Category #1.

Resist the near-universal impulse to supply the reason. Yes, there was an engagement that ended is an answer. The circumstances belong to the sister, who is not the subject of this inquiry and whose consent nobody sought.

A Sibling Who Is No Longer Observant

Among the most painful questions in the area, and among the most frequently asked.

The candidate’s own religious commitment is squarely Category #1. A sibling’s is not the candidate’s. As a matter of halachic analysis, a brother who has left observance is not a defect in the candidate.

Two qualifications are real. Where the situation in the home will materially affect the couple’s life, that consequence may be relevant and should be raised with a rav. And many families treat this as a firm requirement, which places it in Category #3: answerable if asked, never to be lied about, never to be volunteered.

What is not permitted is the common practice of volunteering it, in detail, to anyone inquiring about anything. The sibling is a Jew whose situation is being used as currency, and the halachos of loshon hora protect him no less than anyone else.

Psychiatric Medication and Prior Therapy

These are routinely conflated and must be separated.

Prior therapy, standing alone, is not disclosable and generally not relevant. A person who saw a therapist for six months after a parent died, or during a difficult year in seminary, has done something healthy. Treating this as a defect has produced substantial communal harm, including the well-documented result that young people avoid needed treatment specifically because they fear it will be held against them in shidduchim.

Ongoing serious psychiatric illness is different. A diagnosed condition requiring continuous medication and monitoring, with a history of hospitalization or of episodes materially impairing functioning, is Category #1 — and per the mekach ta’us discussion, concealment carries consequences beyond the marriage’s happiness.

Between these poles lies a wide middle — a controlled condition managed with medication for years without incident — where the answer depends on facts only a rav familiar with the situation can evaluate. This middle range is where nearly all actual cases fall, and it is why a shaila is not optional.

Note also that the obligation to disclose in the serious case falls on the family and the candidate, not on a neighbor who happened to learn of it. A third party holding this confidentially is bound by Part Eight.

Learning Disabilities

A diagnosed learning disability that has been managed and does not impair a person’s ability to function as a spouse and parent is not Category #1. It is not a defect in the sense the poskim use the term, and there is no obligation to volunteer it.

Where a condition materially affects earning capacity, or where a young man’s learning is represented at a level his actual capacity does not support, the representation rather than the condition is the problem. Halacha does not require disclosure of every difficulty; it forbids affirmative misrepresentation.

A Parent’s Business Ethics

A father is known to have conducted himself dishonestly in business.

The candidate’s own middos are Category #1 or #2 depending on severity; the father’s are the father’s. A father’s dishonesty is not automatically transmitted to a child, and treating it as though it were is both halachically unsupported and cruel to a young person who may have suffered from it more than anyone.

Where the concern is that the candidate has himself absorbed the conduct, that is a statement about the candidate and must rest on firsthand knowledge of the candidate — not inference from the father.

Where the concern is financial — promised support that will not materialize — this is for the parties to address directly and in writing, not through third-party character reports.

Genetic Carrier Status and Dor Yeshorim

Dor Yeshorim exists precisely so that carrier status need not be discussed. The system was designed to establish compatibility without either party, or anyone else, learning who carries what. That design is a halachic achievement and should be respected rather than circumvented.

Accordingly: carrier status is not a subject of shidduch inquiry, should not be asked about, and should not be answered. The correct response is that the parties should obtain their numbers and call Dor Yeshorim.

Two limitations. Dor Yeshorim screens a defined panel and is not a general test of genetic health. And a diagnosed genetic condition actually present and symptomatic in the candidate — as opposed to recessive carrier status — is a health matter governed by the ordinary Category #1 analysis.

A Prior Marriage or a Get

The fact of a prior marriage is not concealable and is Category #1 — a person entering a marriage is entitled to know the other party’s personal status, and concealment here is among the clearest cases of mekach ta’us in the literature.

The reasons for the dissolution are an entirely different question. A third party who knows why a marriage ended is holding, in most cases, confidential sholom bayis information. Where the reason bears directly on the new marriage’s viability — established violence, for instance — a rav must be consulted both as to whether it may be conveyed and as to how.

The Digital Dimension

Everything above was formulated for a world in which shidduch information moved by conversation. It now moves substantially by text, and the change is not cosmetic. Every factor determining the halachic analysis is altered by the medium.

Why Written Information Is Different

• It is permanent. A spoken remark fades and is misremembered. A text message is a fixed artifact producible verbatim in five years. Rule 5’s weighing must account for harm that does not decay.
• It is forwardable without effort. Repeating a conversation requires a decision and the labor of retelling. Forwarding requires one motion, and the forwarder need not have read carefully. The friction that limited the spread of spoken information is gone.
• It is stripped of tone. The hesitation, the qualifying tone, the audible reluctance — every signal telling a listener how much weight to place on what was said — does not survive transmission. What arrives is bare assertion.
• The qualification detaches. A message reading I only heard this secondhand and really don’t know — apparently there was some issue with his older brother will be forwarded as the second clause alone. This is not hypothetical; it is the normal behavior of forwarded text.
• The audience is unknown. Rule 5 requires assessing whether the listener is discreet. In a group chat there is no listener to assess — the speaker does not know who is in the group, who will be added tomorrow, or who is reading over a shoulder. The rule barring speech to a listener who will misuse it cannot be satisfied where the listener is indeterminate.

Practical Rules

1. Negative shidduch information should be given by voice, not in writing. Where a person asks by text, the correct response is to arrange a call.
2. Nothing negative about a named individual belongs in any group chat under any circumstances.
3. A person receiving negative shidduch information by text should not forward it. If someone else needs it and the conditions permit, it should be conveyed by that person in his own words, having satisfied himself of its accuracy.
4. Screenshots are the worst case: permanent, unqualified, attributable, and infinitely forwardable. Assume any screenshot will eventually reach the candidate.

Searching a Candidate Online

Publicly posted material is not confidential, and viewing what a person chose to publish is not the same as extracting private information from a third party. Several cautions nonetheless apply.

• Material posted years earlier, particularly during adolescence, is subject to the staleness analysis of Part Eight. It is evidence of what a person was.
• Context collapses online. A photograph or comment carries no indication of setting, audience, or what preceded it.
• Tagged material was posted by someone else and may not reflect the candidate’s choices at all.
• Whatever is found remains subject to every rule in this guide once one considers repeating it. Public accessibility made it permissible to see, not permissible to circulate.

Deliberately gaining access to restricted material — through a mutual acquaintance’s account, a false profile, or a request made under pretense — may involve geneivas da’as in addition to everything else.

Résumés and Reference Lists

The shidduch résumé now circulates as a file. Two points follow.

A résumé that misrepresents — a yeshiva attended briefly listed as a primary affiliation, a level of learning overstated, employment inflated — is affirmative misrepresentation, and the mekach ta’us discussion is relevant where it goes to something fundamental.

And a person listed as a reference on a freely circulating document has been placed in the position of receiving calls from strangers, indefinitely, about someone he may know slightly. He is entitled to say he does not know the candidate well enough to be useful, and should say exactly that rather than manufacturing an assessment because he was asked.

After the Information Has Been Gathered

Use It for One Purpose Only

Negative information learned through a shidduch inquiry may be used for exactly one thing: deciding whether to pursue the particular shidduch for which it was gathered. Once the decision is made not to pursue, sharing it with anyone else is forbidden — including the shadchan, a parent, or a neighbor.

Never Reveal Why You Stopped

Once a person has decided against a shidduch it is absolutely forbidden to reveal why, absent a very clear purpose. This holds even where the shadchan or a family member insists. To anyone aware the investigation was underway, the only thing that needs saying is:

I decided not to pursue this shidduch. It was not for me.

The One Possible Exception

It sometimes happens that in researching a shidduch a person discovers information the shadchan would need in order to prevent someone else from walking into a bad situation. Because this is a subjective judgment with major consequences, a shaila must be asked before acting on it.

Group Discussions Are Wrong

A group of people or students sitting and discussing particular individuals and their suitability for shidduchim is simply wrong. It serves no constructive purpose and causes real damage. The same is true, with greater force, of the electronic equivalent.

Talking With a Parent or Shadchan

At times it is important to discuss a prospective or current date with a parent or shadchan. At other times these same conversations are destructive. The rule about never revealing why a shidduch was stopped remains in force.

When to Ask a Rav

The Engagement Changes Everything

There is a very significant difference between what may be said in the early stages and what is permitted after an engagement. For this reason it is always important to ask a shaila, and especially so once a couple is engaged.

Situations Requiring a Shaila

• Whenever there is doubt about whether a quality falls inside or outside the ordinary range.
• Before revealing any medical or emotional information — without exception.
• When transmitting information will cause humiliation.
• When information is discovered that a shadchan may need to protect someone else.
• At any point after an engagement has occurred.
• When a family is weighing whether it must disclose something about its own candidate.
• When information is held in confidence and appears to fall into Category #1.
• When a matter occurred years ago and its current relevance is unclear.
• When the person answering has any history of ill feeling toward the family.
• When a serious matter must reach a family and the inquiry came through an intermediary.

The Underlying Principle

Even within these guidelines it is often very difficult to distinguish what must be shared from what may be shared from what is forbidden, and to separate hard fact from personal opinion. When in doubt, a shaila must be asked before speaking.

The Person on the Other End

Everything above is a set of rules. Rules can be followed precisely by a person who has entirely missed the point, and in this area that happens often.

The subject of every one of these conversations is somebody’s child. There is a mother who has spent years hoping, and who checks whether her daughter’s phone rang. There is a young man who has been told for the third time this year that it was not for me, and does not know what he is doing wrong, because nobody will tell him, because nobody is permitted to tell him. There is a young woman who has begun to believe something is wrong with her, and there may be nothing wrong with her at all beyond a remark somebody made in ninety seconds four years ago and forgot the same afternoon.

A phone call lasting a minute and a half can determine years of a person’s life. The person making it will not remember it by the following week. The person it was about will live inside its consequences without ever learning it occurred.

That asymmetry is why the halachos are as demanding as they are. The Chofetz Chaim did not construct this apparatus of conditions and qualifications in order to make conversation difficult. He constructed it because he understood exactly what a careless sentence does to a human being who is not in the room.

A person asked about a shidduch is holding something that does not belong to him. He is holding another Jew’s name, and another family’s hope, and he is holding them on behalf of somebody who trusted him enough to call. The halachos above tell him what he may do with what he is holding.

What they cannot tell him is how much care to take. That has to come from elsewhere — from understanding that the young person being discussed is exactly as real as his own children, would be entitled to exactly the protection he would want for them, and is depending entirely on a stranger he will never meet to remember it.

And from the recognition, established at the outset, that nothing he withholds can cost anyone the marriage intended for them, while a great deal of what he volunteers can cost them years.

May all who are searching find what they are looking for, and quickly.

Quick Reference Summary

The Two Axes

• What is being reported: inside the ordinary bell curve of human fault, or outside it. Inside — silence. Outside — it must be conveyed.
• Who is asking: an intermediary gets I don’t know. A parent or the candidate may receive a graduated answer.

Before Asking

• Always state that the reason for the question is a shidduch.
• Know what you actually need to establish, and do not ask beyond it.
• Verification stops when the fact is established. Calling until a negative answer appears is not verification.

Before Answering

• Would this same description fit a third of the people I know? If so, it is inside the range — do not report it.
• Does it fit me?
• How well do I actually know this person, and in what setting?
• What is the real source of what I am about to say?
• Do I carry any ill feeling toward this person or family?
• What does this information look like after four repetitions?
• Will this listener over-weight what I say? If so, I may not say it.

Rules of Speech

• Default answer: I don’t know. Train yourself to say it. It is usually also true.
• Positive: may be presented expansively. A glimpse of good implies more behind it.
• Negative: bare minimum, no amplification. One word of exaggeration is motzi shem ra.
• Judge at his best: what a person managed once, he is capable of. That is who he is.
• Opinions: report facts, not labels. Never use a clinical term about a person you have not treated.
• Secondhand: verify first. If impossible, label as hearsay, attached to the substance and not only at the start.
• Stale: conduct at seventeen is generally not evidence about a person at twenty-four.
• To a parent, on a known deficiency: leave a door open. State the fact, offer the possible explanation, let him investigate.

Absolute Limits

• Never lie.
• Never reveal confidential information — hint only, and go to a rav if the hint fails.
• Nothing negative by text, ever in a group chat, never a screenshot.
• Never say why you stopped a shidduch. Only: it was not for me.
• Concealment by a family of a Category #1 matter may put mekach ta’us in play. Rav before, not after.
• When in doubt, ask a rav before speaking.

As reported by VINnews