So when her phone began to ring off the hook with stories about her former son-in-law’s new wife, she was faced with a dilemma of no small proportions. Was it permissible, she pondered, to hear what her friends and neighbors wanted to tell her? The nosy strangers, the mere acquaintances who had the temerity to call her or stop her in the street were not the problem; she dispatched them with a withering look and an on-high quotation about the evils of gossip. What, there was a shortage of quotes? But the others—people she had known all her life, people she respected, who like herself had on their bookshelves well-worn copies of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s seminal book on loshon hara called Chafetz Chaim, meaning “desire life,” after the verse: Who is the man who desires life? He who guards his tongue from evil and his lips from falsehood; people who had Talmud scholars for husbands and sat next to her in the synagogue on Yom Kippur quaking with fear that their prayers for a good year might not be accepted—if people like this were willing to risk their eternal souls by selflessly bringing a matter they considered of vital importance to her attention, how could she refuse to listen?

What made it more difficult was the suddenness and volume of these tales after months of quiet in which she had congratulated herself on removing her opposition to the strange match as well as single-handedly facilitating the wedding through the shameless use of her considerable prestige as the widow of the great rav, cowing all opposition. Moreover, she had personally taken it upon herself to convince the loudest and most vociferous opponent to the match, her granddaughter Shaindele (who had even gone so far as to run away from home) that her father deserved to go ahead with his life, even if it meant accepting his less-than-stellar choice in a new wife. Selflessly, she had made it happen, which wasn’t to say that she didn’t occasionally indulge in secret fantasies about how different things might have been had Yaakov settled on one of the Flatbush widows or Monsey divorcées for whom the matchmakers had so vigorously campaigned.