Shaindele understood all this intuitively, revealing to her just how far she had traveled in her beliefs from her childhood and from the community in which she had grown up. Only a few months ago, such a rumor would have started her down a spiral of humiliation and devastation ending in a bitter confrontation with her father and Leah. But now, she had no intention of mentioning it at all. Why should she give the perpetrators the satisfaction of causing heartache and tension between her parents?

Honestly, she felt sorry for Leah. A rumor like this once started never really went away. It was as sticky as superglue, adhering forever to those it shamed. Whatever the truth, Leah honestly didn’t deserve what was coming her way. But she was mature enough to understand that she, Shaindele, was helpless to do anything about it. It was not for nothing the sages compared repairing the damage caused by loshon hara to gathering feathers from a pillow shaken out in the wind. Go talk to everyone who had heard or was spreading this rumor! Go find them! And even if they could be tracked down somehow, what could you say to convince them that what they had heard, what they so wanted to believe, was monstrously wrong?

“It’s their sin,” her friend Shulamis comforted, her kind blue eyes narrowed, and her pretty, soft mouth pinched. She was a new friend, recently transferred from the women’s seminary in Gateshead, England, as her father took up a prominent rabbinical post in a prestigious Torah institution known for its emphasis on perfecting one’s character traits, or middos. Unlike the other girls, she was meticulously careful never to speak or listen to a word of loshon hara. The other girls, however, had kept their distance, unsure of how this would affect their own reputations.

Walking back into her classroom after recess, Shaindele stared straight ahead. To her surprise, instead of mortification and helplessness, she felt a sudden surge of strength. Let them talk then, the useless cows! God heard all, saw all. He would decide who deserved to be punished. As it is written in the Yom Kippur prayers: He alone “brings down low and raises on high.”

She had embarked on a new path in life, she told herself, one that would shock everyone she knew—especially her family. But she didn’t care. Why should she? Had concern for the family reputation prevented anyone in her family from doing precisely what they wanted, and the consequences for everyone—herself most particularly—be damned? So who cared that this rumor about Leah would shorten yet another leg on the already shaky stool that was her shidduch chances, putting them in danger of complete collapse? Who wanted to get married anyway? What she wanted, she realized, was something else.