Ask the Ethicist: Can I Read My Husband’s Texts?
I don't have reason to think he's cheating, but I'm the nervous type.
Question: Is it ethical to read my husband’s texts? I don’t have reason to think he’s cheating, but I’m the nervous type.
If you have no reason to suspect him, you in fact would be the one guilty of betraying trust if you read his texts. Better to utilize the communications tools we have, whether cutting-edge or old-school, to enhance trust.
That was the goal of an 11th century sage named Rabbenu Gershom, a guy so respected that he was literally called the “Light of the Diaspora.” He issued an order of excommunication against anyone who opened another person’s mail. “One should not read a friend’s letter,” he wrote, “without their knowledge and permission.”
We don’t know his precise motivation for issuing this ban, but it’s clear that Gershom was a stickler for personal privacy and public accountability, and that his overarching goal was to build trust. According to Louis Finkelstein, a 20th-century scholar of Jewish history (and chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in his spare time), letters were rarely carried by government agencies in those days, so there was no oversight and nothing preventing curious private messengers from breaking the trust that had been placed in them. For Rabbenu Gershom, it was less a matter of who opened the letter at the receiving end than who might break the chain of privacy and read its contents en route. By issuing his ban, Gershom was able to singlehandedly foster accountability in long-distance communications. And his rulings were so widely respected that an acronym for the Hebrew warning “subject to the ban of Rabbenu Gershom” is placed on sealed envelopes by some observant Jews to this day.
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Gershom cared about matters closer to home as well. Among his other ordinances were several aimed at maintaining trust and civility between spouses, including a prohibition on polygamy (which aligned Jewish practice with broader European trends) and another preventing a man from forcing his wife to divorce him. He was an activist against spousal abuse and domestic strife who sought to foster the prime Jewish value of shalom bayit (peace in the home). What links his domestic rulings to the one regarding mail delivery is a need to promote trust everywhere — shalom bayit in both the private and public domains.
In a strange way, the circumstances of Gershom’s ban mirror our situation with digital communication. Unlike regular mail, but like the missives carried by the unregulated non-governmental messengers of Gershom’s day, email and texts are by their very nature unprotected. That text you send passes throgh many networks and potential sets of unregulated eyes, even when encrypted, before it reaches the recipient. The rule of thumb is to assume that anything you send online could be on the front page of tomorrow’s tabloids.
Gershom’s ruling is therefore even more relevant in our digital era than in the snail-mail era of our forefathers. With so much communication zipping around the internet today, we need regular reminders of how corrosive an erosion of trust can be to healthy relationships — and a healthy society.
If maintaining trust doesn’t compel you, consider this: Even if your husband were cheating, he’d be an absolute idiot to leave a digital trail that could be so easily exposed. If he’s that reckless, you’ll certainly find other clues to an affair in places that are even less private, like credit card bills and phone records. In the meantime, like Rabbenu Gershom, you can use this challenge as an opportunity to build a higher level of trust and in your relationship and shalom bayit in your home by coming clean, in a loving way, and letting him know about your concerns — and maybe suggesting sending a few old fashioned love letters to one another. Special delivery.
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is the author of Mensch-Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi and Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism That Takes the Holocaust Seriously. See more of his writing at his Substack page, In This Moment.
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