A list of the people you have lost

Every Jewish calendar I have used has a page most people never look at until they need it. It holds a short list: a name, a Hebrew date, sometimes a relationship. Father. Grandmother. A brother. It tells you when to light a candle and when to say kaddish.

Read that list as a stranger would and it tells you a great deal more. Who you mourn. Which side of the family you still keep faith with. Whether you mark yahrzeit by the Hebrew date at all, which says something about how you live. It is a short list, and it is one of the most personal documents a family keeps.

I write software, and the question I kept coming back to was not a technical one. Where should that list live? The obvious answer today is a server: sign in, sync across devices, never lose it. I came to think that answer is wrong, and that the reason is older than the technology. That is not really a sync problem, it is a confidence problem.

Keeping a list in step across two devices is a solved problem. What isn’t solved is being sure that your father’s name, and the date you lost him, is not sitting somewhere you never agreed to, readable by people you never chose.

The names were always public, in their place

Jewish memory has never hidden its dead. Medieval communities in the German lands kept a Memorbuch (the Nuremberg one was begun in 1296), and its lists of martyrs were read aloud in synagogue, on the Sabbath before Tisha B’Av and the Sabbath before Shavuot.

The same instinct fills a shul today. The one I belong to has a light beside each name. The one I grew up in had backlit glass panels. Another I go to, much older, has a board from before electricity with the names of the departed written out, and the donations given in their name. Digital displays now show each name on a screen as its date comes up. And all over the room, written on items or affixed to them or embroidered, you find “in memory of”. On Yom Kippur and the last day of each festival, there is Yizkor as well.

So the names were never secret. But they were public in a particular way: in a particular room, to a particular community, for a particular purpose. The people in the room at Yizkor knew him, or knew you, and the prayer itself leaves a place for the name, which the mourner fills in. The name was being remembered, not collected.

Even the screen is in the room.

Privacy as context

The philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has a name for this. In Privacy in Context (2010) she argues that privacy is not a line between public and secret. It is about whether information flows according to the norms of the setting it came from. Your medical history belongs with your doctor. The same facts in your employer’s hands are a violation, even though nothing about them was “secret”.

A yahrzeit list fits her argument almost too well. Read aloud in shul, the names are exactly where they belong. Held on a company’s server, next to your email address, your location and whatever else the company knows about you, the same names have left the room. Nothing about them has changed except the context, and the context is everything.

The law looks the other way

You might expect data protection law to have something to say here. Mostly it doesn’t. The European GDPR, one of the strictest privacy laws anywhere, says in Recital 27 that it “does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons”, leaving any protection to the Member States. In the regulation itself, the dead have no data.

But the list is not really data about the dead. It is data about the living: about you, your family and how you practise. The law’s blind spot is the mourner.

Halacha starts somewhere else. It recognises obligations toward the dead: the Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 606:3) records an early decree, backed by a ban, against giving the dead a bad name, and honouring the dead, kavod hamet, is a central concern of the funeral ritual and of the rabbinic rules around it. Jewish law already holds the intuition data law lacks. A person’s memory does not become fair game the moment they die.

What follows for anyone who builds these tools

None of this needs a regulation. It needs a few decisions, each of which goes the other way the moment you assume the server is the natural home of everything.

The list should stay with the mourner. If it has to travel, it should travel in a way only the family can read. And nobody should need an account to remember their father.

None of that is difficult. It is a series of small choices about where the names live and who can read them.

Zakhor

The Torah commands us to remember, again and again. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi gave that one verb as the title of his study of Jewish memory and history, Zakhor. The command was given to people: to families, to communities, to the congregation standing for Yizkor. It was not given to platforms.

Keeping the list close is a small way of keeping it that way.