Dear Mrs. Bluth,
This is totally off your radar but I’ve been told that your column deals with a wide spectrum of issues and nothing is off limits, so here it goes. I’m a physician who has recently bought a home in a lovely Jewish (with a sprinkling of unaffiliated Jews) neighborhood. I have an office on the lower two levels and there is a separate entrance for the two upper floors where my wife, four young children and I live. When we looked at the home, on a beautiful, tree-lined street with adequate parking and low noise level, we fell in love with it immediately. Probably because of the perfect visuals, we may have overlooked what now seems to have become a major problem.
Our immediate neighbors on either side of our home are the nicest people you could ask for, with kids in ages that correspond to our own. However, there is a problem with the neighbor one house over. Had I had the wherewithal and good judgement to speak to my immediate neighbors before we purchased the house, perhaps they would have made me aware of what they, too, have had to endure. This neighbor is a very modern, self-hating Jewish woman, clearly resentful of the young Jewish populace that has bought up all the homes in the area. She affiliates with no one, is nasty and cold and goes out of her way to cause trouble.
Her large, extended deck, which wraps around her backyard to half of the side of her house, faces the large picture window of my waiting room and the upper windows of our living room, and is clearly visible from those vantage points. She is a sun worshipper, who delights in sunbathing almost unclothed. To my great consternation, many of my patients have complained that looking out the picture window is almost unavoidable, forcing them to see her in a state of undress. A few have even left my practice over this. My wife has covered our windows with heavy draperies, closing off the wonderful view of nature that was a great incentive for buying the house so that our children are not exposed to the offensive view. I am forced to do the same with the large picture window in my waiting room, pitching the room into almost total darkness and necessitating the installation of lighting fixtures to counteract the gloom.
My wife and I went over to speak with her when the problem first became apparent, in the hopes of appealing to her sense of neighborliness, even offering to pay for her membership at a nearby beach club. However, she met all our offers and entreaties with derision and sarcasm, declining our offer and insisting that she could do whatever she chose on her property. She went so far as to say we were all welcome to move away if the sight of her on her deck was problematic, that essentially, it was our problem and not hers. After speaking to the other families on the block, we learned that many of them had tried to speak with her at one time or another, and had received the same message. So there it is in a nutshell. Now I’m hoping you have some practical solutions that may save us from selling and moving from a home we love and neighbors we have become close friends with.
Dear Friend,
The two areas of assist I step away from, for the most part, are legal advice and halachic advice. However, there are other options you might consider.
Planting tall shrubbery to form a natural, green divider high enough to cover (no pun intended) the offensive spectacle might work. You may also think about repartitioning your office/waiting room so that it will be in a different part of the main floor area. Although this may be a costly and time-consuming endeavor, in the long run it may be worth your while.
There’s no accounting for why people choose to be unfriendly and unneighborly, especially since this woman has no other friendly or social affiliation in your area. She sounds, from all accounts, a bitter and lonely person who only knows how to associate with others by being adverse and argumentative.
If I were a betting person, I’d venture that wearing her down with kindness might work. Invite her over for coffee sometime or, if that is too much to consider right now, just keep being pleasant to her and saying hello in passing, enlisting your neighbors to do the same, and see what happens. There’s power in numbers and you are in the majority.
On a basic level, she is one of our own and, V’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha applies here. If you don’t try you’ll never know what mitzvos you let pass you by, and the chance to touch another Jewish soul enough to make her appreciate who they are is a ticket to Olam Haba.
Keep us posted on how things work out.