Are You a Yenta? | Rabbi Naftali Horowitz

So I once came home from a shopping trip, and I called my kids together in the kitchen, excitedly told them, "Kids, you wouldn't believe what I just saw. You know that Tatty always looks to his left when he stops at a stoplight to see who's driving the car next to him? You know how I always look to the right to see who's driving the other car? Well, today, I hit pay dirt. You wouldn't believe it. In the car next to me, instead of a human being, a giraffe was driving the car." "But Tatty, how does a giraffe fit his head into the car?" I said, "Well obviously, he was sticking out of the sunroof." My children were amazed. All those years of looking at who's driving the car to my left and the car to my right finally paid off with that one unforgettable sight. Of course, this story is a fairy tale. It never happened. You ever stop to wonder, why do you bother looking to the car next to you to see who's driving it? Why do human beings walk down the street and look at things all around them? Who's going into that store? Who's getting into that car? What's in that store window? Why do we do that? The answer is, we're curious. But if you think about it, it's absolutely nonsensical. Is there any chance that the person driving the car next to me is not a human being? The answer is, no. So what information have I gathered when I look to my left and I look into that car? Every time I do that, I am training myself to be habitually a Yenta. And a Yenta is a person who gathers information that has absolutely no use whatsoever. This is not just harmless. This is actually detrimental, because this is how we end up seeing things that we shouldn't. Simply out of nonsensical curiosity.