"She doesn’t have Internet, so she comes to your ‘treif’ house to use yours?"

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I have a dear friend (we’ll call her Ahuva because to me she truly is!) who has unintentionally put me into a very uncomfortable position.

Ahuva doesn’t have any internet access, and at some point during the COVID lockdown she asked me if she could come do some shopping on my computer. It was a reasonable request, and of course I said yes. Slowly she began coming over more often, and I saw what a huge help it was for her.

She and her husband are on an extremely tight budget, and with three little ones it was a real boon for her to be able to order summer clothes for herself and her kids on Ali and other cheap sites, paying for all her purchases the amount she would have paid for one item in the local stores. She was also in middle of moving apartments, and rather than shlep around town to Lowe’s and Home Depot and Target for hours, she was able to order household items and the like all from the comfort of a laptop while her kids played with mine.

Very often I’d leave Ahuva in my apartment to do her thing, and she’d just lock up when she was done, but sometimes I was home and we’d have coffee and schmooze while she shopped, checked her emails, and occasionally surfed the frum news or lifestyle websites.

“You don’t mind being her Shabbos goy?” My sister, who was once visiting while Ahuva was doing Yom Tov shopping, asked me afterward.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Well, she doesn’t have Internet, so she comes to your ‘treif’ house to use yours? Does her husband even know that she spends all this time online?”

“First of all,” I responded with more than a tinge of indignation, “you’re throwing together completely separate issues. Second of all, it’s totally none of your business! Come to think of it, it’s not my business either. I have no problem with helping Ahuva out, she’s doing nothing wrong, and I think it’s inappropriate for you to even bring it up.”