Seclusion of four women with a Jew and a gentile

We’re four girls. We are going on a trip to Georgia. We are taking with us a tour guide, who is a religious Jew and we’re renting a car with a driver, who is not Jewish. We have several questions connected to this trip: Is there a problem with seclusion? Is there a difference between daytime and nighttime drives? If we take a female tour guide instead, will that solve our problems, taking into account that we are still going to have a non-Jewish male driver?

1. According to the opinion of the Shulchan Oruch, it’s forbidden for a number of women (even more than three) to seclude themselves with one Jew and one gentile. There is no solution to this problem, unless you only drive on relatively busy roads, where you’ll encounter at least one vehicle every ten minutes. But if among the women there is a pair that consists of two sisters-in-law, or a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, then you’d avoid the problem of seclusion. The Sephardi Jews usually follow this opinion, and so do many Ashkenazim.

But according to the Remo, three women are allowed to seclude themselves with one man, if one can assume that he is a morally upright person (and is not suspected of lechery). Among the Ashkenazim, some rely on this more lenient opinion.

2. If this group is allowed to be together because they have someone who serves as a guardian, then at night they need an additional guardian. What follows from this is that in a situation where one is allowed to be secluded with three women during the day, he’d be allowed to be secluded with four women at night.

However, if one is allowed to be secluded because there is a pair of sisters-in-law or a mother-in-law-daughter-in-law pair, or because there are passersby that can see what goes on, then this seclusion is permitted at nighttime just as it is permitted during the day.

3. Having a gentile driver without the religious tour guide only exacerbates the problem. If you could take a female driver and a female tour guide, then you’d avoid prohibited seclusion altogether.

Practically speaking, I wouldn’t recommend taking a trip the way it’s set up now.

Shulchan Oruch, section Yore Dea, ch. 22, §5