Before the sun sets on this year’s Chanukah, one of the many neurotic holidays that remind us of all the bad things non-Jews have tried to do to us, I want to talk about one more Hazard that connects Chanukah and Ketuboth.

I think the Braita on daf 3b leaves us wondering when was this “time of danger” that caused the ancient Jews to change weddings from Wednesday to Tuesday. Not surprising several writings about Chanukah (including the Geonim specifically and other Midrashim) describe persecution along these lines – Greeks raping Jewish women in general, specific targeted rapes of brides on their wedding night. One source even explains that young couples were invited to sleep together before their wedding, so that even if a Greek would rape her, she would already have an emotional bond to her husband.

There is one story that I want to share here. For a long time leading up to the rebellion the Jews would avoid violating the decrees of the Greeks without direct conflict. If they were told women were not allowed to go to the Mikvah, they simply would not sleep with their wives. This way they didn’t violate their Judaism but they didn’t provoke the Greeks either.

Until the daughter of the Cohen Gadol, Yehudit (in one version), was supposed to get married to one of the Maccabi brothers. At this point the Greeks had a decree that the governor had the right to sleep with the bride before her wedding. Some marriages were done in secret but not all could avoid the Greeks prowling eye. But Yehudit wouldn’t stand for it. She stripped in public and shocked the Maccabis who wanted to burn her as a harlot. Then she spoke: You are embarrassed that I stripped in front of Jews, but you are willing to send me naked, powerless to the Greek governor to be raped. Her speech embarrassed the Maccabi’s so much that they decided to rebel. Instead of attempting to hold the wedding in secret, they dressed her up in her wedding clothes and paraded to the house of the governor as if they were gladly giving her over to be raped- and then they killed the governor starting the rebellion in force.

The End

Well it’s the last day of Chanukah and I have yet to share with you any insights on Chanukah and Ketuboth. I hope you are not all Chanukah-ed out.

I recently read a halakhic responsa, the Dvar Yehoshua by a former chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, who argued that it is actually wrong to light your Chanukah candles outside, as so many Israeli’s do. He explains the following: In our past historical times of danger, when lighting candles outside would provoke pogroms and other communal hazards, we didn’t simply dump the mitzvah and hide the candles indoors. As a community an alternate minhag was formed. The new minhag to light candles inside, near a door or near a window, then took on legal status. It is important to the halakhic system that an alternate setting fills the void, and that every individual family does not make their own decision, relocating the candles wherever they see fit.

He learns this from the opening sugya Ketuboth, which I have been beating to death on this blog. The Jews had a minhag to marry on Wednesday but in time of danger the minhag was changed to Tuesdays. First off, says the Dvar Yehoshua, the minhag was changed uniformly and a unified alternative date was chosen. Though interestingly, from the text itself it seems that the community uniformly changed the minhag, and the Rabbis gave it their stamp of approval afterward. Secondly, says the Dvar Yehoshua, according to the Braita on daf 3b, after the time of danger passed the minhag remained in place because the change of date had acquired a halakhic status of it’s own. Hence he claims we should continue to light our candles inside, even after the time of danger has passed.

Interesting, in the Dvar Yehoshua’s discussion he brings up the question asked by the Gemarah and many Rishonim, what was exactly the danger that caused the Jews to change wedding dates from Wednesday to Tuesday. One possibility is that it is a time of shmad- religious persecution- where the very purpose of the prowling governors who came to rape brides on their wedding night was to force the Jews to abandon mitzvoth- any and all. Therefore it is very significant, according to the Dvar Yehoshua, that the Jews picked a new date for weddings and stuck to it.

By choosing Tuesday, the Jewish community may save some women from rape (though not all because the governor might catch on to the new wedding day), while still not surrendering their right to have a religious system that they adhere to. Similarly with candle lighting, if we remove our candles from outside, without mandating a new location for the mitzvah, then the threats of our enemies are stopping us from keeping our religious rites. But if the system mandates a new location, then we –as a community, as a religion- are simply outsmarting the potential pogrom.

I think this is an important comment on change in religion. These cases show a dynamic relationship between, tradition, community action, and Rabbinic/halakhic sanction. On the one hand the Gemarah displays distaste for change, both because we don’t believe in being submissive to religious persecution and because we have a strong faith in the need to have a stable system of laws that accompany us through the generations. On the other hand if the system can’t change, then the religion is in danger of collapsing. How many people would marry off their daughter’s on Wednesday if they knew it meant she would be raped? How many people would put their Chanukah candles outside, if it was a sure fire invitation for pillage. If the Rabbis and the institutions want the Jewish people to be faithful to the halakhic system, then laws need to change based on community reality. The transformation can occur within the Batei Midrash and Batei Din, or else they surely will be overrun by the power of the community. If the Rabbis don’t sanction some of the changes, we are more likely to have disparate and dis-unified solutions to problems facing Jews worldwide.  

What about our Chanukah candle ritual, which in Israel is increasingly moving outside? I think this is a powerful communal response to the State of Israel. In the US where people proudly light their candles in their windows and have no worries (in most cities) of anti-Semitic attacks, they still light indoors. In Israel the invention of the glass box that sits outdoors and protects candles from blowing out in the wind, is a statement about a fundamental change in reality. Now that we have our own state, where the official National Holiday includes Chanukah it is time perhaps for one more communal change in halakha. We are not reverting to the “correct” halakha in times when there is no danger; this is an actual change. We are not simply no longer afraid of pogroms, but we are positively asserting that the reality of galut - of being a minority whose safety fluctuates with the whims of others - has changed, and so have we.

(Thanks to Rav Ariel Holland for bringing the Dvar Yehoshua to class at Matan)

One method in psychological counseling (don’t ask- information from a previous life) is to pay really close attention to the direction of the conversation. Of course you hope your psychologist is listening to what you say, but sometimes the twists and turns of the topic itself is a telling indication of a client’s feelings. What do they avoid talking about, how do they distract the therapist from following a line of questioning, when do they change the subject sometimes so subtly that a fledgling therapist might never notice the intense avoidance under the cover.

The Talmud, though it didn’t happen in real time, is sort of like a recorded conversation. On daf 3b-4a there is a discussion of various kinds of unfortunate situations that may force one to change the planned wedding date. One painful occurrence is if the father of the groom or mother of the bride passes away on Monday, and the wedding is planned for a Wed; the bride and groom get married and are sent into Yichud (to have sex) before the funeral, then they have the burial, 7 days of shevah brachot and wedding feasting, and then 7 days of mourning. The idea behind the strange order of events is that they don’t want to push off the wedding because the very parent who passed away put a lot of effort into the wedding, and if it were to be pushed off no one would be around to finance and organize another wedding. On the other hand once they bury the parent the laws of mourning kick in and it would be inappropriate to hold the wedding. So the wedding is quickly held before the funeral.

Interestingly after this shockingly sad and psychologically uncomfortable mix of emotions the gemarah seems to take a detour from the main issue at hand (which was what day one should get married and under what circumstances can you change the date.) The gemarah goes into painstaking details of whether one could sell a half cooked meal and save the money from this aborted wedding for another time. They discuss the different stages of preparing a wedding feast and the different economic climates of different cities. The escape into the minutia of what kind of meat can be sold in what size city, seems to me to be a defense against the very painful material at hand.

I’d like to suggest that the detour doesn’t display the gemarah’s insensitivity to the emotional situation it just set up- rather the defense mechanism could be a hidden signal that the writers of the Talmud were quite saddened and in touch with these feelings. However, just as someone recently bereaved may loose themselves in the details of planning a funeral, the shiva, the kaddish, the gemarah finds a literary escape from the weight of such situations.

This article, which outlines the current political battle between civil and Rabbinic courts in Israel for adjudicating monetary issue of divorce, doesn't per say blame the Rabbinic courts any more than the system as a whole. (Though the article does describe the mad dash to file for divorce: the women in civil court - where she'll get a fair hearing, and the man to the Rabbinic court, where he'll get favorable treatment.) We are a schizophrenic country with competing courts and confusion and injustice abounds.

I want to comment on the Mishnah order in chapter 5. I think attention to order (and disorder) reveals the Mishnah’s awareness of woman’s need for a certain amount of economic independence within marriage.

The Mishnayot seem to be following the order of the natural progression of events in planning and executing a wedding. At the engagement the price of the Ketuba is set (Mishnah 1), then during the couple’s engagement both the man and women are entitled to a year’s time to work to make money for building the household, making the furnishings, or executing the wedding (Mishnah 2); if the wedding date comes and goes, certain rights and responsibilities kick in at the end of 12 months even if the wedding is pushed off (end of Mishnah 2). The fourth Mishnah picks up where the 2nd left off: it details the responsibilities of a wife to her husband once the marriage has begun. The fifth talks of the husband’s responsibilities to his wife after the wedding.

The third Mishnah in this chapter seems, raises eyebrows and seems totally out of place. It asks can a husband donate or vow to donate his wife’s handiwork to the temple, making the forbidden for everyday use. The larger question at hand is to what extent is the woman economically independence in the marriage and in control of her earnings. The Gemarah fills in some details: the Rabbis dictate that during marriage a woman should hand over her handiwork to her husband in exchange for his responsibility to feed her. However there is a debate as to what comes first. Perhaps he is essentially responsible to feed her, but in order to not to create bad feelings, the Rabbis ask her to pitch in by contributing her earnings to his total assets. Or maybe he owns her handiwork automatically and in return he is responsible to feed her. In the end of the day he can only donate her handiwork if he owns it a priori, or if he has control over her “hands,” meaning he has the ability to force her to work.

Ultimately most opinions suggest that a woman can opt out of such a contract – even though it may be built to protect her – she can choose to refuse his food and thereby keep her own handiwork to support herself, demonstrating that she owns her own handiwork and can choose how to use it. First point I want to make is that on the basic level this discussion reminds us that women were not always as economically dependant on their husband’s as we may imagine. They worked both in and out of the house, sometimes bringing the second salary into the household, sometimes choosing maintain their own savings.

We are still left with our original question: why does the Mishna bring up issues of bank accounts during marriage, when the progression of the Mishnayot are still dealing with the pre- marriage stage? Why not lay out the basic rules of the game (Mishna 4’s description a wife’s basic responsibilities) before discussing the exception to the rule, the woman who keeps her own savings, the man who tries to donate his wife’s salary as if it were his own?

I think this out-of-place Mishnah addresses the transition FROM independent wage earning woman (albeit young) who spends the year before her marriage earning money and furnishing her new house TO dependant wife who is fed at her husband’s hand and turns over all her earnings to his bank account. This Mishna answers perhaps the emotional needs of a transitioning woman; even when she becomes part of his family estate, she maintains a certain amount of control over her contribution to the family. Despite the fact that she may deposit her money into his bank account, so that he can divvy out the spending money for the week- still she has some independent control over her own productivity in that he can’t donate it against her will, and that she has the right to craft a more independent economic arrangement.

The pesky Tznuot and Perutzot, about whom we gossiped on daf 3a reappear on daf 3b, surprise surprise! On daf 3a we were concerned that the meek woman would think the best of her husband (who left her over a year ago with a suspicious conditional divorce) and assume she was still married, rendering herself an agunah; while the brazen woman would purposely remarry despite her husband’s intention to return. (Picture Romare Bearden. Two Women in a Landscape, 1941.)

On daf 3b they play different though similar roles. As we discussed earlier, the meek woman would prefer to be killed then allow a local governor rape her on her wedding night (perhaps for halakhic reasons because she believes she won’t be allowed to return to her husband, or simply for emotional reasons). On the other hand the lascivious woman will actually enjoy the first night’s rights- her desire transforming it from rape to adultery, after which she really is not allowed to return to her husband.

In some ways the tznuot and the prutzot play a similar role in both sugyot. The Rabbis would like to build a perfect world, with clean clear legal standards and set rules, but reality keeps rearing its ugly head, and it has two faces. The minute we step from the ideal into the real, we find women, real live people with personalities and opinions. And they don’t always listen to Rabbis. In fact the Perutzot, listen to the Rabbis and then manipulate the system with the knowledge of halakha, while the tznuot, a term we would usually consider praise, are in fact those that reject halakha and rabbinic loop holes on the grounds of their emotions or sense of the world.

Reality doesn’t always work out as planned. But the Rabbis do want to make things work in the real world, and so time and again they have to face the women, the real people for whom the law exits and adapt.

This post - about a rally that included Modern Orthodox Rabbis pressuring other Rabbis to treat women in the divorce process with more respect - is refreshing. If only we had a few Rabbis here in Israel who were brave enough to stand up and and target specific Rabbis who abuse their power.

The Gemarah on daf 3a (yes we are still on daf 3 in my Iyun class) describes a takana enacted to solve the problem of Tznuot and Prutzot- the modest and the brazen or lascivious.

The problem at hand is as follows: if a man writes a conditional divorce “If I don’t come home in a year, you are divorced,” the woman waiting at home may not know whether she is in fact divorced. If he chose not to come home at the end of the year, then she is in fact divorced because the condition was fulfilled purposely by the husband. But if some accidental circumstances forced the husband not to return, then she is still married because the condition was not fulfilled by the husband, but rather by the an outside force (let us call it an act of God.)

According to Rashi the modest/meek woman takes this lack of information and never remarries rendering herself an aguna, while a brazen woman fills the void with a new husband and may unwittingly give birth to Mamzerim (bastard children) if she in fact is officially still married. For both personality types the problem is the lack of information that allows these women to create ill consequences for themselves, which the takana can solve by pronouncing her divorced in any event no matter why the husband didn’t return.

Tosfot has a bit of a different read. The problem is not lack of information but the women themselves are problematic, each personality type with her own machinations. The modest woman, says Tosfot, really can get married because statistically it is unlikely that her husband was held up by circumstances and so she is halakhicly allowed to remarry (though I’m not sure whose doing their statistics). She with her own personal stringencies refuses to except the halakhic statisticians’ pronouncement and therefore she creates her own igun. The Perutza on the other hand knows for a fact that an accident of fate has held her husband up in some foreign land- only she doesn’t tell anyone. She takes advantage of the same statistics proffered to the modest woman and tells the world she is remarrying because her husband isn’t returning and the divorce took affect, when she knows this not to be true.

Are these stereotypes worth anything to the modern Feminist reader? And whose fault is the gemarah really pointing towards? I think all women will have a similar problem if the husband asserts an essentially vague condition to a divorce. If he is negligent enough to write her a conditional divorce without sending word as to why he didn’t return then any woman will be in trouble. Perhaps the gemarah is taking his faults and turning it into extreme personalities of women.

If I am positing that the fault is of the husband then why call this “the problem of Tznuot and Prutzot.” A “normal” woman, who is neither quick to remarry nor slow to get over her denial, will herself be transformed into a neurotic, trying to weigh the possibilities. Has enough time passed? Did he want to remain married and is trying to get back yet was prevented against his will from returning? Was he eaten by a lion? Did he willingly chose to abandon me because he met a younger more beautiful woman to start a family with in some far off town? The imagination is a dangerous thing.

The experience of not knowing of being trapped in your thoughts and in your nightmares in itself could turn a woman into a Perutzah or a Tznuah. One woman may shrink into herself, nurse her romantic memories, refuse to see the truth of his betrayal and spend the rest of her life mourning his disappearance. While another woman may turn to anger and brazenness. She may let that anger blind her from the hints of his return or prevent her from waiting some reasonable time, or from hiring a private eye. She says “he left me! Well I’m not waiting for him to find himself.”

I like this reading of the text because it doesn’t mean women are by nature extreme emotional beings who can’t be trusted. Rather it is unfair to leave women hanging in lacking of control and lacking information. The fault belongs to the man for leaving her with a worthless conditional divorce, and some of the blame can be shared ultimately with the structure of one-sided marriage that leaves only the woman helplessly chained. Perhaps it’s this blame that actually propels the rabbis to find a way out, to validate this questionable divorce so she can move on. 

When does the marriage actually take affect? There are in affect many moments that signify the marriage: The engagement ring, the discussion with you betrothed parents, the engagement party, opening up a joint bank account for the gifts, the veiling, the chuppa, the wedding party, moving in together, and of course the sex.

According to some reads of Ketuboth, the process of marriage may take affect in stages, because the marriage itself is made up several different relationships - sexual, familial, economic, social.

One place this issue arises in on page 56a. If the husband adds on to the base price of the Ketuba, when does the wife actually acquire the rights to that money. The Gemarah tries to answer from a psychological perspective: what was the reason he added on to the basic requirement of the Ketuba? Does he promise it in order to make her happy to sleep with him, or because he is paying her to sleep with him, or he is paying for her specific level of experience or virginity- in which case she would only own this part of the Ketuba after they consummate the marriage. Or perhaps he adds the money to make her happy at the Chuppa, perhaps representing the more social or even communal element of their relationship. Then after the chuppa she would be entitled to this money.

In some ways this discussion raises the question: how central is sex? Does sex represent some kind of love and personal relationship that has already been initiated at the Chuppa. If so perhaps the promise of fidelity made at the chuppa is enough to solidify the marriage in that it hints to the consummation to come, based on the emotional (and legal) promises made. Or perhaps none of these promises and projections are meaningful until they are fulfilled and made tangible.

I had the weirdest dream last night. ( I know those of you who read this blog are not used to reading the personal fluffy stuff- but I promise it’s related.)  So I had uncovered the truth, that in ancient Hebrew society powerful women, queen like, goddess like women, were in charge. These women, in their collaborative spirit were the first to come up with the idea of the Talmud a way to pool brain power. Different women would remember different pieces of information different Mishnayot. Each woman was like an individual server and together they could recreate all the learning that was being forgotten.

This is clearly a mixture of a couple things I’m reading right now. Tikvah Frymer Kensky’s book on Goddesses traces the decline of the Goddess in Ancient Summerian and Assyrian lore. Male Gods slowly took over the roles women had played, just as in my dream the Rabbis were actually replacing an early group of women. Also on my desk is Albeck’s Overview on the Mishnah, which discusses the theories of how it was organized and finalized by Rabbi Yehudah Hanassi. This fused with Halivni who describes certain student’s whose responsibility it was to remember the official version of Mishnayot and Braiytot, so he like a computer could repeat it back to those who needed it. And servers….well my computer is my closest companion theses days.