Masechet Ketubah Daf 2-3

Let's try this again!


Daf 2

The overarching topic of this masechet is the legal contract between husband and wife in a Jewish marriage, which is called a ketubah. And in general, the idea that a Jewish marriage is built on this legal structure, this idea of legal obligations the husband has to the wife, and legal obligations the wife has to the husband. These obligations are extremely asymmetric- the husband's obligations are quite different than the wife's. I'm not super-happy with this conception of marriage, so I think you can expect these blog posts will push back against the Gemara more than, say, my posts on Chullin did. (My general preference, as I've explained a few times, is for a conception of marriage closer to Mark and Kareen's negotiation in A Civil Campaign- 'A Mutual Option!' Preserving the idea that contracting a marriage is a legal procedure about creating obligations between both parties, but doing so in a way where the obligations are symmetrical and mutually supportive.) That said, don't expect this to become a series of me just trashing the Rabbis. There's a lot that I think is beautiful in the Talmudic conception of marriage, and there's a lot that I think is easier to save than might seem at first glance.


The Mishna says that the Rabbis decreed that weddings for virgins should take place on Wednesdays, and weddings for widows should take place on Thursdays. Why? Because traditionally the Beit Din convened on Monday and Thursday and a Wednesday wedding meant that if the chasan discovered his kallah did not have the signs of virginity, he could immediately go to the Beis Din to have his marriage annulled. Yikes.

But before I go into the yikes, some background. For reasons that I've forgotten, Talmudic marriage has two steps, Erusin and Nisuin, which operate more or less like engagement and marriage in America except not. In Talmudic times, there was traditionally a significant time gap between the two: the marriage would be contracted in erusin, but the woman would continue to live in her father's house for some time, until nisuin, where she formally moves to her husband's house and becomes his wife completely. Part of the reason for this, R' Linzer emphasizes, is that some marriages in this time may have been contracted when the woman was still a minor girl, and the marriage could not take full effect until she reached her majority. Which, ick. Some of the effects of marriage take place from erusin, most importantly for our context being that from that moment, the woman is forbidden to other men and if she sleeps with another man, she has committed adultery. But until the moment of nisuin, the full contracted set of obligations between husband and wife do not have effect.

So why yikes?

Yikes because the concept of signs of virginity is physiologically problematic here, obviously, and nobody should be constructing law on the idea that you can prove a woman is a virgin in the halachic by examining her body. R' Linzer's approach to this is closer to mine: He just says look, the emphasis on virginity was characteristic of the societal norms of the time, and we don't need to defend them. R' Steinsaltz's approach, since he's more reluctant to criticize the Chachamim or situate them in a rejected social context, is to spend a lot of time arguing that the Rabbis themselves were uncomfortable with his halacha and that if you close read carefully enough you'll see them implicitly objecting to this framing of a woman's value. R' Steinsaltz is a genius, and there's a lot of value in his close readings even if I think they're sort of unnecessary if we just accept that the social context of ancient Yisrael was wrong about how it regarded women.

Anyway, a more specific yikes is this: Starting your marriage with a scheduling choice made on the presumption that there's a reasonable chance that it will turn out that your wife committed adultery is terrible!!! How can you marry this woman, sign a legally binding contract committing to support her and be her partner, if you think there's a significant enough chance that she cheated on you that you would plan your wedding around the possibility?

It's straightforwardly untenable. The very first thing the Gemara does, in the name of Shmuel, is try to just disavow the Mishna altogether. Yes, you do wedding on Wednesdays, but for completely different reasons. Weddings on Wednesdays are convenient, you have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to organize the party and then you have Thursday and Friday to get ready for your first Shabbos as a couple, he says. Ignore the Mishna. The Gemara won't go this far, they reject Shmuel's position. The Mishna had to have a reason.

R' Linzer reads this Gemara differently, but I think I'm in sympathy to the Steinsaltz read. R' Linzer says Shmuel isn't trying to disavow the Mishna, he's just trying to say that the Mishna's reason is not enough of an explanation on its own for why Wednesdays, so he's trying to offer a second half to the explanation. He says Shmuel's explanation is that the Mishna's statement is fine as a statement of the traditional wedding date, but what's the nafka mina? The idea is that since we understand that weddings are on Wednesdays, if a chasan says to his betrothed "We will have nisuin in a year (or three months, or whatever)", and the date passes and he fails to carry out nisuin, the woman still starts to be entitled to the benefits of her ketubah, but only after Wednesday of the specified week.

But again, I think the original Mishna is straightforwardly untenable. It's not possible to start a successful marriage by telling your bride you're so worried that she committed adultery that you're going to organize your wedding around it. Marriages require trust and demonstrations of trust. R' Linzer wants to read the Mishna as not a halakhic enactment of the Rabbis (It's indisputably not a d'oraysa) but simply as a statement of the cultural norms of the time. In other words, it's not the Rabbis who were so concerned about potential adultery that they scheduled all weddings for right before the Beit Din met, it's just that a lot of men were concerned and so it became the custom, Which again, starts with R' Linzer's presumption that the ancient Orient was deeply misogynistic in a horrifying way, but tries to separate out the halachic Jewish principles from that misogyny. The Gemara does not agree with R' Linzer. But even in the Gemara's terms there's something deeply uncomfortable about this whole premise, and R' Steinsaltz's footnotes in the Koren are full of Rishonim explaining why it's actually not what's going on. A lot of their arguments work like the psychological approach to sotah, where the idea here is something like "By making it easy for the man to make an objection, we ease his mind that the legal system will serve him if needed, and make it more likely that he will go forward with the wedding and not actually avail himself of the legal system."

I don't think the psychological approach is inherently wrongheaded, though it clearly thinks very little of men, but I do think if we accept that that's what's going on, we have to operate with the awareness that the psychological approach will sometimes fail and we need a backup plan. What do you do if someone really does abuse the system to harass his wife-to-be?

Daf 3

Shmuel's counter-argument against the Mishna, that the point of the Wednesday date is to say that a woman can start enforcing her putative husband's ketubah obligations on the Wednesday even if the wedding isn't consummated, leads the Gemara into a discussion of when there are exceptions to that. Essentially the Gemara's principle is that if the wedding is put off for a reason that stems from the chasan, he is obligated, and if the reason stems from the kallah, he is not obligated. 'Stems from' is a little loose, it seems to include things like "If the kallah gets sick and the wedding has to be postponed," where it's obviously not her 'fault' but she is the locus of the delay. This is a little silly, but okay. You can imagine that a principle like this is useful to hold the line against monkey business. Nobody wants to distinguish between "kallah/chasan says (s)he's sick because (s)he wants to delay the wedding" and "kallah is actually sick", and both seem like plausible things to happen, so you just say you're not going to make a distinction.

This leads the Gemara into a sidetrack about similar exceptions in a conditional gett. A conditional gett is a procedure where, say, a husband had to go away on travel for months. It was much more dangerous to travel back then, and communication was much more limited, so if the husband died on the trip his wife might never find out. She would then be stuck in the position of being an agunah, an abandoned woman who is not permitted to remarry because her husband might still be alive and could return. So the husband might give her a conditional gett saying "If I don't return from my trip in a year's time, consider us divorced." That way, if he doesn't return within the specified time period, she is divorced and able to remarry.

But what if he intended to return within the year but was held up by a storm, or he unexpectedly becomes sick and is unable to return? The principle here is that there are no exceptions to the explicit language of a conditional gett even for sickness. This seems to be because we'd be in for all manner of headache if we allowed it- what if a woman acted in good faith on the language of the conditional gett, considered herself divorced and got remarried, and then her first husband shows up a month later and says "I was sick or I would have made it on time, a Beit Din should annul the conditional gett? Is the woman an adulterer, then, since she married a second man and upon the annulment of the gett she was still retroactively married to her first husband? It's a whole mess, clearly we don't want that.

A slight problem is that the Gemara's not clear that from a procedural standpoint we can bypass a general principle of Jewish contract law that we don't enforce contracts based on unanticipatable circumstances completely out of the person's control, so apparently there's a little *wink*wink* going on that I don't really feel like going into for the same reasons the Gemara doesn't want to go into it.