Maseches Ketubot 21-22
Aug. 1st, 2022 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDaf 21
Don't have much to say about this one. More stuff about testimony about testimony, when do we accept that a witness can validate their own signature on a document about some previous financial arrangement and when don't we?
Daf 22
We are finally back to marriage. A woman testifies that she was married, and now she is divorced (or testifies that she was married, and then her husband died)- we take her word for it. But if witnesses show up before this testimony and say that she was married, then we don't take her word for it, because the idea of taking her word for it is based on the fact of the adverse testimony. In the absence of other testimony, she could have simply testified that she was never married, it would have been an easier story with less problems, so we believe her. See? Similar to the discussions on the last few dapim. But a new innovation! What if she testifies that she was married and now is divorced, and then later witnesses come and testify that she is still married? Do we retroactively reject her testimony?
The obvious problem here is that most likely she testified that she was divorced in order that she could marry someone new. So she's married again, if we decide that she was not telling the truth, she is committing adultery and is prohibited to her husband. And it's not like there were generally central registries of marriages and divorces, or at least, maybe there would be a townwide registry but there's no computerized database that you can search for all weddings and divorces anywhere, so if there's controversy nobody can go out and investigate and find the records and definitely decide whether she is legally married or not.
And of course underlying this whole thing, but never stated, is the problem of the agunah. A woman under Jewish law is not able to decide to be divorced, she is dependent on her husband to grant the gett, and if he refuses she is stuck. And moreover the other form of agunah was much more common back in the Talmud's time, it was much more likely that a woman's husband went traveling and nobody was sure whether or not he had died or not. So you can subtextually understand this discussion as the Talmud grappling with "If an agunah lies in order to get married again, and we find out later that she is an agunah, whose interests do we prioritize, the interest of the community in maintaining the inviolability of the terms of the marriage contract, for better or worse, or the interest of the woman in no longer being an agunah?"
I think not surprisingly, the answer is... confused. The Gemara keeps flipping back and forth, making all sorts of distinctions between scenarios where the woman's testimony is accepted and when it isn't, between leniencies in circumstances where freeing the woman of being an agunah is desired, and stringencies when we have reason to think the woman is lying even if that reason falls short of being actual testimony of two witnesses.
Don't have much to say about this one. More stuff about testimony about testimony, when do we accept that a witness can validate their own signature on a document about some previous financial arrangement and when don't we?
Daf 22
We are finally back to marriage. A woman testifies that she was married, and now she is divorced (or testifies that she was married, and then her husband died)- we take her word for it. But if witnesses show up before this testimony and say that she was married, then we don't take her word for it, because the idea of taking her word for it is based on the fact of the adverse testimony. In the absence of other testimony, she could have simply testified that she was never married, it would have been an easier story with less problems, so we believe her. See? Similar to the discussions on the last few dapim. But a new innovation! What if she testifies that she was married and now is divorced, and then later witnesses come and testify that she is still married? Do we retroactively reject her testimony?
The obvious problem here is that most likely she testified that she was divorced in order that she could marry someone new. So she's married again, if we decide that she was not telling the truth, she is committing adultery and is prohibited to her husband. And it's not like there were generally central registries of marriages and divorces, or at least, maybe there would be a townwide registry but there's no computerized database that you can search for all weddings and divorces anywhere, so if there's controversy nobody can go out and investigate and find the records and definitely decide whether she is legally married or not.
And of course underlying this whole thing, but never stated, is the problem of the agunah. A woman under Jewish law is not able to decide to be divorced, she is dependent on her husband to grant the gett, and if he refuses she is stuck. And moreover the other form of agunah was much more common back in the Talmud's time, it was much more likely that a woman's husband went traveling and nobody was sure whether or not he had died or not. So you can subtextually understand this discussion as the Talmud grappling with "If an agunah lies in order to get married again, and we find out later that she is an agunah, whose interests do we prioritize, the interest of the community in maintaining the inviolability of the terms of the marriage contract, for better or worse, or the interest of the woman in no longer being an agunah?"
I think not surprisingly, the answer is... confused. The Gemara keeps flipping back and forth, making all sorts of distinctions between scenarios where the woman's testimony is accepted and when it isn't, between leniencies in circumstances where freeing the woman of being an agunah is desired, and stringencies when we have reason to think the woman is lying even if that reason falls short of being actual testimony of two witnesses.