Seeking Ferret

Quick sprint to the end of the first Perek.

Daf 4

We started with the Mishna saying there are 4 Avot of Nezikin, but now the Gemara cites a Baraisa in the name of R' Oshaya that there are actually 13 Avot- the four we mentioned, plus several kinds of bailment, plus some other kinds of damage a person causes. Later we get Rabbi Hiyya's list of twenty four types of Avot. The Gemara goes through some possibilities but basically says that the Mishna's 4 are the most classic categories of damages that meet the Mishna's definition- it is in their nature to cause damage, the owner of the property is responsible for restitution, and restitution in land must come from the highest quality land. And these other lists may involve what we would call damages in some way, but don't involve all of the same basic properties. We are still in an introductory mode, the Mishna is throwing out these big conceptual tools to help us prepare to dig down into the cases.

Daf 5

Amid some boring stuff, start of a persistent question in the Gemara- what payments represent mamon- monetary restitution- and what payments represent k'nos- monetary penalties? There are lots of differences in the law between the two, and there are going to be lots of places where it's unclear which is which, because they occupy a sort of borderline.

Daf 6

The Gemara returns to the four Avot- Ox, Pit, ???Other Living Damage???, and Fire, and demonstrates that each has unique halachot that distinguishes them from the others, so that the Mishna needed to list each separately, because while perhaps they did not need to have those names, the Mishna needed four paradigmatic categories to catch all kinds of classic nezikin.

At the end of the daf, start of a long detour into the question of, when you owe a debt (whether because of a Damage or because of some other reason) and your creditors have a lien on your land, what part of your land do they get. All of the answers the Gemara discusses are default answers- this is the way you assume the agreement works in a case where there is no contract spelling out specific collateral on a loan. That's precisely what you want in the case of nezikin, because in most scenarios of nezikin there won't be any pre-agreement between parties on how a debt will be paid, nobody anticipated that your ox might gore my ox, but since these laws also cover debts incurred in the normal course of business I do want to note that you can contract out of most if not all of this. This is a large part of what modern bankruptcy court and law does- in the case of a company dealing with resolving its debts, there will be specific contract terms associated with each bond spelling out who has rights to be the first creditor paid, who has the rights to be the second creditor paid, etc, and who has the rights to which particular properties.

But there is weirdness in the contrast. In the case of Nezikin, if you repay in land, it must be from your highest quality land ("meitav"). In an uncollaterized loan, if you repay in land, technically by halacha you could repay from your lowest quality land, but in order to incentivize lenders the Rabbanim enacted a takanah that you repay from your most medium quality land. So a lot of the halacha is not relevent to nezikin even though it's ostensibly a discussion of nezikin. Well, it's all civil law, eh?

If a creditor comes to you with a lien on your land, but after the lien existed but before the creditor came, you'd sold your most medium quality land, the creditor can go to your buyer and claim the land from them, because the lien transfers. But maybe the takanah doesn't transfer, so the buyer could instead give the creditor from their lowest quality land instead? The answer is a lot more complicated than that, and has fascinating logic, but I don't feel like working through the case here.

Daf 7

Continuation of the discussion of recovery of debts from land. The Gemara brings a text discussing when a person is considered 'poor' because there are limitations on how much you're allowed to collect from a poor person. But if a person is not poor, but they lack liquid assets and cannot repay their debt without selling illiquid assets at a loss, what do they do? Generally, the answer is you can let them pay with their illiquid assets so they can be sold later without forcing them to take a loss, or if possible, let them wait until a time when their asset is more liquid. The Rabbis want fair restitution to happen but not if it's going to just be punitively unfair to the debtor.

Daf 8

Still talking about recovery of debts from different kinds of land. Here we get the takanah I mentioned earlier, and the idea of liens transferring but maybe the takanah not transferring.

Daf 9

A bunch of inheritance cases where a man who died had two sons who inherit equally, but they don't necessarily get equivalent inheritances, just equivalent value. So maybe one son gets all the land, and the other son gets all the money, or maybe one son gets the house and the other son gets the farmland. Different asset classes have different discharge of debts with death, so one son might end up getting screwed-a creditor can come in and claim land owed in repayment of the dead man's debt, but he can't seize money once it's been inherited because money is fungible and you can't have a lien on money. So if a creditor seizes land from the son who inherited land, and the other son is just sitting happy with his money, the Gemara says the son who's flush needs to split his cash with his brother, because they both inherited the estate equally and that means they both owed an equal share of their father's debt that was settled. But there are lots of exceptions to this, because one or both of the sons can stipulate in various ways that save them from the obligations of equalizing the debt. For example, if the son who took the cash explicitly did so because he didn't want to be involved with any creditors or liens, maybe he could disclaim his responsibility to make his brother whole. Apparently this works because taking money assumes different kinds of risk, like nobody can burgle a plot of land but they can burgle a pile of gold. So since each brother is taking on different risks, they can agree that they are only assuming their own risks and not their brothers. But by default, they are jointly responsible for the nondischargeable debts of the estate, even if they receive different assets.

Daf 10

Comparative chumras- how is the law of Shor more strict than the law of Bor? I think my favorite is the case of Eish vs Bor- if you give a minor care of a pit, and someone is injured, you're chayiv, because your original construction of the pit created the hazard and giving an irresponsible person charge of the pit doesn't absolve you of that responsibility. But if you give a minor care of a fire, and the fire spreads, you're patur because the nature of the kind of fire the Gemara is envisioning is such that by its nature it will blow out or burn out on its own over time, and the only reason the fire spread is because the minor did something unexpectedly irresponsible on their own to stoke the fire, something you could not have predicted the minor would do. I find this a little baffling. Has the Gemara ever met children?

Daf 11

How to make kinyan on an animal: If the animal is small, you pick it up. If the animal is big (presumably too big to pick up), you walk it along for a reasonable distance. Rabbi Shimon says you still need to pick up the animal to make kinyan even if it's too big. Not sure how that works.

Daf 12

Some interesting questions about hekdesh. If your ox gores an ox that had been consecrated to the Beis Hamikdash, there's no owner to pay restitution to other than God, so there's no civil damages. Fine. You might think that you would need to replace the animal's place in the Temple service but no. There are more liminal cases where the animal had been intended to be consecrated but all the steps of consecration hadn't been carried out, and so ownership is unclear. And liminal cases of sacrifices where you eat the meat or retain some other part of the sacrifice, so maybe you retain some kind of partial ownership even after consecration. Drilling down through this helps clarify what it means to 'own' hekdesh, what rights you still retain and what rights are ceded to God.

But what I kept get stuck on is the fascinating intersection between the idea of 'benefit' in property law, and the idea of benefit attached to offering a sacrifice. If your ox gores an ox, you owe someone the value of the damage, out of your ox, but if you then consecrate the ox before the judgement is made by the beis din, the damaged party cannot claim the damage anymore because you are no longer getting temporal benefit from the ox. But you are still getting a benefit from the ox, in that whatever spiritual value the sacrifice has to you theoretically still accrues to you. Likely the idea is that Hakadosh Baruch Hu will apportion reward for the sacrifice in a True and Just way, so the beis din doesn't need to consider this kind of benefit in its judgement.

Daf 13

You're only responsible for damage caused by a Jew to a Jew. I think this is just a limitation of the jurisdiction of the beis din, if your ox gores the ox of a non-Jew, you don't go Tough luck, goy, I don't owe you shit. What happens is the goy takes you to goy court and you get everything sorted out there, so the beis din disclaims jurisdiction for the case so that there's no double restitution happening.

Daf 14

If my ox damages your ox on my property, I'm patur because what was your ox doing on my property? If my ox damages your own on your property, I'm chayiv because what was my ox doing on your property? If my ox damages your property in a reshut harabim, I'm chayiv if it's keren but patur if it's shen or regel. Discussion of damage that happens in a place where there is shared ownership, or shared access but it's not a reshut harabim, occupies most of the page. It matters specifically what kind of access, different rights to access lead to different obligations in nezikin, and always you go by closest analogy to the main categories of ownership- my land, your land, reshut harabim.

Daf 15

So far we've used muad to refer to specifically an ox that has gored three times before, so that you should be aware that your ox is a dangerous ox. But here the Mishna extends the idea of muad to the other Avot by using the language of muad to explain why with bor and shein and regel you pay full damage even from the first time. Because these cases are analogous to an ox that has gored before, you should know that by the nature of a pit or a hungry animal, they will cause damage if they are not guarded. I like this conception of muad as a key to nezikin as a whole.

Daf 16

The Mishna teaches that five minim of animals are considered muad by default. Lion, bear, the things you'd expect. If you own an animal like that and it injures someone, you're on the hook for full damage even the first time. One of the animal names, the bardelas, is obscure, the Gemara debates its identification. One path of identification is wild. It's identified with the tzavua, and the Gemara then cites a baraisa on the life cycle of the male tzavua: After 7 years, the male tzavua turns into a bat. After another 7 seven years, the bat turns into a different kind of bat. After another seven years, the different bat turns into a nettle plant. After another seven years, the nettle plant turns into a thorn plant. After a final seven years, the thorn plant turns into a demon (shed).

I don't know what to do with this baraisa. Normally the weird demon stuff in the Gemara, I can give you a sort of plausible rationalist explanation of how the Gemara was doing empiricism with limited information, but here I've got nothing. Life cycle of a demon, eh?

Daf 17

Aggadah on the funeral of King Chizkiyahu, famously righteous in the sense that everyone around him was anti-Torah and he was at least publicly pro-Torah. Very much seems to have been a B'dorotav situation, but anyway the Gemara brings a medrash that he received some sort of exceptional praise at his funeral because of his righteousness, but whatever praise it was, it seems to have been adopted as more or less standard for the funerals of gedolei Torah in the times of the Amoraim, so the Amoraim try to establish that in some way King Chizkiyahu's kavod was greater than the kavod paid to Chachamim in the time of the Amoraim.

Trying to catch up.

Daf 8

The Gemara teaches that if the chasan gives a piece of silk to the kallah, there are problems. Nobody argues that the piece of silk isn't worth more than a perutah- someone in the YCT daf shiur pointed out that silk had just made it to the Middle East in the mid-Amoraic period, so we're talking the most advanced, sought after material in the world. What people are uncertain about is the exact value of a piece of silk.

Based on everything we've learned so far, it's unclear why this would matter. So far we've only established that the kesef needs to be worth at least a perutah. But now we introduce two new concepts: Kesef needs to work like kesef, and the woman's understanding of the value of the kesef is part of the required da'as to effect kiddushin. It's not clear that these are majority positions, but they at least have some force in how we observe kiddushin today.

To the first one: Kesef needs to work like kesef means that if instead of doing kiddushin b'kesef with actual money, you need to use something with an unambiguous value of exchange. Something where you can get it appraised and then people would buy it for the appraised price. Something that could viably substitute for money.

The second point is that the Gemara is concerned about a woman being misled, so if she agreed to kiddushin thinking the silk was worth X dollars, but it was only worth 2/3X, that might call into question the kiddushin.

For both these reasons, if the chasan is going to use silk, they need to get it appraised first. The Gemara tries various tricksier approaches, like saying "I'm giving my kallah this piece of silk, which everyone agrees is worth at least a perutah, but only a perutah worth of it is given for purpose of kinyan." But all of this gets messy, how do you know which part of the silk is the part that effects kinyan? The bottom line is appraisal works. And the practical implication today., as brought down in a Tosafos on this daf, is that we have a tradition that the wedding ring should only be a solid metal ring with no gemstones, because appraising gemstones is complicated and more subjective and it potentially runs afoul of these two new ideas about the value of the kesef, but if it's just a gold ring, you can weigh the ring and have an unambiguous value if you melt down the gold, and nobody's being deceived.

There's also discussion of cases where the kiddushin is sort of conditional on the kesef and there is a problem with the kesef. If the chasan says he's going to give the kallah 100 dinars if she marries him, and then he gives 20 dinars, there's maybe an idea that it's a conditional kiddushin, the kinyan takes place immediately with the 20 dinars, which is more than a perutah, and now he has to give her the remaining 80 dinars eventually or it'll invalidate the kiddushin but they'll have to get a divorce. But if he says he's going to give 100 dinars and then he starts counting out all 100 dinars, and after he reaches 20 dinars either she or he stops and says the kiddushin is off, then that's okay, the kinyan never took place. Even though the same 20 dinars was exchanged, because the counting was all part of an instantaneous process of kinyan that was interrupted.

Daf 9

More discussion of sort of conditional kiddushin. If the chasan gives the kallah kesef and she immediately throws it in the garbage in front of the chasan, that's considered a rejection of the kiddushin. Marriage isn't just the empty performance of a physical ritual, it's also a contractual undertaking that requires a meeting of the minds. But, like, if there's a pause, like, she takes the kesef and then the next day she throws it out, then that's just her doing with the kesef as she pleases, and the kiddushin is still valid because her actions indicated that there was a meeting of the minds and an acceptance of the money.

Then some discussion of shtar kiddushin, which is weird and nobody does it. There are no terms of the shtar, the shtar just needs to say "Harei at mekudeshet li", it's not even clear if it needs to be signed with witnesses, if it needs lishma, all the big requirements of a gett or most shtarot for business purposes. Any terms are part of the tenaim or ketubah. So it's weird.

Whereas the discussion of kesef kiddushin was in terms of the chasan and the kallah making a negotiation, the first discussion of shtar kiddushin is in terms of a baraisa of a father giving over his daughter to the chasan. Not clear if this is significant or not, whether this represents an earlier baraisa, or whether it was more normal for shtar kiddushin to be used in the case of the father giving over his daughter. But even though this is the case, the Gemara points out that the shtar is reversed from how you'd expect it- the chasan writes the shtar and gives it to the father/the kallah, which is not what you'd see if it were a bill of sale for a piece of land. But rather the form is the same as kesef, where the chasan gives it over to the kallah. This sort of suggests a distinction again where a kiddushin is formally distinguishable from a sale of a person, something at least slightly more reciprocal.


Daf 11

Further discussion of biah as it effectuates kiddushin. There's a machlokess about whether biah just jumps straight to nisuin, since, like, I think the whole idea in the Torah is that if a man and woman have sex there is the potential for a child and therefore society's interest in forcing the man and woman to be married and obligated to take care of any potential children kicks in. But this competes against the Gemara's interest in not creating marriages that are too much against a woman's consent, #talmudicfeminism, so the Gemara seems to conceptualize biah as only effecting erusin with an intent that it is biah-for-the-purpose-of-kiddushin. R' Linzer compared it to the modern idea of common law marriage. There are facts on the ground that these people are living together as husband and wife, therefore they are husband and wife, and if they want to separate they require a gett. No legal proceduralism required to effect kiddushin.

R' Linzer discussed how this affects halacha l'maaseh with regards to agunot, particular agunot who were baalei t'shuvah. If they married under circumstances that Orthodox Rabbis considered legally defective (witnesses to kiddushin were not shomrei Torah, wedding was performed according to the laws of Reform Judaism, etc...), some Rabbis want to say that this is sufficient to have a beis din annul the marriage. But biah is a problem. If you say that their kiddushin kesef was defective, you sort of have to argue that none of their post-marital intimacy effected kiddushin because they never had the intention that it would effectuate kiddushin, which is a tough haul.

Daf 4

So one of the methods of effecting Kiddushin is kesef, an exchange of money for the woman's commitment. It can technically be a de minimis amount of money, the value of a perutah, but it's nonetheless actual money. Who gets the money, the woman or her father?

R' Linzer sees this whole debate as being the Gemara grappling with the Kinyan model vs. the Kiddushin model: Is marriage the acquisition of a woman by a man, or is it the union of two souls?

Everybody agrees that if the kiddushin happens when the girl is under 12 years old, her father gets the money, because the kallah in that case is not legally competent to accept the money and her father is acting in loco parentis. Or the father is entitled to the labor of her hands, if we want the awful patriarchal language that the Talmud uses, but I think it amounts to the same thing. If she is 12 years old, she is legally competent to accept a marriage on her own (!), but the Gemara still wants to say that her father gets the money. This seems to accord with the acquisition model. But what the Gemara is stuck on, and takes all of the daf and then apparently more tomorrow, is why the father gets the money. R' Linzer mostly diagnoses this, and I think I agree, to the fact that the rules of marriage is not very explicit in the Torah and so there isn't a good textual basis to decide one way or another.

More Daf Yomi. I stalled a third of the way through Ketubot and I learned a little Gittin without blogging it, but lannamichaels posted that Kiddushin is starting and I was like, yeah, okay, that seems fun. So we'll see. I'm sure it won't all be fun.


Daf 2

The first Mishna makes two big moves: It conceptualizes betrothal as a kinyan, which I think we would most typically translate as an act of taking ownership. And second, it conceptualizes betrothal and divorce as happening by analogous processes.

There are basically two feminist approaches to this text. One is to just outright say that this is the worst kind of patriarchal thinking, that this idea of a husband purchasing and owning his wife is abhorrent and should be rejected. The other is to try to find a broader definition of the word kinyan. So for example, Artscroll is not super invested in this point because Artscroll is not feminist, but they argue that kinyan is used to refer to the enactment of many types of contractual bond, so a better way to understand kinyan here is not that the husband is buying the wife, but rather that that husband is offering certain contractual obligations that both he and his prospective wife will be taking on, and his wife can then choose to accept them through a kinyan process. And I know I am often an apologist for these sort of technical halachic reads that find a more feminist approach while retaining the idea of mesorah, but here I'll say I'm more sympathetic to the rejectionist approach. I don't think Mishnaic marriage quite works for me as is, I think it needs some tweaks. I do like the sort of legalistic framework that marriage is about accepting obligations to your spouse, but I think it ought to be more symmetric in the obligations than it is, and I think the framework of kinyan inherently creates really fraught asymmetries. I feel like Mah Rabu had a great post ages ago about how to think about the traditional commitments of marriage in a fairer way. Aha, i found it! Not necessarily endorsing Mah Rabu's conclusions, just saying that they're worth thinking about.

Oh, maybe we should review the idea of Kiddushin. Jewish traditional marriage is segmented into two parts, the kiddushin and the erusin. They're often translated as betrothal and marriage, but in modern times both take place during the same day as part of the wedding ceremony, because kiddushin isn't really betrothal as people in the West do it, it's a partial marriage commitment, and it's too legally problematic to have a long period between kiddushin and erusin the way we approach things today. Most significantly, you can't 'break an engagement' if kiddushin has been done, you need to go through a full divorce. A better way to understand the split is that Kiddushin enacts the couple's commitment to fidelity (or in a polygynous society, the wife's commitment to fidelity) and Erusin enacts the couple's other marital obligations to each other, the Jewish versions of in sickness and in health and so on, with my and so on doing a lot of heavy lifting. Those obligations were covered in more detail in Masechet Ketubot, which as I said I didn't make it through.

Where does the Mishna get the idea that marriage operates through kinyan, asks the Gemara? By a really gross g'zeirah shavah. It says in the Torah, in context of the discussion of divorce as well as in some other places, that a husband 'takes a wife'. The same verb 'take' appears when Abraham purchases the Cave of Machpelah for Sarah's burial, and there the text refers to it as a kinyan. Therefore here, too, with marriage, there is kinyan. I don't like this, I think the best I can do with it is to find some homiletics on the fact that Kever Machpelah was Avraham's way to honoring his wife, and so some part of the gezeirah shavah could be about how Avraham is fulfilling his final marital obligation by way of this act of kinyan, and kiddushin in some sense is a reminder that going forward, all purchases are for the sake of the marriage and not just the individual. But this is kind of acrobatic homiletics.


The other move I think is more conceptually interesting. The laws of kiddushin are learned in part through the laws of gittin. Just as a get is executed through a shtar, kiddushin can be executed through a shtar, and you see very clearly in the Mishna's conception that they are seen as reciprocal processes, one by which a woman is 'acquired' and one by which she 'acquires herself', to use Artscroll's language, or one process by which a woman participates in a kinyan exchange of obligations and the other in which she is released from those obligations. Like I said earlier, I do like this idea of marriage as a set of legal obligations that people undertake with respect to each other, and I like the idea that it's all about these documents that have a clear mapping to a relationship, that in some sense the documents create a specific reality about a relationship, and then different documents can alter that reality.

In any case, the Mishna teaches that you can effect Kiddushin by kesef, shtar, or biah, but in practice basically everyone today uses kesef- most commonly a ring.

But it can be worth as little as a perutah, which we understand as essentially the smallest possible coin, which admittedly does argue against conceptualizing this as the husband buying the wife. It actually feels more like that thing where a friendly lawyer tells someone to give them a dollar, because that dollar creates an attorney-client relationship in the eyes of the law. Similarly, the perutah creates a husband-wife relationship by analogy to acquisition of land moreso than by actual monetary acquisition.

I dropped Daf Yomi in early August when all the travel started, and I kept meaning to pick it back up but then the chagim hit. Kesuvos ended a few days ago, so I'm left with the choice of picking up Nedarim to stay in synch with the cycle, or trying to finish Kesuvos. I think I'm going to try the Ketubot option. Here's the rest of Perek 2. Also, as usual with Kesuvos, TW: Rape and Misogyny.


Daf 26

When last we stopped, the Gemara was struggling with a concept of scenarios where a court chooses to believe a person testifying to their advantage, because they could have just as easily told a lie that was more advantageous to them. Clearly this needs to be a limited concept, because it's almost equally reasonable that they're telling the less advantageous story precisely because they think it's more believable, or even because they know this principle of law. But in certain circumstances where witness evidence is difficult to obtain, and where the cost of accepting the lie is minimal, the Rabbis held it was okay.

Some of the cases in this chapter have nothing to do with marriage, but some of them do, which is why this chapter is in Ketubot. And in addition to this particular law of witnesses, the Gemara is touching on some other cases where the Rabbis will accept a single witness, or accept types of witnesses it ordinarily wouldn't accept.

On this daf the Rabbis are concerned with cases where a woman is imprisoned by non-Jewish authorities. She is out of view of Jewish life. In ordinary Jewish life, a married woman is forbidden to be secluded in the same room as a man who is not her husband, because it creates a suspicion of adultery. And I think there's sort of an assumption that, living in a Jewish community, seclusion is difficult to manage without some Jew knowing about it. But if she's held captive by non-Jews, we don't know whether or not forbidden seclusion happens, it's all away from the eyes of witnesses who could tell us whether there was forbidden seclusion.

So the Rabbis have to decide whether or not they trust non-Jewish society, and particularly the non-Jewish authorities. Spoiler alert, the Rabbis usually don't trust non-Jewish authorities, but fascinatingly here, they seem more open to trusting them than usual. According to Rav Shmuel bar Yitzhak, Rav creates a construct here of "The Hand of Israel is Over the Nations", which means one of two things:

1. The particular government the Jews are living under is a basically moral government by Jewish understanding, and can be expected, barring some failures of governance, to protect even vulnerable people kept in prison.

or

2. The entire era of the moment is one where all governments basically respect the rule of law and morality according to basic Jewish understanding, and can be expected, barring some failures of governance, to protect even vulnerable prisoners.


Either way is pretty amazing; the second is stunning. And the whole conversation left me extremely curious how modern poskim feel about this halacha, because there are potentially substantial consequences in halacha l'maaseh of any of these rules being in effect, or not being effect, and what posture do we believe American prisons are in, today?


Daf 27

A horrible but horribly romantic story:

Rabbi Zekharia ben HaKatzav was in Jerusalem during the Roman sack. There's a law that when a besieged city is occupied, the women inside are considered to have potentially been raped because soldiers raping is a fact of life, today just as much as in the Rabbinic era. For women married to normal Israelites, this is horrible but poses no halachic problems because non-consensual sex does not count as adultery. But for women married to priests, this is a problem, because as a matter of the law of purity, priests are not allowed to be married to women who have had sex with another man, consensually or not. Now, if the priest's wife has actually been raped, clearly she has to divorce her husband even though this is tragic and horrible. (I guess you could say that this is something she knew when she signed up to be a priest's wife, it's part of the commitment.) But if she hasn't been raped, there is still a presumption that she may have been raped, and unfortunately a woman is not allowed to testify that she hasn't been raped because the Rabbis weren't #believewomen. So she still is now forbidden to be with her husband even though nothing happened.

Rabbi Zekharia ben Hakatzav was a priest, and he was living in Jerusalem during the siege and was with his wife and children and somehow they managed to stay together and stay safe. Afterward, the Sages said that his wife was forbidden to him, but he demurred, insisting that his wife had never left his sight and he knew she had not been raped. They still held him to the letter of the law and told him she was now prohibited to him. But here's the awful but romantic part. He refused to divorce her but built her a house in his courtyard so that he could stay with her but never ever be allowed to be alone in the same room as her. And they lived the rest of their lives together but apart. Awww. So romantic. Also this sucks so much.


Daf 28

The Gemara returns to discussion of how we know somebody who hasn't been acting as a Kohen is actually a kohen. This is a really fascinating discussion not for the legal questions, but because it reveals a lot about how social class was constructed in the society the Talmud is describing. The (Jewish) slaves of Kohanim were allowed to eat terumah, the special offering/tax of first produce given as an entitlement to the Kohanim by all of Israel as recognition of their central role as intercessors on behalf of the people. Why were they entitled to eat Terumah? Presumably because their master was responsible for feeding them, and the Terumah might be the only food they had, so the Torah needed to make sure they would be fed. But there was apparently an importance given to making a distinction between the Kohanim being entitled to the Terumah, and the slaves being able to eat Terumah, so a slave cannot directly receive Terumah as an offering and eat it, they have to be given it by their master specifically.

Daf 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.

Daf 18

If there's a legal document that has a signature on it, but nobody has testified that it's a valid signature that they witnessed, and the person who signed testifies "Yes, that's my signature, but I was forced to sign it." then this seems to fall in the category I wrote about on Daf 17 of a testimony partially against interest that ends up working in your favor, where we accept the testimony provided no witnesses exist who essentially forced you to admit you signed it. If you were going to lie, the easier lie would be "That's not my signature,," it would sidestep all sorts of questions, so we presume you're telling the truth. Since as the Gemara discusses, maybe there's a difference about when we'll allow you to retract your signature because of coercion. Some seem to hold that if someone threatens your physical well-being, you're allowed to sign and then retract, but if someone just says "If you don't sign, I'll destroy your house" or otherwise threatens you financially, you're not allowed to sign falsely, so your retraction isn't valid.

An opinion is cited in the name of R' Meir that even if they threaten your physical well-being, you can't retract and must die rather than sign. It's hard to accept, since the famous standard Talmudic idea is that the only sins you die rather than commit when threatened with death are murder, idolatry, and sexual immorality, but R' Steinsaltz says that the Rishonim seem to think R' Meir's idea is that maybe there are other categories of sin that ordinary people wouldn't be obligated to die for, but tzadikim might be at a higher level, and possibly honest testimony and telling the truth is so central to the life of a tzadik that they are permitted to martyr themself over a threat of false testimony. The Gemara suggests an alternate understanding of R' Meir is that he doesn't allow retraction even in cases of physical threat stam. It's not that he encourages death, he just thinks as a matter of legal procedure that even though we understand that if a person is threatened with physical harm if they don't sign falsely, we still don't allow retraction because it would cause chaos in the legal system.

Daf 12

Actually at the very bottom of 11b, we get the case of Private Benjamin (!) : If a betulah is secluded with her chasan on their wedding night, but her chasan dies before they can consummate the marriage, and she subsequently remarries, is her ketubah written as if she is still a betulah, or is she now considered an almanah? Or if the ketubah is written as if she's a betulah, and the second chasan discovers evidence on the wedding night that she is not a betulah, can the marriage be annulled, or can it be rewritten as if she's an almanah?

I'm mostly just delighted that the Rabbis wrote about Private Benjamin. Who knew Nancy Meyers was a talmud chacham? But also this case gets at really basic ideas about contract law and how they interact with marriage contracts. In other words, I could also make some Elon Musk comparisons here! If the second chasan was misled about the status of his kallah, then by rights the contract should be annulled, just like how if Twitter actively lied about the number of bots on the platform in their SEC filings, in a way that was material to the operation of the business, then Musk can get out of the contract because the contract was signed under false pretenses. But if the second chasan was aware that the kallah had been secluded, and he just assumed that there hadn't been enough time for consummation to take place, then it's on him, he should have known that there was a possibility that has kallah had possibly been intimate with her first chasan. Just like Elon Musk waived his right to due diligence and therefore may be compelled to do specific performance of the purchase of Twitter.


Later there's a fascinating Mishna about the cost of different types of brides. Throughout the masechta so far we have seen two 'marriage prices', where 'marriage price' means the amount written into the Ketubah that a woman would receive if they subsequently divorced, intended to support her. A betulah would be entitled to 200 dinars, an almanah to 100 dinars. The implied idea is that this reflected the fact that a betulah was considered more valuable, whether that be because of the supposed pleasure of being intimate with a betulah (though paying double the marriage price for one night's pleasure hardly seems worth it) or because a betulah is generally younger and has more child-bearing years ahead of her, or because a betulah is considered more pure and the marriage is more holy, I don't know, all the potential reasons are pretty gross. Though I do want to emphasize that I've been saying 'marriage price' for lack of a clearer translation, but this is not a dowry or a payment to the father of the kallah, this is the amount of money the kallah is due in the event of a divorce, so ideally this is not an amount of money anyone is paying anyone. That said, it's still a variable amount of money the chasan is committing to being willing to spend as part of the ketubah, so it's still in some fashion setting a price on his kallah. But the point is, the Talmud to this point has only contemplated these two prices, but now we get more prices and a discussion about the prices relative to each other and what that means. Higher prices for daughters of Kohanim, or daughters of wealthy families, and a complicated push and pull between some idea of market pricing, or some idea of considering the dignity and emotional well-being of women involved in these negotiations- even though the market apparently considered an almanah who is the daughter of a wealthy family to be significantly less valuable than a betulah from the same family, the Gemara insists on maintaining the 2:1 ratio in order to protect the dignity of the almanah.

I think we can imagine several pricing models. The Talmud is not writing in a purely capitalist society so it's not necessarily imagining that the marriage price is, like, 'whatever the market will bear'. The clear communicated intention of the marriage price, as I said, is to provide for the woman in the event she loses her husband and needs to support herself. So one possible model is that the Rabbis did some investigation, determined a reasonable minimum amount of money that a woman would need to support herself for a reasonable amount of time, and said "This is the marriage price." Or another possible model is that they did the same research, made the same determination, and said "This is the minimum marriage price, you can negotiate higher but cannot go lower." Or you can imagine a full free market, where the prices the Talmud is talking about are just suggestions, and if you want to negotiate a lower marriage price the Rabbis advise against it but don't forbid it.

Some of these approaches are less horribly objectifying than others, and there's some ambiguity so to some degree you can choose the option you find least horrifying. And of course in modern western societies prenuptial agreements are still a common part of getting married in many cultural contexts, of course finances are part of the consideration of a marriage, and of course some people think of marriages in mercenary contexts where one potential spouse is more of a 'catch' than another for all sorts of reasons besides whether they will make a good partner in the marriage. So I dunno, at some points I try to get over my horror and just think about the strictly legal implications. But it's hard because every so often you remember that you're talking about people, not animals.

But I also want to say that I know I am wildly inconsistent about when I use Hebrew, Aramaic and English in these posts, but I've been trying whenever possible to use betulah and almanah rather than virgin and widow, precisely because of these issues. The words virgin and widow have a lot of implications in English, and probably there's a lot of overlap with what the Talmud is talking about, but it's not a complete overlap and I feel like because this subject is so fraught and it's so easy to start using dehumanising language, keeping a reminder that the Talmud is not talking about what we mean when we use the English, it's talking about halachic states, is useful.

Daf 13

I'm starting to like Rabban Gamliel, which is one of those indicators that either things have gone wildly off the rails, or we're talking about a different Rabban Gamliel. Wikipedia reminds us that there are 6 Rabban Gamliels, so sometimes it can be hard to be sure. But I'm pretty sure it's the one we usually are annoyed with, the grandfather of Yehudah HaNasi based on context, though it might also be his grandfather (the one who is a Catholic saint).

A few dapim earlier, in a discussion of mourning customs, the Gemara says that it was Rabban Gamliel who set the example of being buried in a modest, low cost burial shroud in a cheap wood coffin, which was a specific attempt to end the process of ever more extravagant burials which made it difficult for poorer families to bury their loved ones. As Rabban Gamliel was one of the richest people in the nation, his example ended the status games and returned the focus in burial to the task of honoring a loved one's legacy with dignity. So I was already liking Rabban Gamliel more than usual.

But here on Daf 13 in discussion of he-said/she-said disputes about the condition of a kallah, the Gemara concludes that Rabban Gamliel was an absolutist: Always believe the woman. This stands in stark opposition to Rabbi Yehoshua, whose position was never believe the woman, even when it was an admission against interest and ordinarily we'd be inclined to put extra weight on her testimony.

To be clear, these are not some sort of bedrock trial principle, that in the face of evidence to the contrary you shoudl believe certain kinds of witnesses. Both Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua prioritize above everything else legitimate testimony of two kosher eidim. If they have proof the woman was lying or telling the truth, that's one thing. It's just, by the nature of this being a private and intimate matter, you're often going to be in the position where you don't have two kosher eidim one way or another. And Rabban Gamliel's position is that it's the woman's body that the testimony is about, so the presumption is that she's the domain expert. And Rabbi Yehoshua's position is, I guess, that it's the man's experience of sex that the testimony is about, so the presumption is he's the domain expert??? Or, there's an interesting statement a bit earlier that I didn't discuss which is that maybe the presumption is that this is always a testimony against the man's interest, because he just brought all his family and friends together for a big wedding feast, A) presumably he really wanted to marry this woman and still does and B) It's going to be really embarrassing to him to immediately divorce her because he thinks she cheated on him, so if he testifies that she was not a virgin, it's got to be because he really truly believes that she cheated on him and is forbidden to him d'oraysa. I think this overlooks really toxic men, but there is certainly some logic to it.

Daf 7 revisited

I skipped over this intentionally on Daf 7, but I decided I wanted to mention it because of lots of stuff I've been reading on the internet. The Gemara discusses an alternate reading of the verse that is used to say that you need a minyan for Sheva Brachos, which is that the verse is proof that nefashot in the womb also sang the Kriat Yam Suf.


I haven't said much about the Dobbs decision, which I think was a bad decision legally and morally, but I've read a lot of things both accurate and inaccurate about Jewish positions on abortion lately and I wanted to clarify some things. From an Orthodox position, we stand somewhere in the middle. Abortion is not the murder of a fetus, but it is a violation of Torah law. That said, since it's not murder, it is not only allowable but required in the case where the life of the mother is threatened. And unlike the mess of uncertainty that's been created by some red state laws, Jewish law is clear that in a safek pikuach nefesh situation, you act as if it were unambiguous pikuach nefesh, nobody wants you hesitating and trying to be machmir when a person's life might be at stake. But as this passage in Daf 7 makes clear, there is some conception that a fetus has a nefesh and that it is in some intermediate stage between having no significance and having all the significance in the world.

I dunno, I feel like it's important to maintain an awareness of the specific facts, and I've seen summaries of Jewish law that make it seem like traditional Judaism is more permissive of abortion than it actually is, and I've seen when some of the more conservative Jewish groups have defended Dobbs that they've been criticized as being un-Jewish. That said, the key point Modern Orthodox people are making now is that more permissive or less permissive, the Orthodox conception of when an abortion is required is clearly different than that of the conservative Christians writing the laws in red states today, and we would much prefer a regime like Roe because it meant that deciding to go forward with an abortion was the province of individual women in consultation with their personal religious and moral and medical authorities.

Of course, there are more liberal Jewish traditions that take from our mesorah instead the idea that since theologically we don't regard the fetus as being a full nefesh, logically the woman's autonomy is the most important fact. From a pluralist perspective, these are valid Jewish traditions, too, and fuck Josh Blackman for saying otherwise.

Daf 8

Continuing discussion of the Sheva Brachot. There's a machloket between Levi and Rav Asi, or machloket is the wrong word, I think, Levi is a Tanna and Rav Asi a late generation Amora, they can't have a machloket, just an apparent discrepancy in practice. Levi recited 5 brachot, Rav Asi recited 6. 6 is actually 7 for our purposes, as I mentioned in my last post the borei pri hagafen was a later addition of the Geonim, which is to say Rav Asi follows the accepted practice, but why did Levi recite 5?

The Gemara seems to think the discrepancy is that Levi considered the first two brachot (the ones we recite second and third) to be one bracha. These brachot both discuss the creation of mankind, in different language- one echoes Bereishit chapter 1, the other Bereishit chapter 2. Famously these two accounts differ in their description of the creation of mankind- one version has man created and then women created from man, the other version has man and woman created together, brooking of many explanations. In the Documentary Hypothesis, this is evidence that the story of creation was assembled from multiple accounts. In Jewish folklore, this is the origin of the idea of Lilith, the woman who predated Eve. But theologically here, the Rabbis seem interested in the question of how we understand the relationship of man and woman as demonstrated through the marriage. Anyway, Levi combines the two brachot, suggesting he considers the two narratives to reflect one act of creation. And Rav Asi doesn't combine, suggesting he thinks they represent two separate creations. But the Gemara rejects the idea of dual creation, and says that actually they all agree it was one creation, but it was a dual stage process and they just disagree about whether to emphasize the first step (when man and woman were one) or the second step (when man and women were separated). Which is to say, in accepting Rav Asi's position we are accepting the idea of man and women as separated entities that are being brought back together by marriage.

Either way, the emphasis of the sheva brachot in these brachot is on the idea of Man and Woman as these really fundamental theological categories, and Marriage as this unification of the two into a partnership. R' Linzer's class took this off into some fairly detailed homiletical ideas about partnership and how separation itself creates a kind of unity, which are pretty ideas but they also buy into this idea of strict gender roles, and I don't know exactly how to reconcile this with the many people I know who find gender roles constricting in a way that is really damaging to their spirits. R' Linzer claimed that Levi's approach feels more consonant with a modern sensibility about gender because it premises a much stronger sense of equality between the (emphatically two) genders, but I think this reflects a more second wave than third wave feminist idea about gender.


Daf 9

Fundamental to Jewish Talmudic law is the idea of two witnesses being required to create a factual reality in court. We do not make a ruling based on the testimony of one person. There are various exceptions, I am not an expert but I generally understand the exceptions to be places where for some reason the witnessing creates a personal imposition of a reality. So for example if I testify that I made a vow that obligates me in some way, the court accepts that testimony because my testimony creates the reality for myself, in a way that doesn't need anyone else witnessing it.

Rabbi Elazar says that if a chasan goes to Beis Din and says that he was with his kallah for the first time last night and she did not appear to be a betulah (but the physical evidence is gone or ambiguous or something), we accept this testimony even though obviously there is no possibility for there to be another witness. The logic seems to be parallel to the idea of the vow- since if a woman committed adultery she is no longer allowed to have sex with her chasan, in effect what the testimony is trying to do is establish a sort of vow that the chasan is forbidding his kallah to himself, so it takes effect.

There are lots of problems with this. One is there is a monetary aspect too- The ketubah settles different amounts of money on the woman in the event that she is not a betulah than if she is a betulah. But possibly we just say that the chasan can prohibit his wife to himself by his own testimony, but to annul the ketubah he still needs two witnesses. Another problem is similar to what I mentioned on the last post- if we can go by the testimony of just the husband, what's with the whole business of blood on the sheet? But we can resolve this similarly- to annul the ketubah, we need two witnesses, and the two witnesses are going to be going by the evidence of the sheet. But the evidence of the sheet can be faked, or it might be missing altogether in the cases where for legitimate reasons a betulah doesn't bleed. So a chasan can still bind himself to not being able to sleep with his kallah. But even the Gemara recognizes this is ridiculous. But what if he's not an expert at sex? it asks. Obviously in this case no consequences attach to his testimony, they conclude. Except emotional consequences.

But the Gemara clearly sees the scenario itself, of a woman claiming to be a betulah but not being one in actuality, as being of serious concern. That's why there's any consequence at all to the testimony of the chasan, that's why the Mishna we started with scheduled weddings for Wednesday. The Gemara lived in a world where if a chasan discovers his kallah was not a betulah, and he shrugged and said I don't care, I love her anyway, I'm not seeking the Beis Din, then there were real problems this could pose. Because what if she really were an adulterer? I think there's metaphysics behind this, similar to eating non-kosher meat. Remaining in an improper relationship has metaphysical consequences not just for the couple, but for their whole community because at a metaphysical level the whole structure of the community is built on the purity of the family structure. So in spite of the aforementioned emotional consequences, the Rabbis didn't want to make it too hard to speak up if there was a spiritual stain on a marriage.

I think it's also possible, if tricky, to make an argument that holding the chasan to his testimony is a way of protecting the kallah- she may think she wants to, but she really shouldn't want to continue being married to a man who would doubt her on her wedding night. I'm not really holding my hat on this argument, though.

Daf 4

Actually toward the end of Daf 3 the Gemara discusses the idea that the Mishna's rule of observing weddings for betulot on Wednesdays was eventually given up and weddings sometimes scheduled on Tuesdays because having a standard date for weddings made them susceptible to non-Jewish rulers coming to towns specifically on Wednesdays and insisting on their right to prima nocta. The Gemara says that actually women are allowed to submit rather than die, which is surprising since arayot are not covered under the rule that pikuach nefesh exempts one from mitzvot, but maybe this isn't exactly an araya, or maybe the idea is that the rapist has power over you so he may kill you anyway, or maybe there's something about the way in which women are obligated in mitzvot differently, I don't know. But in any case the Gemara recognizes that in this circumstance a woman might choose to die anyway rather than submit (It calls them "tz'nuot", women who are particularly modest, but I think we can stipulate that any woman in this horrible circumstance might make any possible choice and be considered reasonable) so it considers it a case of sakana* allowing the change in date (Bearing in mind that the original enactment was d'rabbanan and horrific to start with, as I covered in my last post). So by changing to variable wedding dates they made it much harder for the ruler to try to impose prima nocta.

An alternate explanation of the idea of unforeseen circumstances leading to rescheduling the wedding from Wednesday is that it has to do with the case where unfortunately the chasan or kallah's parent dies immediately before the wedding, and they have to negotiate shivah rules along with the wedding. This is the bulk of Daf 4's discussion. Do you still go ahead with the wedding? Do you try to do the legal part of the wedding but defer the celebration? Do you postpone the wedding?

Amazingly, the Gemara's answer is practical and economical. If the feast was prepared and it's too late to stop it without going to waste, you have the feast and enact the wedding. If the feast is not fully prepared, to the point where one could resell the food and not lose money, you postpone the wedding. If you do go ahead and enact the wedding, you keep the body of the deceased in the house until after the wedding because technically mourning doesn't start until that happens. The husband immediately after consummation leaves his wife for the week. Though the sheva brachos are observed, and shiva is deferred until after, private mourning customs are adopted immediately.

I say amazingly because it strikes you, as some of the people in R' Linzer's shiur point out, that the first question on one's mind if you've lost your father the day before your wedding may not be whether you should carry on with your wedding or not. You may in fact be overcome with grief and unable to think clearly. When my grandfather died on a Friday, I wrote about how utterly wrongfooting it felt to not observe the rituals of mourning until Sunday... I can't entirely imagine what it would be like experientially to defer your observance of shiva for a week, in order to celebrate your marriage.

Daf 5

Both Daf podcasts I listen to skip this daf. Sometimes that happens because the daf fell on Shabbat the year it was recorded, but I suspect the content may have something to do with it being skipped in this case. I'm tempted to skip discussion of this page, too. But I feel like for that reason, I should discuss it.

Caveat that I am not an expert at human anatomy. But the point is, neither were the Rabbis.


A baraisa says that one is forbidden to do nisuin on Shabbat (Friday night) or motzei Shabbat (Saturday night). Why? They go back and forth a few times on motzei Shabbat but ultimately conclude it's a concern that one might be mechalel Shabbat in preparing for the wedding. You want to impress your guests, you want to have a freshly schechted animal for the wedding feast, so you schecht an animal and you don't wait until sundown. Perhaps you don't, like, massively cheat, but maybe you do it in the time disputed between the Rabbis about when exactly Shabbos ends. So fine, that explains motzei Shabbos.

Why can't you do nisuin on Shabbat? I mean, I would expect you to say that it's because you usually can't make kinyan on Shabbat, right? Easy, straightforward, and consistent with the idea that marriage is a legal contract. I sort of kid, there's nothing straightforward about the rules of kinyan and maybe there's some important reason why you could complete this sort of contract on Shabbat that I'm not aware of because there's a whole lot of Torah I don't know. Oh! I googled and you can make kinyan on Shabbat if it's for a mitzvah, and the daf suggests that the Rabbis seemed to consider nisuin a mitzvah. I guess p'ru u'r'vu.

But anyway, for whatever reason, that's not where the Gemara goes. No. They seem to believe that for some reason, the act of having penetrative sex with a betulah is melacha, but they're not quite sure why because the anatomy is confusing to them. The question they ask is, well, is the blood of the hymen something that is contained in blood vessels in the hymen that are broken by the act of penetration, or is it like menstrual blood, coming from inside the uterus or vagina but not originating in a wound?

Um...

Um...

Yeah.

So the Gemara's not so clear on the anatomy.

And of course the blood is not actually a necessary result of first time penetrative sex, both because sometimes the hymen has already been damaged by other activities and may not bleed, and because sometimes first time penetrative sex does not damage the hymen because of the way it is positioned or structured, because humans are a glorious tapestry and our bodies do not always obey the same rules. But that's besides the point, because as I understand it, for many people, there is some amount of blood from the first penetrative sex. So setting aside the fact the virginity is a ridiculous made up concept and there is the risk of real damage to relationships from having incorrect information about these biological processes, there is some physical reality that halachic deciders knowledgeable about female anatomy could potentially make halacha for. But these Rabbis are definitely not the people we want making decisions about womens' bodies!

Daf 6

Hilariously, the Gemara reports this weird finger-pointing about who forbids sex with a betulah on Shabbat. Rav says "We have no problem, it's Shmuel who forbids it." Shmuel says "We have no problem, it's Rav who forbids it." Worth mentioning again, the Gemara is the transcription centuries later of oral teachings from a widely geographically dispersed area, it's keenly aware that there may be mistakes or omissions in the oral transmission and a big part of the project of the Savoraim was sorting out disagreements that are not per se arguments, just discrepancies between traditions.

La di da, skipping the next part entirely, la di da, pay no attention to the twelve year old girl discussion, la di da.

So then the Gemara tries to figure out how it can possibly be permitted, since according to the theory that it's blood vessels in the hymen being ruptured, that's a clear violation of the prohibition on making a cut in someone's body on Shabbos (the same prohibition as schechting an animal) and according to the theory that it's blood internal to the uterus or vagina, you're still creating an opening and that's probably a melacha too. (Boneh, says R' Linzer, okay, sure)

One remarkable theory in the name of Rabba is that on Shabbat, one is permitted to have sex with a betulah provided they have penetrative sex carefully in order to not damage the hymen, which the Gemara contends is possible if men are trained in how to do this. This is remarkable, because if this is the case then the whole theory of virginity that yichud rooms are based on makes no sense, as Rava bar Rav Ḥanan says. Why do we have all sorts of testimony about the presence or absence of blood on a sheet, if the answer for its absence could simply be "We had the kind of penetrative sex that doesn't damage the hymen."? Abaye's answer is fascinating. He makes a distinction between cases when the man is trying to avoid damaging the hymen, because he would be mechalel Shabbos, version a case where the man is trying to claim that an absence of blood proves that his new wife has committed adultery in order to annul the marriage. In the one case, there's no need for witnesses or testimony, the man doesn't care about his wife's virginity as an object to take, he's just happy to have a wife who is a wonderful woman who will be his partner. In the other case, the man is terrible and we need to protect the wife from abuse of process by having a legal system that must presumably be designed to make it difficult for a man to make claims about the virginity of his wife.

This is precisely what I meant in my opening discussion... very often you find that when you dig into these utterly horrifying Gemaras, that buried a couple layers down in confusingly convoluted ways is an extreme awareness of the ways in which toxic masculinity operates and how to operate within its contours to try to protect women from its abuses. These Gemaras are still utterly horrifying, don't get me wrong. And for all the awareness of men acting badly, there's rarely an overt effort to just reject toxic masculinity.

And all this to add to R' Linzer repeatedly makes the point in discussing these dafs that besides the nonsense anatomy, there's an extremely male oriented perspective here in terms of the halachic questions. Nobody is asking whether a betulah having sex on Shabbat is mechalel Shabbat, the question is about whether the things that her chasan does TO her are mechalel Shabbat, and she has this wholly passive role as the person that things are done to, not a person who is actually doing any act. R' Linzer keeps calling it treating her as an object, but that doesn't quite feel right. It's not that she's considered an object that various sex acts are performed on, it's that she is participating in the acts but her actions have no halachic consequence.



*Just repeating for newcomers: The amount that I use Hebrew and Aramaic in my Daf Yomi posts is variable depending on my mood, if there's any words you don't understand you can always feel free to ask. Also I do Ashkenazi or Sepharadi pronunciation at random, ignore me. Also, as lannamichaels points out, the tractate is called Ketubot, but I promise I will keep mixing up singular and plural and Ashkenaz and Sepharadi spellings.