It Takes Witnesses to Bind and None to Let Go

About This Talk

Chapter 7 works through conditional kiddushin and shows at every turn that a condition is honored exactly to the letter and confined exactly to the letter, opening with a father whose silence is a refusal where the condition was that he consent and a consent where the condition was that he not object, and with a court that instructs a father to declare his refusal so that a widow will not be bound to yibbum, then ruling that a man's own denial of his wealth is not accepted against witnesses because he may be making difficulties for her, that undertaking to show two hundred zuz or land fit to sow a kor requires showing what belongs to him rather than borrowed money or a rented field, and that clefts ten handbreadths deep are struck from the measure of that land when they stand full of water and counted into it when they are dry. It then narrows the two conditions men actually made, holding that only vows against meat, wine and colored ornaments void a condition that she is bound by no vows while any other vow leaves her consecrated even where he protests, importing the published list of blemishes that disqualify a priest and adding those particular to a woman so that a private distaste is not a blemish, leaving the status doubtful where a man stipulated nothing and a blemish or one of the three vows emerges, and setting the asymmetry by which a sage's release of her vows rescues the kiddushin while a physician's healing of her blemishes does not, though a man who stipulated about himself is rescued by both, since there is no shame for a man in a blemish that is gone. It closes on time and on acts, ruling that thirty days lapsed without the promised payment void the kiddushin, that a second man who consecrates her inside a waiting period takes her permanently, that a hundred men using the doubled formula all owe her a divorce, that an impossible condition simply falls away, that an agent who adds, alters or omits a condition accomplishes nothing, that a retraction an instant after kiddushin is worthless, and that a condition cancelled before the bride alone with no witnesses is wholly cancelled, so that a man who attached a condition and then brought her to the chuppah without mentioning it obliges her to receive a divorce though the condition was never fulfilled.