Daily Talk
A man who marries and writes nothing down has still taken on ten obligations and received four rights, and the Rambam says there is no need to state them explicitly. A husband may agree with his wife to waive her food and her clothing, both of which the Torah itself requires of him, and the agreement holds. He may not waive the one Torah obligation in the list that involves no money at all. Why does a chapter that lets almost everything be negotiated draw its hard line in the one place where nothing is being bought?
The Contract Nobody Wrote
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About This Talk
Chapter 12 sets out the whole standing structure of a marriage, ruling that a man who weds any woman at all incurs ten responsibilities and receives four privileges, that three of the ten come from the Torah as subsistence, clothing and conjugal rights while the seven others are conditions of the marriage contract fixed by the court, covering medical treatment, redemption from captivity, burial, maintenance from his estate, her right to remain in his home while she stays a widow, subsistence for her daughters until they are consecrated, and the right of her sons to inherit her marriage contract on top of their share, and that the four privileges are the fruits of her labor, whatever ownerless object she finds, the profits of her property in her lifetime and his inheritance of it if she dies first. It pairs each right against a duty, setting her labor against her subsistence, his redemption of her against his benefit from her property and her burial against his inheritance, and then breaks the symmetry by ruling that she may decline subsistence and refuse to work while he may not propose the same exchange, lest she be unable to earn. It rules that all of this holds whether or not anything was written and even where no contract was drawn at all, that a stipulation accepted by the other party binds, and that three matters cannot be reached by any stipulation, namely conjugal rights, the fundamental requirement of the marriage contract and his inheritance, since a condition against conjugal rights is a condition against the Torah in a matter that is not financial, since a contract written for less than two hundred zuz for a virgin or one hundred for a non virgin makes the relations promiscuous even where the reduction is disguised as a receipt, and since the Sages reinforced the law of inheritance with the force of a Torah statute. It then fixes her subsistence at bread for two meals a day by the standard of her town with the local staple grain, legumes, vegetables, oil for food and for the lamp, fruit, a little wine where women drink it, three meals with meat or fish on the Sabbath and a silver me'ah for her own needs, raises the allotment to match a wealthy husband and compels a husband too poor for bread to divorce her while remaining in debt for her contract, permits him to eat apart from her provided he eats with her on Friday night, forbids a priest to feed her entirely from terumah, compels maintenance for children until they are six and publicly denounces a father who refuses beyond that age as crueler than an impure bird while expropriating his property for charity if he has means, grants a departed husband three months before the court sells his property for her subsistence on the presumption that a man does not leave without provisioning his house, sides against the geonim in not requiring a departed man's wife to produce her contract while requiring it of a widow, and rules that a vow which bars her from any benefit or from a single species of produce gives him thirty days before he must divorce her and pay, even where the vow concerns food she never tasted, and that a husband who merely allowed his wife's own vow to stand pays her contract in full because the option to annul it was his.