Daily Talk
A man betroths a woman with a condition and leaves out the second half of the sentence. Not the substance, the second half. He says what happens if she pays him and never says what happens if she does not. The Rambam rules that he is married and she owes him nothing at all. Why should an unfinished sentence cost a man his condition and not his marriage?
The Half He Never Said Aloud
Loading...
About This Talk
Chapter 6 establishes that kiddushin made on a condition are binding when the condition is met and void when it is not, whoever stipulated it, and then lays down the four rules that govern every conditional agreement in Torah, in betrothal, divorce, commercial transactions and business law alike, requiring the stipulation to be twofold, to place the positive before the negative, to be spoken before the deed it governs is completed, and to be possible to fulfil, with the consequence of any failure being not that the deed fails but that the condition is nullified as if it had never been made, so that the woman is consecrated immediately and owes nothing, which the Rambam then illustrates case by case with two hundred zuz and a dinar placed in her hand, ruling void a stipulation made after the deed, one stated only in the positive, one that puts the negative first, and one conditioned on ascending to the heavens, which is read not as severity but as teasing, and rejecting the later geonim who limited the doubling requirement to kiddushin and divorce, since the Sages derived it from the condition made with the tribes of Gad and Reuven. The chapter then measures what a person may be asked to promise, holding valid a condition that she eat forbidden fat because she may decline and remain unconsecrated, confining the rule about stipulations contradicting the Torah to a man seizing a right the Torah withheld or shedding an obligation it imposed, and splitting such a stipulation in half so that provisions and garments may be waived as financial while conjugal rights may not, before ruling that a condition requiring her to bring her father or brother into sin is as impossible as ascending to the heavens, since causing others to transgress is outside her capacity, while a condition that she get a third party to sell a courtyard binds, because she can pay him and no sin is involved. It closes on timing, ruling that a conditional betrothal takes effect only when the stipulation is fulfilled, so that a second man may acquire her in the interval, unless the words from this time onward were used, which makes the betrothal retroactive and, like the wording al menat, lifts the requirements of doubling and of stating the condition before the deed, leaving only possibility standing.