Daily Talk
After ten childless years a court has to decide whose body is the reason, and the Rambam hands the verdict to the wife, not out of compassion but because she can feel what her husband cannot. Then the same halacha takes it straight back from her the moment she admits she is not sure. And then a chapter that has spent seventeen rulings counting children, years and miscarriages puts the ledger down and legislates a tone of voice. Why does a chapter this arithmetical close on how a man is permitted to speak in his own house?
Neither Sad Nor Angry
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About This Talk
Chapter 15 opens by permitting a woman to release her husband from his conjugal obligation only where he has already fulfilled the mitzvah of being fruitful and multiplying, places that mitzvah on the husband alone from the age of seventeen and counts a man who reaches twenty unmarried as having transgressed, and then exempts a man absorbed in Torah study who fears that supporting a wife would cost him his learning, along with a man like ben Azzai who never marries at all, provided his natural inclination does not overcome him. It fixes the count at one son and one daughter, disqualifies a son who is a saris and a daughter who is an aylonit, admits grandchildren in place of children where they are male and female and descend from two of his children, credits a convert with children fathered before his conversion and denies the credit to a freed slave, since a slave has no paternal lineage. It then rules that a man married ten years without children must divorce his wife and pay her ketubah or marry a woman fit to bear children, that he is beaten with a rod until he does, and that no arrangement to remain together with witnesses is accepted from either of them. It assigns the affliction according to whether he releases semen as one shoots an arrow, accepts the wife's word against her husband because she can feel what he cannot make out, and withholds the essential requirement from a woman who says she does not know. It strikes out from the ten years any time lost to an extended business trip, illness or imprisonment, restarts the count from the day of a miscarriage, believes her about miscarriages because no woman makes herself out to be barren, limits a woman who has been divorced twice on this ground from marrying a third husband, grants a wife who demands the divorce her request while limiting her to the essential requirement alone, and instructs a court facing such a claim to protract a compromise rather than compel her or call her rebellious. And it closes by binding a man who has already fulfilled the mitzvah not to desist while he remains able, since whoever adds a soul to Israel has built an entire world, forbidding him ever to compel his wife and requiring conversation and a spirit of joy, and commanding him to honor her more than his own person, to cast no superfluous fear over her, and to speak with her gently, being neither sad nor angry.