The Ornaments He Cannot See

The Hook

A man goes abroad on business and does not come back when he said he would. The court steps in and sells off enough of his property to keep his wife fed, clothed and housed, and it does this without any argument at all, because the obligation does not go on hold when the man does. Then the Rambam stops the allowance in one place only. She is not granted money for ornaments. The reason he gives is blunt. She does not have a husband present for whom to make herself attractive.

Read that on its own and it sounds like the whole chapter is about a man's eyes. The clothes, the colored cloths for her head, the eye makeup, the rouge, all of it accounted for as an investment in how she looks to him, and suspended the moment he leaves the room.

And then the very next sentence. If her husband loses his mental faculties, or becomes a deaf mute, she is granted an allotment for ornaments.

He is in the house. That is the only thing that changed. He cannot follow a conversation, cannot say her name, will not notice one way or the other what she has done with her face. And the law that suspended the ornaments for a man temporarily in Alexandria restores them in full for a man sitting in the next room who has lost the capacity to look at her.

Something is wrong with the first reading. Why should a woman be funded to make herself beautiful for a man who cannot see it?

Fifty Zuz, and Then No Number at All

The chapter starts with an amount. Fifty zuz a year in clothing, which the Rambam converts for his own readers into six and a quarter dinarim of pure silver, new garments in the rainy season, the same ones worn into the summer once they have gone soft, and last year's frayed ones become hers outright. A belt, a cap and new shoes at every festival.

Two sentences later he takes the number away. When does the above apply? In that period, and in the Land of Israel. In other ages, and in other countries, there is no fixed amount at all, because clothing is expensive in one place and cheap in another. What survives is a principle rather than a figure. He owes her what a married woman in that country wears, at the low end of it.

That is a remarkable thing to do to your own halacha four lines after writing it. The figure stays on the page as a specimen, a picture of what the obligation looked like once, and the obligation itself is handed over to whatever the neighbors are wearing this year.

Then the rest of the household. A bed and its bedding. A mat to sit on. A pot, a plate, a cup, a bottle. A rented dwelling of four cubits by four, with a yard of her own outside it and a latrine nearby. And ornaments, so that she should not become unattractive in his eyes, which is the first time the chapter names the purpose out loud.

All of that is the floor, and the floor is described as belonging to a poor man in Israel. A wealthy man is measured against himself. If silk and embroidery and gold are what would suit him, he is compelled to provide them. And if he cannot manage even the poor man's minimum, he is compelled to divorce her, and the ketubah becomes a debt he carries until he can pay it. Nobody is permitted to keep a wife on less than the floor.

Every Vow Comes With a Clock

Then the chapter changes register and starts timing things.

A husband takes a vow forbidding his wife any ornament. If the couple are poor they may stay married for a year under that vow. If they are wealthy, a month. Past that he must get the vow annulled or divorce her and pay the ketubah. The poorer household is given twelve times as long, and the reason is not indulgence toward the poor man. It is that among people with nothing, a year without ornaments is closer to ordinary life, and among the wealthy it is a public humiliation within four weeks.

A vow forbidding the bathhouse runs one week in a large city and two weeks in a village. A vow forbidding shoes runs three days in a village and one day in a large city. Notice that the geography reverses between the two. Bathhouses are everywhere in a city and the deprivation bites immediately, while a village woman was not going often in any case. Shoes are the opposite. A village is mud and stone and three days is the most anybody could ask, while in a paved city going barefoot is a spectacle and the clock runs out in a day. The Rambam is not applying a formula. He is imagining the street.

Then the sieve. If he vows that she may not lend or borrow the things neighbors always lend and borrow, a sifter, a sieve, a hand mill, an oven, he must annul it or let her go with her ketubah, because his vow gives her a bad name in the neighborhood. And then the inversion. If she takes an oath not to lend or borrow those same things, or not to weave attractive garments for her sons where the local women do, he may divorce her without paying the ketubah, because her oath gives him a reputation as a miser.

The same sieve. The same closed door. The money moves in opposite directions depending on whose mouth the vow came out of. Whoever cut the household off from the street pays for it.

A Woman Is Not Confined in a Jail

The middle of the chapter is where the Rambam writes the sentence people quote and the sentence people fight about, and he writes them one after the other.

In a place where women do not go out with only a cap, he must buy her a veil, the cheapest kind if he is poor and something befitting him if he is not, so that she can go to her father's house, to a house of mourning, and to a wedding. Every woman must be able to visit her father and to go to a mourner and to a celebration as an act of kindness to the people she knows, because they will do the same for her. And then the reason, which reads like a door being kicked open. For a woman is not confined in a jail, from which she cannot come and go.

And then, in the same breath, that it is unbecoming for a woman to be constantly out, and a husband should keep her from it, and once or twice a month as needed is enough, because there is nothing more beautiful for a woman than to sit in the corner of her home, all the glory of the king's daughter being within.

Both sentences are his. What the rest of the chapter does is enforce the first one with money. A vow keeping her from her father's house buys him a month if her father lives in town and until the next festival if he lives elsewhere, and after that he pays. A vow keeping her from a house of mourning or a wedding gets no grace period at all. He annuls it or he pays, and the Rambam says why in words he has not used before. This is like placing her in jail and locking her in. The only escape is a factual one. If he claims there were indecent people at that particular gathering, and it is investigated and found to be so, he may keep the vow.

The last part of the chapter widens out to whole countries. Canaan, Egypt, Yemen, Ethiopia, Babylonia, and inside the Land of Israel three separate lands, Judea, Transjordan and the Galilee. A man who married a woman from another land may make her follow him home, because that was the unstated condition of the marriage. A man who married in his own land may move her from city to city and village to village but not from a city to a village or a village to a city, since each has advantages the other lacks. And then the ruling that catches everyone. He may not move her from pleasant surroundings to unpleasant ones, and he may not move her from unpleasant surroundings to pleasant ones either. An upgrade is not permitted without her consent, because in a better neighborhood she will have to keep herself and check herself so as not to be reckoned the shabby one on the street.

The Unifying Principle

Every ruling in the chapter turns out to be about the same thing, and it is not comfort and it is not affection. It is standing. What a person looks like to the people who see her every day, and what it costs to take that away.

That is why an improvement can be a harm. A woman moved from a modest quarter into a prosperous one has not been given anything, she has been entered into a competition, and the Rambam names the mechanism precisely. She must care for and check herself there, so that she will not be considered inferior. That is why a vow about a sieve is expensive. A house that neither borrows nor lends has quietly announced something about itself to the whole lane. And that is why the shoes clock runs out in one day in a city and not for three days in a village. Being seen barefoot is one thing on a paved street and another on a farm road.

Which turns the opening problem inside out. The ornaments were never for the husband's eye. When he travels, the allowance stops because the reason for that particular expense has gone with him, and there is no reason to charge his estate for something nobody is asking for. When he loses his mind, the expense is restored, and the only person left to restore it for is her.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that a soul may come down into this world and live seventy years for the sake of doing one favor for another person, once, in material things. Not a spiritual favor. A material one. This chapter is written in that key throughout. It is not interested in a man's feelings about his wife. It is interested in whether there is a pot, whether there is a latrine, whether there is a veil she can put on to go to a wedding, and it treats every one of those as a claim she can enforce in court.

The Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya that the love a person has for a fellow only becomes real when the body and its wants are made secondary, because as long as the body leads, two bodies have nothing in common. The way that shows up in law is unglamorous. A household in which each party can be compelled to fund the other's dignity is a household where the bodies have been demoted. Nobody has to feel anything. The sieve gets lent.

Modern Application

The year has three days left, and this is an odd chapter to receive.

Nothing in it is about what anybody intended. A man who forbids his wife the bathhouse may have had a perfectly good reason in his own mind. A woman who swears off lending the hand mill may have been wronged by a neighbor. The Rambam does not ask. He looks at what the vow does to the household's standing in the street, and he starts the clock. One week. Two weeks. Three days. One day.

Most of the damage anybody does in a year works that way. It is not in the deeds a person would confess to. It is in the doors that quietly stopped being used, the invitations that stopped coming because a thing was said once, the small withdrawals from other people's lives that were never announced and never explained. Nobody meant a policy. A policy formed anyway.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe pressed the phrase beis ne'eman b'Yisrael, a faithful home, and refused to let it stay abstract. A home is faithful in the same way a wall is straight, which is to say measurably, in the ordinary furniture of the thing. Who comes in. Who is welcome. Whether the neighbors can borrow the oven. Whether the woman of the house can go to a wedding.

So the question this chapter puts to the week is not what you did. It is what your house currently looks like from the street, and which of the doors that used to be open have closed without anyone deciding to close them.

The Closing

The chapter ends by dissolving all of its own rules at once. None of the geography holds against the Land of Israel. A woman may be compelled to move there from anywhere, out of a pleasant place into an unpleasant one, out of a Jewish neighborhood into a gentile one. Nobody leaves, in either direction, for any improvement whatsoever. And if he wants to go and she refuses, he divorces her with nothing. If she wants to go and he refuses, he divorces her and pays in full. The same rule again for Jerusalem.

Which means the whole careful apparatus of standing and appearance and what the neighbors will say has a ceiling over it. It governs everything except the one move that is worth being the shabby one on the street for.

A woman is not confined in a jail, from which she cannot come and go. That is the line the Rambam reaches for when a husband tries to keep his wife away from a house of mourning, and it is the standard the rest of the chapter is quietly measured against, right down to the eye makeup he keeps funding for a man who can no longer see. Three days from now the year turns and a judgment opens on a household rather than on a ledger. So what has your house been closed to this year, and who stopped being able to come and go?