Sunday, September 20, 2026
What Then Can She Do
Ishut 24|Sefer Nashim
The Hook
Four Words in the Middle of a Code
A man marries a woman, and it later emerges that the Torah forbids her to him. Not through his fault and not through hers. He did not know. She did not deceive him. The verse standing between them was there before either of them was born.
The Rambam rules that she does not receive the fundamental sum of her ketubah. Then he rules that she does receive every coin her husband added to it on his own. And then he does something a legal code almost never does. He gives the reason from inside her position.
As long as she desired to maintain the relationship, he writes, she kept her part of the agreement. She is willing to continue. It is the Torah that deems her to be forbidden. What then can she do?
Four words, buried in the third halacha of a chapter about marriages coming apart, and they are the hinge of the whole thing. Chapter twenty four is one sustained question, asked over and over about different women standing in different ruins. Whose deed made this impossible? It is the chapter learned on the afternoon before Kol Nidrei.
Halachot 1 to 6
Whose Deed Made It Impossible
The chapter opens with a man who knew. He married an aylonit, a woman who cannot bear children, knowing her condition, and since he has no children by another wife he is compelled to divorce her. And yet the financial arrangements that govern other women govern her. She receives the fundamental requirement of the ketubah and all its provisions, and her husband holds the privileges any husband holds. The outcome does not change the accounting, because he walked in with his eyes open.
Then the same marriage with one fact removed. He did not know. Or she turned out to be forbidden to him by a negative commandment carrying no death penalty. Now she is not entitled to the fundamental sum, nor to any of the provisions, nor to sustenance in his lifetime or after it. The couple are forced to separate, and the produce he ate from her property is not taken back from him.
But she keeps the extra amount he committed to beyond that sum, and the Rambam explains both halves at once. The fundamental sum was instituted so that a man should not treat divorce as a light matter, and since he never knew what he was entering, that instrument has nothing to grip. The addition is different. He obligated himself to it willingly, in consideration of a marriage she upheld. She gave what she agreed to give. She would continue if she could. It is the Torah that forbids her.
What then can she do. And the Rambam adds the sentence that makes the principle exact: it is not her deeds that cause her to be forbidden after the marriage, because she was forbidden beforehand.
The fourth halacha runs the distinctions to their edges. A sh’niyah, forbidden by Rabbinic decree, is treated as unrecognized in every case, because the Sages reinforced their own enactments. But a man who knowingly married a woman forbidden by a negative commandment damaged his resources willingly, so she keeps her full ketubah, as does a woman forbidden by a positive commandment whether he knew or not, that prohibition being light. Both are supported from his estate, and he must reimburse every benefit he drew from her property.
Then two women the law reads in opposite directions. A minor who dissolves her marriage through mi’un forfeits the fundamental sum, since the Sages instituted her marriage for her benefit and she is declining it, but she keeps the addition, because her husband granted it knowing she could walk away. And a woman who commits adultery receives nothing at all. The reason is a single clause, the mirror image of the one given three halachot earlier: it is her own deeds that cause her to become forbidden to her husband.
Halachot 7 to 10
The Dowry Follows the Fault
The same fault line runs through the property she brought with her. Whatever of her dowry is still intact, she takes when she leaves, and this applies, the Rambam says, even to a woman who committed adultery. Nothing she did forfeits the chair that is still a chair. The questions begin only with what is gone or ruined.
In the ordinary case the husband answers for the nichsei tzon barzel, whose value he guaranteed, while for the nichsei m’log, which stayed hers while he ate its produce, she bears the loss if something is stolen.
And then the inversion, the most surprising ruling in the chapter. Where the woman was an aylonit or forbidden by a negative commandment and the husband did not recognize her status, everything turns over. Whatever was lost, stolen or damaged from the tzon barzel, he does not pay for, because she gave him permission to use it and his acceptance of responsibility rested on false premises. But whatever was lost or stolen from the m’log, he does pay for. The Rambam flags it himself: this is the opposite of all other women. Since the bond was never binding, he never acquired the right to use her m’log, and a man who holds what was never his answers for it.
A woman who ends her marriage by mi’un receives no compensation for anything destroyed, because the court gave her husband the right to use that property and made him liable only if he divorced her. An adulteress receives nothing for what was lost either, and the Rambam extends that to a woman who violates the faith of Moses, one who violates the Jewish faith, and one divorced on a scandalous report.
Halachot 11 to 23
Where the Law Refuses to Blame Her
Three categories have just been named, so the chapter defines them, and what is striking is how much of the definition is spent building fences on her side. Violating the faith of Moses means going out to the marketplace with her hair uncovered, taking vows or oaths she does not keep, relations while in the niddah state, or feeding her husband food he may not eat, including produce that was not tithed. And the Rambam is precise about how such a thing would ever be known. She named the sage or the neighbor who had tithed the produce or ruled a stain pure, and afterwards that person denied it.
Violating the Jewish faith means the customs of modesty that Jewish women practice, and the Rambam names six: the marketplace or an alley open at both ends with her hair under a handkerchief but no veil; a rose worn on forehead or cheek in the manner of wanton women; spinning in the market with her forearms shown; frivolity with young men; demanding intimacy loudly enough for the neighbors; and cursing her husband’s father in his presence.
And then, immediately, the exemptions. Ezra ordained that a woman wear a belt at home as an expression of modesty, and if she does not wear it she has not violated the faith of Moses and does not forfeit her ketubah. If she goes from courtyard to courtyard with her hair covered only by a handkerchief, she has not violated the Jewish faith. Two practices named, both lifted out of the category of forfeiture before anyone can use them.
The procedural fence is higher still. She must have been warned before she acted, and the warning and the act must both have been seen by witnesses, before she loses anything. Take the hard case: she transgressed privately, her husband warned her without witnesses, and she transgressed again. He claims she acted after a warning; she denies the act, or the warning. The Rambam rules that he must pay her ketubah in full if he divorces her, after she takes an oath. Her word plus an oath outweighs his certainty.
The scandalous report is the one case needing no warning. Witnesses saw something deeply indecent without seeing adultery: a perfume seller leaving a courtyard where she was alone, two people emerging together from a dark place, a room entered one after the other and locked. If the husband then wishes to divorce her, she does not receive her ketubah.
And then the sixteenth halacha, easy to read past. In all three categories the husband is not compelled to divorce her; if he wishes to remain married, he remains married. She still holds no ketubah, and the Rambam gives the reason without softening it: the ketubah was ordained so that a man should not regard divorce as a light matter, and the Sages were legislating for modest Jewish women.
The last halachot deal with adultery itself, and they are built out of restraint. A man who saw it himself, or was told by a relative he genuinely trusts, must divorce her, because he believes it, and he must pay her ketubah in full, because he holds no evidence a court would take. A woman who says she acted willingly is not believed, though her admission costs her the money. No court compels a divorce short of two witnesses to the act.
And then the ruling that decides the whole chapter. A woman who committed adultery unknowingly, or who was raped, remains permitted to her husband, from the verse in the passage of the sotah specifying that she was not forced. Women seized by robbers are treated as captives who were forced. And the Rambam goes further than he has to: a woman forced at the outset is permitted even if she eventually consented, because her nature overcame her, and originally she was taken against her will.
One exception, and it has nothing to do with her. A priest’s wife who was raped or acted unwittingly is forbidden to him, because of the added sanctity legislated for a priest, and the Rambam says explicitly that this is no reflection on her virtue. She receives her full ketubah, and the court compels the priest to pay it before he divorces her. She loses nothing at all.
The Unifying Principle
Deeds, and Everything That Is Not a Deed
Read the chapter end to end and a single line runs down the middle of it. On one side is what a woman did: adultery, a vow she broke, food she swore was permitted and was not, an act indecent enough for witnesses. On the other side is everything that is not a deed. A body she was born with. A verse written before she existed. A husband’s mistake. A marriage entered for her benefit while she was too young to decide. Force.
The money tracks that line. Where her deeds forbade her, she loses everything and keeps only what is still physically intact. Where something else forbade her, she keeps what she earned, and where the marriage was never really binding, the property rules flip over in her favor.
The Alter Rebbe devotes the twenty seventh chapter of Tanya to a person tormented by thoughts that rise in him unbidden, thoughts he is horrified to find in his own mind. Do not be distressed by them, he writes. The presence of the thought is not the measure of the man. What he does with it is. The Rambam’s chapter is that teaching set out as a schedule of payments.
But the line cuts the other way too. The woman who admits she acted willingly is not believed about her marriage and is believed about her money, because a person’s admission is worth a hundred witnesses in matters of property. Once she says she chose it, the law takes her at her word and closes the account. It will invent no story for her.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that whatever a person is shown about another is being shown to him about himself, and the sixteenth halacha is hard to read without hearing that. The law will not force the husband out, and it will not pretend for him either. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe returned constantly to the principle that nobody is handed a test greater than the strength he was given to meet it, which is another way of saying that the account is drawn against what a person could actually have done.
Modern Application
The Ledger Nobody Keeps Honestly
Most people carry two ledgers and keep neither one straight. In the first, everything that went wrong this year was done to them. The job, the argument, the distance that opened with someone and never closed. There is real truth in that, and the Rambam is generous about it in a way that is almost startling for a code of law. He names the customs that are not violations, demands a warning and witnesses, gives her the oath, and rules that force at the outset stays force even when consent arrives later.
In the second ledger, the one that runs at three in the morning, everything is the person’s own fault, including what was genuinely done to them. That ledger is not humility. It is a refusal to do the work of sorting, dressed up as taking responsibility.
Teshuvah is the sorting. Not the confession, which is the easy part, and not the guilt, which does nothing. The work is putting each item on the correct side of the Rambam’s line, and both sides are uncomfortable. One means admitting you were not in control. The other means giving up the story that had been carrying it. And one item belongs on the side of deeds tonight, since the chapter names a broken vow as a violation of the faith of Moses, in a list with far graver things, and tomorrow evening opens with a proceeding about vows that did not hold.
The Closing
Before Kol Nidrei
There is a reason the Rambam asks his question in her voice rather than stating it as a rule. He could have written that a prohibition originating outside the marriage does not forfeit the addition, and the halacha would have been identical. He wrote what then can she do.
A code of law stopped to notice that someone was standing in a ruin she did not build. That is not sentiment. It is precision. A legal system that cannot tell what a person did from what happened to her will charge her for both, and by tomorrow night most people have been charging themselves for both for about a year.
Tomorrow you will stand and list your deeds, and the list will be longer than it should be, because half of what is on it was never a deed at all. Take those items off. You owe nothing for them. What is left will be shorter and much heavier, and none of it is circumstance. That short list is the only thing Yom Kippur was built to handle, and it cannot reach anything you are still calling an accident.