A key component of the mitzvot of repentance and atonement is vidui, or confession, ideally with pirut hacheit, specification of one’s sins. At least some of these sins should be confessed publicly. So I’ll take this opportunity to acknowledge some of my sins of misreading.
Over the past year, I misread the fact-patterns of at least two medieval responsa. These errors struck directly at my self-evaluation as an excellent reader of classical halakhic texts. I’m trying to be grateful for the opportunity to cultivate the trait of humility, and to make use of the opportunity. I’m also trying to maintain confidence in all my other readings. It’s a delicate balance. The redeeming element (despite the best effort of Aish.com, I’m not convinced that ‘saving grace’ is a Jewish idiom) of these errors is that it was my children who caught them.
The first error was in a shiur given to the GPATS program (thank you Dr. Nechama Price for inviting me!) about the halakhic implications of civil marriage. In Shu”t RIVASH #6”s wonderfully pathetic tale of a woman married to a now-absconded husband just before an expulsion of Jews from Aragon, I married her off to the wrong man! My daughter Channah asked quietly and privately after the shiur whether it wouldn’t be better to attribute a key pronoun differently, and yes, it was better.
Here is the error.
A woman came from Majorca from among those coerced to ‘worship stars’ (i.e. baptized), with her son in her bosom.
We asked her “What are you, and what is your son?”,
and she said that a coercee from the Land of Aragon asked her to marry him before the decree (expelling Jews) in the manner of Jewish law, but he did not succeed (in marrying her). About a week after the decree, a man coerced to ‘worship stars, who was an intimate of that coercee who wanted her, came and spoke to her heart to marry him (lehinasei eilav), and she agreed, and their match was concluded, except that he did not betroth in the presence of (kosher) witnesses, and their marriage was not concluded in the presence of ten, rather via “star-worshippers’ in accordance with the rites of their religion, officiated by the priests of their altars. She settled in his house with him as his wife for all matters with the public presumption of marriage, and many coercees knew of his, and she settled with him for three months, and became pregnant from him, and this is her fruit,
but that man went overseas and never returned to her:
Let our master teach us what the law regarding her is, and whether we need to be concerned regarding her (that she is married), or not?
שאלה:
אשה אחת באה ממיורקה מאותן האנוסות לעבודת ככבים ובנה בח(י)קה, ונאמר לה ‘מה טיבך ומה טיבו של בן זה?’,
ואמרה שאנוס אחד מארץ ארגון תבעה לינשא לו קודם הגזרה כדת משה ויהודית, ולא עלתה בידו,
ולאחר הגזרה בכמו שבוע אחד בא [אנוס אחד] לע’ ככבים אוהבו של אותו אנוס החפץ בה, ודבר על לבה להנשא אליו, והיא נתפייסה, ונגמר הזווג ביניהם,
אלא שלא קדשה בעדים, ולא נשאת לו בעשרה, אלא על ידי עובדי ככבים בחקות דתם ובכהני במותם,
וישבה בביתו עמו כאשתו לכל דבר בחזקת אישות, והיו יודעים זה אנוסים רבים,
וישב עמה כמשלש חדשים, ונתעברה ממנו, וזה פריה,
והלך האיש ההוא מעבר לים ולא יסף שוב אליה עוד.
ילמדנו רבינו: מה יהיה משפטה, ואם יש לחוש לה אם לא?
Did the woman marry her initial suitor, or did the (treacherous?) friend intervene and marry him herself? I taught it the latter way, but Channah Leah thought it was the initial suitor, and on reflection, she is almost certainly correct.
Happily, the error has no impact (that I can see) on the halakhic implications of the responsum. These are still the subject of controversy and debate. Rivash ruled that the woman was not married, but was that a general claim about marriages that don’t have specific Jewish intent, or a narrow ruling about marriages that specifically have non-Jewish intent? Or was the key factor on Rivash’s case the double-ring ceremony in which both rings were given by the officiating priest rather than transferred from groom to bride or vice versa??
The second error occurred over Rosh HaShannah, which my son Gershon and I spent in the LIJ Hospital ICU at my father Yaakov ben Machlah’s bedside. An article by Rabbi Dr. Dov Fischer in the latest issue of the journal Hakira (a gift from my dear friend Dov Weinstein) provided useful historical context for Shu”t HoRashba 3:406, but the translation of an early section of the responsum had an obvious gaffe (the bolding is in the original):
A Jewish taxpayer who marries off a daughter or a sister out of the city
to any man who is not subject to our taxes
shall be responsible to pay an exit tax
equal to the amount the taxpayer would have owed
upon their exit from the city to permanently emigrate to another location,
as is written in the emigration document
כל בר ישראל או בת ישראל שישיא חוצה לעיר הזאת בתו או אחותו
עם שום אדם שאינו מחוייב לפרוע מס עמנו
שיפרע הוא מס על אותו סך שנתן עמה
כאלו הוא יצא ונעתק מן העיר לקבוע דירתו במקום אחר
כמו שנכתב במכתב ההעתקה.
The underlined Hebrew words are simply not translated. I presume they fell out accidentally during an editing interchange. So we need to insert the underlined section below:
equal to the amount the taxpayer would have owed for the amount given with her (as dowry)
Gershon produced a translation that better preserves the word order and is generally more precise:
“Regarding any Jewish man or women who marries off out of this city their daughter or sister
to any man who is not obligated in the tax as one of us:
He must pay the tax on the dowry which was sent with her
as if he had departed and forsaken the city to settle his household elsewhere,
according to what we wrote in the departure law.”
The flaws in the Hakira translation made me mistrustful. After my first read through the full responsum[1], I thought I had found another key error, one that would undo the article’s thesis. The article assumes that the defendant in the case had planned to circumvent the relevant taxes via the dowry. But I was not convinced this was so.
Here’s the overall scenario. The Jewish community of Saragossa was taxed directly by the king. It paid the tax collectively – perhaps by taking out a loan – and then at a future date recovered the funds for this and all communal expenses via a tax assessment on year-to-year wealth growth. Unfortunately but predictably, some people used the intervening time to shift their official residence to a lower-tax area, the medieval equivalent of Monte Carlo. The community responded by charging the tax on exit even if the person’s departure was before the official assessment date.
Another way of shielding wealth from the tax was transferring it to someone who resided elsewhere. The most common way to do that while keeping the money in the family was to use it as a dowry. The community responded by passing a law charging the tax immediately on the amount of the dowry if someone married off a daughter or sister “out of the town = חוץ לעיר”.
The question sent to Rashba involved a wedding that had taken place in town but with an out-of-towner groom. As Rashba understood the question, ‘Reuven’ argued that the letter of the decree made everything depend on the location of the wedding, whereas the unidentified plaintiff argued that what mattered was the residency of the groom. ‘Reuven’ argued further that there had been “a long time” since the passage of the law, during which many daughters had been married off in in-town ceremonies to “out of towners” without their fathers being taxed immediately, while one man had been taxed immediately after marrying off his sister in an out-of-town ceremony.
Rashba rejects Reuven’s literalist reading.
שלשון ‘המשיא חוצה לעיר’ אין במשמע שיהיו הנישואין ממש, כלומר החופה, חוץ לעיר,
אלא אפילו ישאנה למי שיתנה עמו שיוציאנה חוץ לעיר ולהוליכה עמו לעירו, שזה ‘משיאה חוץ לעיר’ אעפ”י שהחופה בתוך העיר,.
ואין הכונה בזה למכניסה לחופה בתוך העיר למכניסה חוץ לעיר, שאלו דברי הבאי, דמה הקפדה לקהל בזה?
The language “who marries off outside the city” doesn’t mean that the actual wedding, i.e. the chuppah, takes place outside the city;
but rather includes even marrying her off to one with whom he has stipulated that he will take her out of the city with him to his city, as this is “marrying her off outside the city” even though the chuppah takes place inside the city,
and the intent of this isn’t ]to distinguish[ between whether he brings her to the chuppah inside the city or outside the city, as that would be nonsense, as what reason would the community have to be particular about that?!
I originally read Rashba as raising “with whom he has stipulated” as a hypothetical possibility to explain why Reuven’s proposed literalist interpretation of the decree was absurd. Rabbi Fischer’s overall thesis depended on reading Rashba as describing what actually happened, namely that Reuven’s son in-law had already left town as planned with the full dowry. I thought that the son in-law had become a resident of the town following the wedding, but was refusing to pay the tax because he had not been a resident at the time the communal expenses had been incurred.
As a matter of general practice, I try to at least doublecheck any strong disagreement with someone else’s scholarship – kal vachomer on the Yom HaDin! I therefore asked Gershon to read the Rashba and tell me what he thought it meant – and on this point he agreed with Rabbi Fischer. We argued about it through many stages for more than a day, and I’m here to concede this reading now seems better than mine, and certainly Rabbi Fischer is within his rights to rely on it.
Rashba concludes that the plaintiff also misunderstood the law. Its real intent was to establish that the tax was owed as of the time the communal expenses were incurred, so that any subsequent transfers of wealth included the tax lien on that wealth. Therefore, Rashba sees no need to make fathers in-law pay taxes on dowries when one can make their sons in-law pay instead. So if the wedding took place in-town, with the groom physically present for the wedding, then if the town officials allowed him (and the numerous other grooms referred to depart with the complete dowry, they are at fault and cannot penalize the father in-law for their inattention.
It’s not clear to me how long the law regarding dowries had been in place when the question reaches Rashba – months, or years? or why, if Reuven spoke truthfully, previous grooms had not been dunned for the dowry tax on departure, and previous fathers in-law had not been dunned at all? One can engage in all sorts of speculation about the politics involved, and what motivated Rashba to interpret it in a way that essentially accused communal leaders of malfeasance. But for this Yom Kippur, I will simply acknowledge my error. O admit that I still find my initial reading tempting, and won’t blame you if you succumb to it.
גמר חתימה טובה!
[1] a photo of the Machon Yerushalayim edition was properly appended to the Hakira article; compare the first edition at https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH001124675/NLI – h/t Gershon, and I’d love to know if there’s a manuscript
moderntoraleadership 