Two Years of Even Ha-Ezer: Generalities and Technicalities

by R. Gidon Rothstein

Last year, my summary of what we saw in Even Ha-Ezer revolved around marriage, divorce, and proper sexuality. We spoke about the obligation to procreate, preferably within marriage, how marriage required consent, celebrated for a week after. At the other end, we discussed affairs, with what evidence, forced the end of a marriage; there, we did see some technical issues of how to write names in a get. But mostly, we saw broad issues of the law.

The same was true for arayot, we saw the basic idea with a bit about yichud, the ideal for men and women never to create the possibility of compromising positions.

Some Technicalities of Divorce and Other Reactions to the End of a Marriage

This year’s seven discussions of Even Ha-Ezer covered similar ground, except in more specific detail. We discussed ways of delivering a bill of divorcea the get, what counts as the woman having acquired it for the divorce to take effect. We also looked into what kinds of reunions between a divorced couple alert us to the possibility they have reunited, or to think a divorcing couple may have changed their minds, suspending the get process.

The question comes up for unmarried or engaged couples, too, with differences between where witnesses saw a full act of copulation, saw activity that strongly indicates copulation, or saw them secluded together.

A step away from divorce, we studied the process of chalitzah, where a widow will not be marrying the brother of her deceased, childless husband. We had to figure out who could serve on the court for the ceremony, where it would happen, and the parts of it, which indispensable, which not.

A further step closer to marriage, we discussed how to handle a widow who remarried without waiting for chalitzah. Ordinarily, we want her to divorce and never return to the new husband (to punish their excessive haste), then undergo a chalitzah with a brother-in-law from the first marriage. There are times we cannot do that, such as if she already had children with the new husband, making us leery to give others reason to call this marriage into question, to suspect the children are mamzerim, the product of a significantly illicit relationship.

The calculus also changes if the woman had reason to think she was allowed to remarry, such as if she received news the brother-in-law had died, had known he existed, or he had already left Judaism at the time of her marriage.

Where she had not remarried, but did behave promiscuously, we thought yibum could proceed, and also analyzed how her connection with her brothers-in-law affects their rights to marry (relatives of hers) before she has had chalitzah.

Prohibited Marriages

Besides ending marriages, we discussed who is allowed to create them. The Torah banned relatives of various sorts from coupling up, and Chazal added to those, often extending a rule up or down an ancestral line. The sanctity of marriage that characterizes Judaism (an idea we saw in the blessings of erusin) is not created between those with certain pre-existing connections.

While AH didn’t make the connection explicit, it parallels the Torah’s arayot rules, which couples may not have physically intimate relationships, according to Rambam because they would foster excessive sexuality [these were the women a man would encounter most often], The proscriptions were to channel people’s urges away from the easy and present, to finding a new relationship, part of building the next generation.

The Marriage of Kedushah

The first step of marriage was erusin, what separates Jewish marriage from others. Before the ceremony, Chazal instituted a berachah, whose surprising wording showed it to be a birchat ha-shevach, of praise rather than of mitzvah, and possibly used the occasion of marriage to refer us back to our national “marriage” with God.

Once married, we encounter the question of the nature of the couple’s intimate life, the activities they should or should not engage, to produce a relationship of tzeni’ut, of modesty and sanctity, with considerations of when and how often.

The two years of chapters seem to me to revolve around a narrower and more focused set of ideas than, perhaps, in other sections of Aruch HaShulchan. Even Ha-Ezer comes away looking devoted to human sexuality, its proper and improper channels (marriage and everything else), how to create and act within the proper marriage, how to end marriages that have broken irreparably and move to the next one.

For all of those, status–of people, of objects or documents, of ceremonies– were the biggest issue, how we do or do not effectuate the statuses we seek, to produce the relationships central to the kedushah of the Jewish family, starting with the husband and wife who anchor that family.

Next time, let’s see if it all hangs together in some way.