Ketuba and Equality

Most people seem to like the idea of marriage being a reciprocal and equal relationship, but traditional law, including the ketuba, do not really fit well with that idea. We can ask why traditionally marriage was not seen as an equal relationship, and if today we should make changes to the ketuba given the greater expectation of equality. But as it is, the ketuba makes a completely different statement. It obligates the man financially to his wife, without saying anything about what he gets in return.

Today, given the practical changes to Jewish marriage law, the ketuba is an instrument of inequality and instability. Many modern perversions have been accepted by the Israeli Rabbanut and by many other religious courts, either directly or by passively accepting decisions from secular courts, and they must be considered when understanding the marriage relationship. Today the woman is guaranteed a minimum of equal division in case of divorce, and the ketuba is used to add on further obligations. While it was instituted to make sure that a woman would not be left on the street in case of divorce or widowhood, today it is more likely to be the husband who is left impoverished by his wife.

Today the ketuba serves three purposes, none of which were intended originally, and none of them are good for marriage. The first is the direct payment of the ketuba in case of divorce. Given a division of property there is no reason for an additional payment, which really should be included in any division. The cost of divorce was supposed to prevent the husband from divorcing frivolously, not to make it too expensive to divorce at all, and not to punish him for being a less than 100% perfect husband. The high cost of divorce today allows many women to take it for granted that they will not be divorced of they do not want it, encouraging the idea that women need not invest in marriage. Marriage is destabilized by this, while the original intent was to secure the marriage.

The second use of the ketuba is to force the husband to support his wife if he wants to divorce her. The support was meant to be while they were married, and not in case of the failure of the marriage. The ketuba actually does not require the husband to pay support if he states he wants to divorce her, and very often what he is made to pay is in gross disregard of the halacha. Again, the ketuba has been perverted from being a support for healthy marriage, to being a weapon to use against the husband if he wants to divorce.

The third use of the modern ketuba is moral, not legal. In case of marital discord many rabbis simply dump on the husband that they willingly signed a commitment, and now they must keep it. The wife, they explain, did not sign a ketuba, and has no commitment to her husband. The ketuba allows the rabbi to easily shame the husband, and to block any relevant discussion of marriage problems. At the same time he reassures the woman that she does not need to invest in the marriage, because marriage is a one-sided commitment. Needless to say, any rabbi who takes this approach will not save any marriages, and any woman who is comforted by this lie will not stay married very long.

The modern use of the ketuba is immoral, and generally in violation of a proper understanding of the ketuba and the relevant laws. Yet when people get married, they are told about the importance of equality and reciprocity, as they are signing a document which will later be used to guarantee a very non-equal approach in case they have any problems in their marriage.

The ketuba can easily be rewritten to account for modern realities, without violating any traditional principles. No one is pushing for this, because equality and reciprocity are only important when entering the marriage. In case of trouble, the only guiding principle seems to be standing by the woman, as a gallant white knight, making sure she comes out unscathed from the failed marriage.

Recognizing the unequal nature of the ketuba would force us to look at marriage differently. We would see it not as a romantic relationship based on full equality, but as a practical, long-term institution. Romantic reciprocity would be a goal, but not a prerequisite. Instead many people prefer to simply force their romantic ideas onto the traditional ceremony. The ketuba, a one-sided commitment, given in recognition that a husband is the head of the family and fully responsible for it, is presented as a statement of reciprocal love.

Legally Stealing and Supporting Agunas

Simple question. How can i get my neighbor's fancy new car without doing anything immoral or prohibited, but with a halachically valid sale?

I hope you will tell me there is no way to do it, and I hope you are seriously bothered by my attempt to find a way to do it. But I will throw out some suggestions for your consideration.

For starters we have to note the operative rule here which says if you force someone to give you a present (i.e. stealing) it is not a valid present, but if you force them to sell it to you then its a good sale. So if the neighbor gets some money for his car its a good sale. All I have to do is give him some money, not the full value of his car, and it is a valid sale, not stealing.

Now let's say we can find a solution to prevent him from using his car. Maybe we can pass a law prohibiting the use of the relevant model (I will take it elsewhere.). We can use any excuse. Maybe its not green enough. We won't allow off-track vehicles for everyday use. (the guy who has the car needs to get to work. The guy who wants it goes camping.) Even better - we will make a law that only people with a full-time job can own a car (He does not work full-time). The excuse is not important, anything that makes the car useless for him will do. So now the car has little value to him, so i can get it for a good price. It wouldn't even be immoral now to force him to sell it now for a token payment, since the only reason he won't sell it willingly is because he is bitter about our law, which was passed with the best civic intentions.

There is a third option which would work the best. We can find a bes din to declare his car hefker. Any challenge at that point would be a challenge against the foundations of society. We can't have every guy who is unhappy with the bes din's decision going around challenging their legitimacy. If we do this regularly we can even rely on our early hefker to justify the next one. Pretty soon only outcasts and bitter losers will ever complain, and they will have no legal basis for their complaining. Our appropriations will be unquestionably legitimate.

I think it is pretty obvious that the violation of private property cannot be justified because the sale is binding. Laws which are meant to force people to give up what is theirs destroy civic society and cannot be justified in the social interest. Using courts to expropriate property is the worst possible perversion of legal proceedings, as we use the institution meant to protect ownership as a tool for stealing.

Halacha prohibits forcing someone to divorce their wife (except as specified.) much of the contemporary aguna debate focuses on the question of how to extract the divorce without calling it forced. The problem with this debate is that halacha is meant to be observed. It is not meant as a challenge to us to find ways around it. We cannot respect halacha and find halachic ways to violate the halacha, any more than we can respect law and private property and find ways to legally steal.

The reason why people do not look at the divorce issue like this is because they see marriage and divorce as formal ceremonies, not as binding contracts. They have no idea why marriage should be binding on a wife after she lost interest in her husband. Private property they understand, so legally forcing someone to give up what is theirs is understood to be wrong. But marriage is not understood, so forcing someone to divorce is taken for granted.

Women are not chattel as the car is, and those advocating divorce are not intending to marry the women they liberate. Many people take this simple observation to mean that women cannot be bound to a marriage. They expect the beis din to force a divorce because once the women has practically left the marriage if we keep her bound to her husband we would be treating her like chattel. The marriage is dead, so how can we force the woman to still be stuck in a dead marriage?

This question again only states that marriages should not involve commitment. If the marriage is dead it is only because someone killed it, and they only killed it because they were allowed to do so. When someone says "the marriage is dead so why doesn't he divorce her already" that should beg the question "how can the marriage be dead and no one was penalized for killing it?" When as a society we allow a woman to declare a marriage dead with no penalty we have already then declared that marriage is not binding, even before the first woman walks out of her marriage.

Judaism respects the sanctity of marriage, just as its laws recognize the principles of private property. Marriage is a contract which is binding on both sides to respect, and which the larger society is committed to enforce. When one side walks out of the marriage, they have violated their contractual obligations. When the community then defends them as an aguna, they are actively supporting the violation of marriage.

Just a Formality

When discussing the halacha regarding divorce people are generally influenced by their understanding of what marriage is. Someone who sees marriage primarily in terms of its being a lifelong commitment will understand that the halacha does not make it easy to get out of it. Someone who sees marriage as a statement of love will never understand why a marriage should continue after the love is gone.

Most of the people on the pro-divorce side see marriage and divorce as formalities. Marriage does not actually create a commitment to live together. It is simply a statement of intent. However hopeful the couple is for the future, the fact that they married cannot actually commit them to each other at a future time. If the women wants a divorce she should not be prevented from marrying someone else after she has walked out of the marriage.

With this view of marriage, how can one make sense of the halacha that the man must divorce willingly? Divorce is merely a formal statement that the love declared at the marriage is gone. How can this simple acknowledgement be dependent on the husband's willingness to make the formal declaration? It is clear there is no love anymore and the marriage is dead, and that is why the wife is asking for a divorce.

If marriage is simply a formal statement of love and divorce simply a formal acknowledgement that the love is gone, then the halacha that the divorce depends on the husband is likewise a formality. It presumably has symbolic value, but no practical relevance, and should not be allowed to stand in the way of the woman's hypergamy.

On pesach we may not have chametz in the house. This is a symbolic law, and we freely respect the symbolic and formal aspects of the law while avoiding the simple practical implications by selling chametz. The chametz is still in our house and will belong to us after pesach, but we have fulfilled the symbolic instruction to remove it from our possession. On succos we must own our lulav, and getting one as a matana al minas lehachzir is completely acceptable. The transaction in both these cases is completely valid, but if we saw the laws as practical instructions we would not freely use these work-arounds. We would rather do our best to respect the spirit of the law and destroy our chametz and buy our own lulav. The reason we have no problem with these halachic workaround is because the mitzva is only symbolic and the symbolism is satisfied as long as it is formally satisfied.

The pro-divorce advocates see marriage and divorce as no different than owning your lulav and disowning your chametz. They see no reason to give any practical credence to the law that the husband must divorce willingly aside from the absolute minimum required to satisfy this purely formal requirement. Even discussing the issue is very disturbing to them - the point is to minimize the formalities, not to make them the primary issue in divorce, and definitely not to try to understand why this is the halacha.

Obfuscating a Get

The daastorah blog has a teshuva up from Ovadia Yosef on the subject of forcing a get when the woman is not interested in the marriage. Ovadia Yosef leans towards forcing divorce, and he provides plenty of suggestions why, but he fails to actually explain his position. His teshuva is more of an obfuscation than an analysis of the halacha.

The first thing that stands out in his teshuva is the wealth of sources he brings, This is meant to impress, and no doubt most people reading it see this as the strongest part of the teshuva. It is the weakest. The volume of sources he brings - with minimal or no analysis - merely serve as a diversion. There is no way to argue with someone who throws out so much material. Even if you refute one proof, there is a whole lot more, and by the time you move on to the next one, the arguments against the first are forgotten. There is no solid construction here, just too many sources to argue with.

One problem with the multitude of sources is that there is no reason to assume consistency between them. Do they all make the same arguments, in which case he is simply presenting overwhelming evidence for his position? No, they all say something else. He is not showing a preponderance of evidence, but multiple arguments which may each be relevant or not.

Likewise, he does not analyze each opinion and ask how it relates to the case at hand. Every teshuva is given for a specific case, with many factors contributing to the conclusion. A teshuva cannot be freely quoted without reference to the full argument, but that is what he does here. From a rhetorical position this shifts the burden of proof from himself to his reader. He does not prove his position here since there is too much which he does not address, by simply quoting conclusions without any discussion of the context and relevance. So now the burden is on anyone who wants to argue with him to study each source and refute them all. But in halachic discourse, as in any intellectual discipline, the burden of proof is on the one making the argument. He must present an argument which is convincing by itself. Here we have an argument which is ultimately an appeal to his own authority, with the burden shifted away from him. He is saying "trust me, all the sources I gave actually do support my conclusion, even though I have not actually shown you how." This is obfuscation, not proof.

The teshuva starts out by giving two strong reasons to force a get - one that the couple is teimani, who always pasken like the Rambam, so we may force a get simply for maus alai, and two, that since the wome was forced into the marriage, we can force a get even not according to the Rambam. I am unfamiliar with the discussion on the second point, so for now I will take it as an accepted fact. The first point is also good. Had he stopped here, I would not have seen any reason to comment on the teshuva, but what comes after is undoes the strength of the opening arguments. The obvious question is, what took them years to force a get? If a get may be forced, it can be done immediately. It seems that the beis din did not really believe that they could force a get, but after years of this dragging on, they decided to look for a solution. That would mean this whole argument was attempting to defend a pre-determined conclusion.

A second problem is that he then wants to rely on the opinion that a get which was incorrectly forced is kosher bidieved. I do not have his referenced teshuva available, so I do not know the sources for this, but the Rambam is very clear that free will is midioraissa, and a forced get only works because deep down he wants to do whats right - so if the get was incorrectly forced, it is very hard to see how the Rambam can possibly be one of those who say it is only possul midirabanan. But these are teimanim, and everything must be done like the Rambam. If he wants to use the Rambam to force the get, then rely on sofek dirabbanan for incorrectly forcing the get. This is a contradictory argument.

His initial discussion of the primary question of forcing a get on maus alai does not quote his sources. He basically writes that the opinion of the Rambam was widely accepted both before an after his time, even though later it was widely rejected. He does not give a source for this, and the poskim who reject the Rambam - which is almost all major poskim of the late rishonim - definitely do not seem to think this was widely accepted before their time. See for example the Magid Mishna on the Rambam, Ishus 14:8 who says the psak of the Rambam is not accepted. So Ovadia Yosef wants to roll back a few hundred years of not going like the Rambam, by simply claiming that before that it was accepted. As a secondary point, he does not bother to address what other changes may have been involved which would affect this psak, for example, the relevance of losing a kesuba when saying maus alai, which today is not a serious issue. So what we have is an accepted psak not like the Rambam, including the Bet Yosef, and Ovadia Yosef saying we should go with the Rambam anyway because way back they used to do that.

After suggesting the proper psak should be like the Rambam even though it is not accepted, he quotes a number of teshuvos without telling us what they said. Look it up yourself. He tells us that based on those teshuvos it is proper to rely on the Rambam when we can combine other considerations, specifically if there is a sfek sfeka. Since he does not actually discuss what these teshuvos wrote, there is no way to know how he reached his conclusion. As I wrote above, he is shifting the burden of proof to the reader.

Another problematic argument in teshuva, which I will not properly address, is the following: "since today we are not talking about beating him with sticks, but only putting him in jail, and today's jails are nothing like what they had in the olden days, it is considered a sfek sfeka dirabanan". While he initally argued that we may force the get, now he wants to argue the get will be kosher even if the halacha does not allow us to force it. Here his main arguemnt is that the sort of force he is using is not real force. But he gives no reason to support this. Zero. It is simply an assertion, no sources, no backup. And quite baseless from a logical standpoint. Jail is meant to compell him to give a get, and it works. How can that possibly not be called forcing him to give it?

These are my basic thoughts on the raw halachic arguments he presents. There is a lot more to point out about his practical arguments, but not for this post.

Seeing the Light

While writing my previous post about religion and the red pill, I asked myself what term we have in Judaism which is parallel to the red pill. Maybe along the lines of "seeing the light". In Judaism though there does not seem to be any similar concept.

Yes, we do have people who get carried away in their mystical experience. People who discover Judaism and tell are their friends they saw the light. People who change their understanding of Judaism and talk of discovering the truth. But I am not looking for individuals describing their spiritual experience - that is the same everywhere. I am looking for a religious term, found in the classic works, which talks of this as a positive experience or as a goal to be reached. I am sure such passages exist, but there are no popular terms or common themes like this.

This observation is likely related to the strict legality of Judaism. When someone discovers the truth of Judaism they do not enter an ecstatic state of connection with God. There is too much they have to get busy doing. The practical demands of the religion counteract the force of spiritual discovery.

The same mechanism seems to be at work when someone reaches a deeper understanding of Judaism. Judaism is composed of practical instructions. The revelation of the true idea behind one of the instructions will immediately be connected to the performance of that instruction. The practical focus which is automatically connected to any insight moderates the spiritual excitement which would otherwise accompany religious discovery.

Judaism is a framework for life. It is not a otherworldly dedication which supplants our focus on the immediate world. Discovering Judaism or reaching a new understanding of Judaism should not lead to a feeling of seeing the light,but a feeling of renewed dedication to refining our everyday life. 

There is somewhat of a paradox here.  Discovering some fundamental truth will often lead people to experience a spiritual exhilaration. The found a red pill, but took a blue pill. The full realism of Judaism, on the other hand, diffuses the intense feeling of recognizing deeper truths. Its orientation towards teaching fundamental concepts prevents people from having an spiritual experience of having discovered the truth.

This paradox is not so surprising. People always prefer the liberation of beautiful ideas rather than the guidance of truthful concepts. When we learn a new truth we are more likely to turn it into a blue-pill high than a red-pill lesson. The practical aspect of Judaism mitigates this response and directs us towards the practical application of our intellectual knowledge and away from the spiritual escapism.

Religion and the Red Pill

Taking the ‘Red Pill’  is a metaphor for accepting that your ideas about the world do not conform to reality, and learning new ways to understand the world. After you ‘take the red pill’  you begin to to relearn what reality is, and to recognize the falsity of your previous beliefs.


No one takes the red pill out of curiosity. We will all stay with whatever beliefs we have as long as they can serve us in navigating the world,. We must have a crises with reality which forces us to question our fundamental beliefs before we can change them. The crises gives us the possibility to look for a better understanding of the world, but leaves us the possibility of remaining committed to our previous ideas, however poorly they are serving us.


The blue pill - remaining blissfully ignorant of the true reality - is always an option. We have a fascinating capacity to  maintain our ideas in the face of overwhelming evidence against them. We are invested in our ideas,  and everything we have done based on them. We do not give them up easily, and many people will only strengthen their commitment to their accepted ideas as reality tries to pry their minds open.


Whenever someone accepts a new outlook on life, they will talk of having discovered the truth, or of having taken the red pill. When someone discovers religion, they have taken the red pill. When someone abandons religion, they have taken the red pill. So which is reality, and which is illusion? Or is it all illusion?


Most people who have discovered the truth have simply discovered a new lie. The only ‘truth ‘ it has is that it rejects their previous lie. They have swapped a blue pill for a blue pill, and they believe they have taken the red pill.


The proper test for the red pill - for discovering a fundamental truth, and not merely

a new lie - is to hold up your new idea to reality, not to your old ideas. The truth is not the rejection of your previous failed belief, but a description of reality. When you hold up your new idea to the aspect of reality it is meant to describe, does it correspond to it, or are you accepting the idea based on the emotional appeal it holds for you?


There is a second way to know if you got a red pill or a blue one. The red one is bitter. You will not enjoy taking it, but you will accept it anyway because it reflects the reality you have to deal with. The blue pill is sweet, Feel-good ideas are appealing, but their appeal is not in their ability to describe the real world.


Religion ans secularism both have aspects of recognizing the fundamental order of the world, and aspects which cover it up. There is a religious red pill, and a religious blue pill. There is a secular blue pill, and a secular red pill.


Most people use religion as a convenient model to replace the real world, and not as a guide for understanding life. For most people religion is the ultimate blue pill. This view of religion has strong personal appeal, but little value.


Religion is the ultimate red pill. Religion provides a metaphysical framework for understanding the world, which with a proper understanding teaches us how to understand the world as we deal with it. When we see religion as a practical guide to life it loses the strong emotional appeal of the spiritual, but it becomes an indispensable framework for appreciating how we live.