What We Learned In Even Ha-Ezer
If I tell you the simanim we saw in Even HaEzer this year discuss marriage, divorce, and ways to avoid inappropriate sexuality, do you call those one, two, or three topics? I’m not sure there’s a right answer, but it gives us a framework for review.
Marriage
Even HaEzer starts with the obligation to procreate, a man is required to do his best to father a boy and a girl, and more beyond. Having children is both a commandment as well as an overall attempt to populate the world with good people (a reason to bear children beyond the minimum, since we never know which one will end up making a crucial contribution). Fathering children is to be done within the context of marriage, even though the man technically fulfills his obligation with children fathered outside of marriage.
AH accumulated sources about the value of marriage itself, how an unmarried man is considered incomplete, how he should marry even if he knows the marriage cannot produce children. And marriage should happen young, halachah thought, although complicating factors tend to push it later than the ages the Gemara gave.
Women are less legally bound, AH thought because marriage was more natural to them.
Even HaEzer 34 laid out the blessing we recite before the first stage of marriage, the ring ceremony that creates an exclusive relationship between the bride and her groom. For most authorities, this blessing praises the institution of Jewish marriage, Jews’ care not to marry certain relatives, and to establish a formal relationship before indulging their appetites.
Consent, Hers and His
Rambam treated it more as a birchat hamitzvah, a blessing over a mitzvah, and therefore thought it could be recited only before the ring was given. Others thought the bride’s right to reject the marriage even up to the last moment made us prefer saying the blessing after she has accepted, when we know there is a marriage to bless.
A convenient lead-in to Even HaEzer 42, where AH has fifty-one paragraphs, compared to Shulchan Aruch’s five (we saw a similar expansion in Yoreh De’ah 183, AH’s discussion of the basics of niddah much longer than SA’s. An interesting topic for further investigation, where AH goes far longer than SA).
Here, his interest is where pressure on one of the spouses would lead us to disregard the wedding, as if it had never occurred. The issue was less pressing for the man, who could divorce the woman if he felt unduly coerced. For the woman, divorce meant she could not henceforth marry a kohen, leading halachah to seek to define when her rejection was immediate enough to convince us she had never agreed to be tied to this man.
In the same siman, AH taught us the unusual role of witnesses. In marriage, they are le-kiyyum ha-davar, necessary for a valid ceremony, rather than just proof the event had occurred. This heightens the importance of ensuring we have valid witnesses, no invalid ones mixed in.
The Celebration
Chazal chose to mark weddings with a week of celebrations when either spouse was marrying for the first time, three days if both were married before. Even HaEzer 64 delves into whether some days of the week are preferable, whether the spouses cannot go to work during their celebratory days, and how a new husband should ensure his bride’s happiness.
Beyond the couple, AH thinks either family can insist on a wedding that meets the standards of their social circle.
When Marriages Must End
If a man has good reason to think his wife had an affair, Even HaEzer 11 tells us he must divorce her. An adulteress may not stay married to her husband, nor wed her affair partner. The siman discussed what counts as evidence, enough for the courts to demand a divorce, or enough the husband should realize this marriage must end.
Within this conversation, we saw a first example of leniency to protect the reputation of children. Where a marriage ended because of ki’ur, acts that strongly indicate the woman had an affair but do not constitute proof, and the husband chose to end the marriage, she is not supposed to marry the other man. If she did, and already had children, we will not push to end that second marriage, to not sully the children’s name.
To stick with the dissolution of marriage, Even HaEzer 119 takes up the basics of divorce, starting with the get, the document the Torah necessitates for a wife to be free to marry other men. Before teaching the rules of the get, AH spent more than a little time on proper motivations for divorce, tradition’s stronger resistance to it in a first marriage, unless the wife agreed, and perhaps also only as advice rather than a formal ruling.
Once divorce is decided, Even HaEzer 129 took us through a lengthy analysis of the correct way to write the names of the people involved. Father’s names might not be necessary, and family names are not clearly accepted as identifiers, so problems there are more easily solved. But the couple’s own names can create problems, because some people have two names or different names in different contexts, cities or social circles.
The question was how to cover all bases, when it was enough to write one name (and which), adding ve-khol shum she-yesh lo, along with all other names s/he has, when it was preferable to include alternate names, either as ha-mechuneh, who is nicknamed, or de-mitkerei, who is also called, or de-itkerei, who has been called.
Names of those who adopted another religion, God forbid, pose another type of problem, as we resist invoking the non-Jewish name, and—if the Jew came back—do not wish to embarrass him/her even with oblique reference to it. There is also, often, the issue of spelling, trying to be sure our Hebrew rendering of a name accurately conveys how it is pronounced.
Lust Has Its Ways
Independent of marriage, Even HaEzer 22 reminds us of the need to avoid all wrongful sexuality, to seal ourselves from any position where it would be possible to fall prey to our lesser selves. The main strategy, a matter of Torah law, is to never be where a couple could yield to such desires, called yichud, where two people are alone in a place where they could consummate a relationship.
Torah law covered yichud for arayot, couplings prohibited at a level of karet or death penalty (including, of course, adultery). David and his court equated the (already in Tanach, AH argues) ban on yichud with an unmarried woman to the Torah-level yichud with arayot.
The idea arises again at the end of Even HaEzer 119, divorced couples who may not remarry (the wife has married someone else in between, whether or not she is currently married to him; a kohen who cannot marry a divorcee, including his own ex-wife) should generally not live near each other, for fear their relationship has not ended enough to prevent them from themselves having an affair.
People are meant to live in marriages, our Even HaEzer has told us, to continue populating the world, because of its inherent value, and to tamp down urges we might give bad vent to if we are not married. We therefore needed to learn how to set ourselves up not to fall prey to such urges when they are disallowed, how to enter marriages which are the only proper outlet for those desires, to celebrate them properly, when they need to end, and how to end them.
The Even HaEzer we saw so far.
