Why is she forbidden in promiscuity? After all, when she commits adultery the condition cancels the betrothal and she is unmarried.

And how does this prevent her from becoming chained to the marriage?

What I wrote was that the prohibition of mamzer status comes to prevent promiscuity by punishing someone who is not guilty (the child), and therefore I see no problem with such a stipulation. Like a stipulation meant to cancel levirate marriage (a bill of divorce an hour before my death, and the like).
I wrote that in general, the conditional document is meant to prevent the woman from becoming chained to the marriage, because it allows the woman to free herself in situations where halakhically she cannot do so. This clause is not related to that.

I understand, thanks for the reply!

In general I’d like to hear your opinion regarding the Rabbinate.
I know you have sharp criticism of it (so do I).
My question is whether in principle you think it is inappropriate for there to be one body that unifies authority in matters of kashrut and marriage.
As I understand it, if it were possible to upgrade the corrupt system of the Rabbinate, that would be wonderful. A situation in which every community rabbi or city rabbi does whatever he feels like, and no one trusts anyone else, will create anarchy and chaos (even though that’s how it was for most of the years of exile. But why not move forward??).
And if that is so, wouldn’t it be more effective to try to change the Rabbinate from within instead of abolishing it?

Thanks,
Uzi

I think that in principle it would be appropriate to have a regulatory body, like supervision over banks or insurance. But its role should be consumer-oriented, meaning to check that what some organization/person offers is actually what they provide. Someone who offers marriages of type X should be checked to make sure he is indeed providing them and not cheating. But the Rabbinate is not a regulator but a monopoly; that is, they determine how marriages are performed and what is done in every situation, and they control the “market.” It’s like kosher certification, where too it would have been appropriate to have a regulator, but the Rabbinate is not a regulator; it is a monopolistic kashrut provider.
In the current situation the Rabbinate is corrupt and conservative and committed to the most conservative foundations that dictate its policy, and therefore I see no possibility of fixing it from within. It has no remedy but a knife, like an earthenware vessel whose breaking is its purification. Contrary to the implicit assumption in your words, we have not “moved forward” compared to the years of exile; rather we have regressed, and therefore it is preferable to return to that. We survived two thousand years without a Chief Rabbinate and we will continue to manage that way today as well.
In any case, there is little chance that anything there will change from within, and not because of the religious but because of the secular. They make sure to give the most conservative elements control over them, and afterward they whine. There is an unholy coalition there between the secular and the religious conservatives, as I have already explained several times in the past.
Be that as it may, in my opinion such attacks, even if they do not lead to the closing of this corrupt institution, only they might perhaps contribute to fixing it from within. Already today policy is changing in several areas because of these attacks. Maybe in the end there will still be some sort of change.

I didn’t quite understand why you don’t care about the condition. After all, if a man betroths a woman on condition that he not eat a certain food, then the moment he eats it, all his past relations retroactively become promiscuous relations, no?
Or are you saying: I don’t care about the condition because there is no problem with it; if he comes to ask me whether he is allowed to fulfill the condition (eat the above), then I’ll say no, because retroactively it creates prohibitions?

This is not a condition not to eat bread. The condition is not to leave the woman chained to the marriage, and that is certainly not okay. Therefore I don’t need to tell him not to do it.
In the case of an arbitrary condition, I would indeed tell him not to do it, and from that point on it is his decision. Though I won’t refrain from adding one more scholarly note: I am not at all sure that eating the bread in such a situation is a prohibition. There is a prohibition on promiscuous relations, but who says there is a prohibition on turning relations that were done in good faith into promiscuous relations retroactively? It once seemed to me that there is an amoraic dispute about this, but this is not the place to go into it.

I didn’t understand what difference it makes that the condition is not to leave her chained to the marriage. Suppose it is indeed forbidden to create retroactively promiscuous relations.
Would it really be permitted to create lots of prohibitions retroactively so that right now she won’t be chained to the marriage?

Yes.
Just as it is permitted to create prohibitions retroactively in order to prevent revocation of an agency without the agent’s knowledge, or to prevent levirate marriage.

The conditions there are on a bill of divorce (right?) that is given an hour before death. They don’t live together during those hours.
Therefore the bill of divorce of the soldiers of the House of David is also fine, because when the soldier is at war he is not home with his wife, so there are no retroactive promiscuous relations. In which of the above examples are promiscuous relations created?

And also, what’s the logic here? Suppose it is forbidden to create prohibitions retroactively — why on earth would that prohibition be overridden so that she not become chained to the marriage?
If they want to commit prohibited acts, she can simply have relations with whoever she wants in a prohibited manner and that’s that. Is there some principled difference between an act of prohibition and creating a prohibition retroactively (assuming that is forbidden)? Why?

We’re grinding water.
1. Any annulment of betrothal of any kind creates the same problem. And there are also annulments in order to avoid levirate marriage (for example, when the brother is an apostate, they annul the betrothal according to Maharam of Rothenburg), and more.
2. Having prohibited relations as a married woman is not the same as promiscuous relations.
We’ve exhausted it.

It’s not clear to me how you compare a situation where the brother is an apostate, where promiscuous relations are the lesser evil, to the condition that was there (according to what was reported in the Ynet article) in these betrothals, which voids the betrothal in every case where the woman needs halitzah.
And another question: would you approve voiding betrothal in every case where the couple wants to divorce, so that the woman will not be considered divorced and could marry a kohen? And if this is an appropriate condition, why do you think the Sages did not institute this condition.

I’m not comparing; I’m only claiming that there is no halakhic obstacle to making marriage conditional, and certainly that does not undermine the validity of the betrothal itself.
This is not about annulment but about a condition that voids the betrothal. Annulment is done by virtue of “whoever betroths, betroths subject to the authority of the rabbis,” and plainly that is only by the supreme religious court of the generation. As for a condition, one can make such a condition. The Sages do not institute conditions as an obligation, neither this one nor any other. But if the couple wants, they can stipulate whatever they want, as is explicit in countless places in the Talmud and in the halakhic decisors.

Fine. It is clear that this is not annulment; I used the wrong terminology. The question is whether it is right for you to agree to a betrothal when the couple themselves do not know whether they are married or not, and when you know that from the outset they intend to live a sexual life that is of doubtful promiscuity.
The answer you might give — that they’ll do what seems right to them and that if they want to engage in promiscuity that’s not your business — is difficult, because to do what they want they don’t need a rabbi.
The additional question (which of course is not directed at you) is why the couple expected the state to register them as married when it is not at all clear that the marriage took effect (in the best case, only after the husband’s death would it be possible to know whether they were really married).

I really do not understand these “difficulties.” If I know they intend a life of promiscuity, I won’t marry them. What for? Do I work for them?!

In our case the couple is married according to the law of Moses and Israel without any doubt whatsoever, and there is no obstacle to registering them. And when they cancel the marriage, if they cancel it, they will update the registration. As is done in annulment and as is done in every other conditional transaction. That’s all.

The additional question actually is directed at me, since I’m the one who demanded that they go register. They had not originally planned to do so. They are married, and it can be known that they are married, and there is only a slight chance that this condition will be fulfilled (and only a religious court decides whether it was fulfilled, and without its decision there is no cancellation of the betrothal). To hang everything on this is nonsense. According to your approach, every annulment of betrothal would make it impossible to register a marriage, because you don’t know whether the husband will send an agent and revoke it without the agent’s knowledge or do something else that will bring about the annulment of his betrothal. According to the law of the Talmud, conditional betrothal is fully valid betrothal in every respect.
It seems to me that we’ve exhausted it, no?

I still haven’t exhausted it, and please don’t be angry. You know that you took an unusual path here, so don’t be surprised if people have questions and objections.
It is not clear to me why you think the chance that he will die childless and she will require halitzah is slight. It is indeed a minority case, but not very rare and certainly not slight.
Annulment is something else, because it is an exceptional court decision in very rare cases that do not need to be taken into account.
Suppose I understand why you hold that malicious refusal to grant a divorce or adultery would not be taken into account, because that depends on them and their behavior, and it is true that pregnancy through rape or being chained to the marriage because of severe illness are rarer. But death without children? Not rare — and it turns all the relations into promiscuous relations in order to avoid the commandment of halitzah.
According to the law of the Talmud, it is true that conditional betrothal is betrothal. The question is whether according to the law of the Talmud it is also permitted to have sexual relations in conditional betrothal when there is a reasonable chance that the condition will not be fulfilled. Do you know of a discussion of this in the Talmud?

I’m not surprised, and it is permissible to raise objections and questions about anything, even if it is not unusual. But here I did not see questions and objections, only weak puzzlements whose logic I do not see, as I explained. My time is valuable to me, and therefore I’ve exhausted it.
As for your final question, according to the law of the Talmud it is certainly permitted to have sexual relations in such a situation. First, because the one who prohibits must bring proof, not the one who permits, and we have not found a prohibition in this (if you insist, say that we follow the majority, that most do not die without sons). But there are also proofs for this. For example, the Talmud says that there is no condition in marriage because a person does not make his intercourse into promiscuity. It should have said that it is forbidden to have intercourse, not that a person does not want to have intercourse. And from this, of course, it also should have forbidden conditional betrothal lest he have intercourse in a prohibited way. Would betrothal that does not permit intercourse really pass quietly in halakhah throughout the entire Talmud? And it can also be proven from the condition that he divorces her an hour before his death in order to exempt her from levirate marriage, and we do not find that it is forbidden to have relations with her lest he die within the hour.