The Oral Talmud: Episode 34 - Our Way or the Highway (Ketubot 2b & 3a)
SHOW NOTES
“What's really important is not just that they're doing it, but they're showing you that they're overturning Torah with what their own svara tells them is a better take on how to be a human being and that's why I think this entire document of the Talmud is an instruction manual for us. I think they meant to teach us how to do it so that we could do it.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This is the final part of Dan and Benay’s conversation about Tractate Ketubot, pages 2b and 3a, which is a case about conditional divorce that is really about showing us how to change the law when necessary to alleviate suffering. In this episode, we see the moment when the Talmud’s sages stop hiding their most radical move. The rabbis don’t just reinterpret the Torah – they openly claim the authority to override it.
BUT, as the text unfolds, we watch that boldness collide with fear…fear of instability, fear of power…fear of what happens when moral intuition is taken seriously. Throughout this podcast Benay and Dan have argued that the Talmud is a manual for how to handle moments of crash. Here we see the rabbis showing us how tradition can be rebuilt but then they hesitate. Dan and Benay ask the unsettling question: when suffering is clear and the tools to alleviate it are in our hands, why do we so often hold back?
This week’s text: Ketubot 2b & 3a
Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.
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DAN LIBENSON: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 34: “Our Way or the Highway” Welcome to the Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY LAPPE: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN LIBENSON: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today.
This is the final part of our conversation about Tractate Ketubot, pages 2b and 3a, which is a case about conditional divorce that is really about showing us how to change the law when necessary to alleviate suffering. In this episode, we see the moment when the Talmud’s sages stop hiding their most radical move. The rabbis don’t just reinterpret the Torah – they openly claim the authority to override it.
BUT, as the text unfolds, we watch that boldness collide with fear…fear of instability, fear of power…fear of what happens when moral intuition is taken seriously. Throughout this podcast Benay and I have argued that the Talmud is a manual for how to handle moments of crash. Here we see the rabbis showing us how tradition can be rebuilt… but then they hesitate. We ask the unsettling question: when suffering is clear and the tools to alleviate it are in our hands, why do we so often hold back?
Every episode of The Oral Talmud has a number of resources to support your learning and to share with your own study partners! If you’re using a podcast app to listen, you’ll find these links in our show notes: First, to a Source Sheet on Sefaria, where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation – there we excerpt the core Talmud texts we discuss and share a link to the original video of our learning.
In the show notes of your podcast app, you’ll also find a link to this episode on The Oral Talmud’s website, where we post an edited transcript, and where you can make a donation to keep the show going, if you feel so moved. On both the Sefaria Source Sheet and The Oral Talmud website, you’ll find extensive footnotes for exploring our many references inside and outside of the Talmud.
And now, The Oral Talmud…
DAN LIBENSON: Hello everyone, this is Dan Levison, and I am here with Bene Lape for this week's episode of the Oral Tom Wood. Hey Bene. Hey,
BENAY LAPPE: Dan. How are you?
DAN LIBENSON: All right. Sorry we're a couple minutes late. We had a little bit of a technical, uh, challenge getting this streaming, but here we are, but we did it so Yay. Yay. Um, so Benet, um, we are, um, we're in the middle of a, of a text that we've been doing for, for a couple weeks now.
We're about to finish it and then go on to another text that, that, uh, follows on similar ideas. And it's actually part of this long. Part where that we're doing, where we're really looking at this pretty dramatic thing that happens in the Talmud, where, where the rabbis are overturning various laws that of the Torah and um, and they're doing it for reasons that are given in different places, different, you know, but ultimately what we're, we're working with this hypothesis that it involves, they're elevating the principle of the alleviation of human suffering to a higher level than it was in the Torah.
And fundamentally, that's what's going on.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. And they're showing their hand. I think what's really important is not just that they're doing it, but they're showing you that they're doing that. And by that I mean overturning Torah with what their own sense, their their own tells them is a better take on how to.
Be a human being and a better guess at what we think God wants of us. They're letting us know that they're doing that and they're showing us how to do it. They're showing, at the very least, they're showing us how they did it. My leap is to say they're showing us how they did it so that we can know how to do it and, and that's why I think this entire document of the Talmud is an instruction manual for us.
I think they meant to teach us how to do it so that we could do it.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. So let's just do a little bit of, uh, a little, little, a bit of a reminding. So we're in this text that basically the issue is that there's a, there's a certain principle in the Torah we've gone into in the last couple weeks. We don't really have to dwell on it right now, but there's a principle in the Torah that basically says that, uh, in, in a particular case, a divorce, a divorce would be, um, not effective.
Meaning that there's a husband and a wife, they're still married according to the Torah, but for a certain reason. But the husband is basically waylaid. He's, he is he the, they don't know if he's coming back or not, that like technically they, they may well be still married according to the Torah. And the, and the rabbis here, uh, are saying, or the Talmud here are saying, Ava's saying that, um, that we're going to, we're going to put that divorce into force, meaning we're going to say that that divorce is in force, even though according to the Torah, it might not be in force.
And,
BENAY LAPPE: and I would elevate that even further. It's not only, might not the, the, the incredulous voice of the editor is saying, but those cases where for sure he comes back and says, Hey, but it wasn't my fault that divorce should be annulled because the Torah says it's annu and we're still married. That's the case that the, the Talmud is identifying is so outrageous because that's precisely the case where the rabbis are without apology saying, yeah, we're gonna ignore what, how the Torah would view this situation.
Yeah. In the eyes of the Torah, this marriage is a, that first marriage is a marriage again retroactively, and the second marriage is adulterous, and the rabbis are saying, no, no, we're gonna ignore what the Torah thinks.
DAN LIBENSON: And the cons. And this isn't just like a little, a little something. By the way, neither was the, the earlier weeks when we talked about the various breaking of, of Shabbat.
Um, I mean these are the 10 commandments, you know, one is, one is Shabbat, one is do not commit adultery. And, and so, so the rabbis here are saying that the fact is that according to the Torah, if they really are married then and she got quote married to another man, then actually she's not married to the second man.
They're committing adultery. That's a violation of one of the 10 commands that's really bad. And their kids are going to be mazare, which is a category of, of people. We could roughly translate it as bastards who are in this. Second class at best, I mean third, fourth class of, of citizens basically, where they're only allowed to marry each other.
And it's just a bad thing. You don't want your children to be mazare. And so this is according to the Torah, this is a very bad situation. And let's remember, let's,
BENAY LAPPE: let's remember those children who are mazare, our only able to have children who will inherit that status forevermore. Mm-hmm. For all eternity.
Their children will be moms, every, their children's children forever. They can never be released from that restrictive 10th class status. Yeah. So it's right. It's really bad.
DAN LIBENSON: And, and I mean, like, I guess we, we will get into this in a second, whether the, what the logic here exactly is, but. If they are mazare according to the Torah, like it, it gets to this question of like, what does it mean to have this kind of a status, whether it's impurity or maity or whatever it might be according to the Torah, because in principle.
They're almost like declaring a truth. It's, it's almost like if you have, uh, if you have two people with light colored eyes, you know, we know those are both double recessive. Their children are going to have light colored eyes. Like, this is not an opinion, this is a, a truth. This is a fact. That's right. So there's, so if you are a moms there and then you, you're passing your moms down to the next person.
Now, if somebody comes along and says, well, we're going to say that you're not a moms era according to the rep, but you're still, you still are a mom's era according to the Torah. So there's this like, bad thing being passed down, passed down. We're just choosing to ignore it. I mean, that's one possibility, right?
That that's, but that what, what that's starting to say is that the world we are creating is so divergent from the world of the Torah, that we are full of mom's ears, you know, according to the Torah in the world, and we're just going to, you know, not, not see that status, except that they're about to say something slightly different.
Yeah,
BENAY LAPPE: I, I would say it's not that there. Recognizing that there are Torah in the world and we're gonna ignore it. I think they're asserting their, their, the, the, the right to impute to themselves the authority to say we name existential truth, not the Torah. Uhhuh. And yes, the Torah would say this, but we now are the Torah.
Or, or yesterday the Torah would've said that.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: But there is no more Torah in that sense anymore. We are now Torah and
in the eyes of. Us who's the real Torah? This woman is no longer married to her first husband, therefore, that second marriage is a marriage and the children are not moms. Ara. So I think they are saying the existential reality of the status is, as we say, not as the Torah says uhhuh, but, but I agree that there's this ambiguity in their language.
Because what the, the Sta is lifting up is this, do you mean to tell me that you're going to marry someone who in the eyes of the Torah is already married? Yes. The fact that they say yes does suggest what you're saying, which is, yes, that person is, that woman is a married woman still. We're still good.
Mm-hmm. It, I don't know. It's twisting my brain,
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh. Well, it's interesting that, so we're, we're, when we look at the text, uh, I mean, I'll, I'll actually, we can see this on the, uh, in the, the, the translation. 'cause, uh, Stein, he often, who's, who's doing the translation here, right? He has an interest in softening some of the, of the more radical elements of the text, whether that's in his explanations, which is what we see in the non bold, right?
The bold is the, is the actual words, more or less of the text. And the non bold is kind of some explanations and sometimes things get bolded that shouldn't be bolded, which I have an eye for, since I used to do some line editing. But in the, in the text here, we see that the comma after Yes. Is bold.
Actually, it shouldn't be bold because none of the punctuation is actually in the, in the original text. Um, and, and there's a question about where, where is the right way to read it? Um, you know, is there a matter whereby the Torah, it's not a bill of divorce, but due to virtuous women and licentious women, we permit a married woman to others.
Yes. Period. Exactly. Exactly. That's how you and I read it. Um, Stein out says Yes, comma, and then kind of little explanation, you know? And Yes, because you know, and, and yes, anyone. And then the next line is, is yes, comma. And the next line is anyone who betroth betroth upon the agreement of the sages. Um, that's the next line.
Now you could say yes, comma, that it's a little softer than yes. Period. Right. That and, uh, and then like, okay, now we'll give you a little bit of explanation, but, but the bottom line is that, do you mean to tell me? And the answer is Yeah. Yep. Yeah,
BENAY LAPPE: exactly. And you're absolutely right that there's a world of messaging in thata.
I pointed out last week in the, in the, in the Jerusalem Talmud, there's a period there and what comes after an hour text in the Babylonian Talmud does not appear over there. And what appears over there is a kind of postscript that makes it very clear really what's implied in that. Yes. And it says over there, yes, the rabbis have the power to overturn Torah Uhhuh, period.
Full stop. Um, and I think it's in that acknowledgement that they're overturning Torah, that it's a little bit more of what I was saying earlier. It, it's not that they're saying, yeah, this woman is an adulterer and we don't care. It's that they're saying we are over, we, we don't see as any longer valid.
What the Torah says about her. I think that's what they're saying now. Ha, having said that, I just wanna say that the comma that Stein Taltz is putting in there is really very sensitive to what does come now in the pa in the, in the Babylonian Talmud that we're reading. And in fact, this next line has a way of undermining the, it is undermining the radicalness of that.
Yes. And what I've learned over the years from, from my teachers who are academics, is that it is characteristic of the Babylonian Talmud to backpedal some of the radicalness. Um, whereas the Ymi doesn't, which is interesting. So we'll look today at the backpedal that comes up right now. And sorry, I cut you off.
What were you gonna say?
DAN LIBENSON: Uh, no, no, I think, I think that I, that, that that's what, no, I don't think, I, I don't, uh, I don't remember. Um, okay, so the, so the next, so the next thing that the rabbis say is whether it's after a comma or after a period, anyone who betroth a woman, I mean, they're talk, they're, they're saying, 'cause really the Talmud is aimed at men and as we always say in a hetero, heteronormative context, but, uh, so any one means any man.
Uh, so any, right.
BENAY LAPPE: Let, yeah, let's remember. It's, it's not just that the audience is men, it's that only a man in their world can effectuate a marriage to, in, in their world. A woman, a woman cannot. Make a marriage happen in the, okay, fine. So any man who betroth Uhhuh,
DAN LIBENSON: any man who betroth a woman Yeah. Betroth her contingent upon the agreement of the sages.
BENAY LAPPE: Great. Let's stop there for a minute.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: So first of all, that's a very bold statement because the rabbis have inserted themselves into this, um, dynamic between a man and in, in their heteronormative world, a woman. And between his right to do what the Torah gives him the right to do, um, by saying, yeah, you can marry the Torah gives you the right to effectuate marriage, but we're gonna put ourselves in the middle and say.
That marriage can only ever be effectuated if it has our approval, if it corresponds to and, and is in line with the values that we've put in place in our new rabbinic system, which is a really TZ thing to do. Mm-hmm. And as Rashi points out here, Rashi says, oh yeah, that's what is meant by that formula, that quote, unquote, traditionally, the man says to the woman under the hookah, which is right, behold, be behold, tro with this ring.
And then the last three words, Israel, which is typically translated as according to the laws of Moses in Israel, the simple, plain meaning of that formula. Always was according to the laws of bracket Moses in Israel as a kind of collective, the laws of the Jewish people.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: But the rabbis, in order to kind of backfill of textual some textual evidence for their right to say, oh, but only if I like this marriage.
They read those words according to the laws of Moses in Israel to meet according to the laws of a Moses and the laws of be Israel, there are two sets of laws they're saying. Mm-hmm. Which is very creative and. You know, forced read of the phrase, according to the laws of Moses in Israel, and they say the laws of Moses.
Yeah, that's the Torah.
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh
BENAY LAPPE: for sure. Laws of Israel, that's us buddy
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh,
BENAY LAPPE: we're Israel. So if your, if your marriage doesn't conform to our new set of rules, values, and principles, we have the right to retroactively un to either deny you the right to marry or to retroactively annul this marriage,
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh.
BENAY LAPPE: And this process is called Ha, the, the uprooting of a marriage. Uh, the breaking of a Marriage. And it comes right from the language that's about to appear.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, go ahead. Before, before that, like, I just wanna hold up a, like a contrast because, uh, and I do this guardedly because I'm not an expert in canon, Catholic canon law by any stretch of the imagination.
But, but I did, uh, have, you know, I do have Catholic friends. No, I mean I, I, I did, I did used to teach at a Catholic law school and at this Catholic law school that I taught at some of my colleagues, and one in particular was an expert in Catholic cannon law. And so, you know, he was a Catholic cannon lawyer.
That was his, you know, he would, I dunno exactly how it works, but he would like bring cases within the church and, and we had some really interesting conversations and, and my understanding of how the Catholic tradition sees marriage, understands marriage, is that the, the, you know, the, the, the, um, analogous thing of hin, the, when you get married in a Catholic marriage.
A, a bond is created between the husband and the wife. That is a kind of a spiritual bond. It's, it's actually something that's created. It's like, it's real. Like it's a, it's a new thing that's created in the world and it's unbreakable. So it's as if like, um, you know, if you think about like Siamese twins being separated, like the bond of marriage is like the opposite of that.
It's that the husband and wife become like conjoined twins. Uh, I think it's the proper thing to say, not ese, but that, that they become conjoined twins so that they actually can't be broken apart. So then the issue is, well, what do you do? So that's why they don't have to divorce in Catholicism. So the only, so now under certain circumstances, uh.
If you, if you wanna not be together anymore. I mean, it used to be in the old days, they were like, tough luck. There's nothing you can do. You know, you don't have to like live together, but you're not gonna be able to marry someone else because we just don't recognize divorce. Not because we don't want to, not because we don't think it's a good thing, but because we actually think we can't do it.
I mean, by the way, there's a lot of that can't language that we've been talking about, you know, and we, and right, we, our hands are tied. What are we gonna do? You know? But there, but in their mind it's like, look, I mean, God made a spiritual bond. We can't break it as, we just can't, as much as we would try it be like, you know, if you were trying to cut, cut something, you know, cut a, a diamond, it can't be cut.
It can only be cut, right? It can't be, can't, can't be done. So the question is, so then they, they said, well, but, but wait a second. But the way that we could do it is if we could figure out that the marriage never happened in the first place, right? So we were under the illusion. We thought there was this bond that was created, but it actually never created because of some mistake.
And then they start getting into like, well, what are all the kind of mistakes that might, uh, mean that the marriage actually never happened in the first place? Um, and that's actually very similar to contract law in, in any kind of, uh, uh, legal system is that, you know, if the, if the very, there's some kind of mistake.
Like, I, I didn't, you told me you were, it was, you know, or I thought that I was buying hay that was, you know, fresh, but it turned out that it was. From last year, that was a mistake. And so maybe I can undo the contract by saying that it never actually occurred because I was under the impression that I was buying something different.
Something like that. And over time, if you expand the category of those, the mistakes that are kind of allowed to, to be used to, to say that this never happened, then you can start to get something closer to divorce. Right. So one of the examples that we were talking about was that like, let's say that your husband had an affair, then you could say that in the old way, you would've said, well, like what can I do?
You have this, this ironclad bond, uh, bond and we can't break it. But in this, uh, newer approach that my colleague had been, uh, uh, developing or, or promoting, and I think successfully, I think this has become a, an accepted thing in, in Catholicism that, um, that. You could say some, I think it was called something like mistake as to the quality of the person.
So meaning I thought I was marrying somebody who was faithful and somebody who was, would never have had an affair, you know? And, and the fact that he had an affair is proof of the mistake. So that, so that means that the fact that he had an affair is proof that I thought I was marrying a different person.
So I actually never married him. So that bond was never formed. And then we can now, we don't have to dissolve it. It was never formed. So now we can basically, like you say haf, we can essentially null the marriage. The marriage never happened. That's genius. The difference between that and, and, and I think that what we're talking about is that.
The Tal litter, the rabbis are more willing to say, more explicitly, maybe the same thing actually happening. In both cases. There's a pre-exist, you know, in one case it's the Torah. In another case it's God in Catholicism, you know, but there's this idea that in the previously, uh, we would've said, our hands are tied.
There's nothing we can do. In one case, we're doing that with a, with a big wink, you know, in a sense, like the Catholic approach is saying, like, you know, we, yeah, we understand that. 200 years ago, they would've said, sorry, Charlie, you're married, you know, but we can kind of backfill that whole thing. Whereas in the, in the, in the Talmud, they're, they're being more upfront about it.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, that's true. And, and let's remember that. I'll tell you what, let's go back to the text and get this last line out. Okay. Let the half of this line out on the table, and then we'll unpack it a little more. So how does Okay. So translate? Mm-hmm.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. So, uh, so anyone who betroth a woman betroth or contingent upon the agreement of the sages, uh, and in c and in certain cases such as this mentioned above, the sages invalidated his betrothal retroactively.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. So, so what that's saying is since the rabbis inserted themselves into the permissioning of any marriage, if they deem that any marriage that the continuation of any marriage violates their sort of moral sensibility or any of the rules they've set up to change the moral landscape, they have the right to say this marriage no longer is.
Uh, continuing with our consent and had we known you were going to behave in this way, we never would've married you in the first place. Therefore, we are pulling our permission and retroactively annulling this marriage, and it's as if it never happened in the first place. So this process is called haka.
It's the right of a badin. A court of three rabbis sages to annu a marriage even against the will of the husband. A husband who in this haik framework, is the only one who can choose to end the marriage.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Even if he refuses, the marriage can be pulled out from under him.
DAN LIBENSON: Hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. And so, for example, if a husband is abusive to his wife,
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh.
BENAY LAPPE: And he still, and he doesn't wanna divorce her. He just wants to abuse her and stay in the marriage. Um, the Bain can say, if we had known that you were going to behave this way, we never would've let you marry her in the first place. And we are going to mathia, we're gonna do haka ki we're going to uproot this marriage.
And this happens today in interestingly, liberal halachic settings, for example, in the conservative movement, what's notable and outrageous, and is only now beginning in the last decade or so to come into conversation is in the Orthodox world where the, the AANA problem. A problem. It's a problem only because this mechanism that we've had for 2000 years, it's right here in black and white
DAN LIBENSON: right,
BENAY LAPPE: is no longer being used.
And it's only what? It's only since women have been learning Talmud
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh
BENAY LAPPE: that women have gone, wait a minute,
DAN LIBENSON: right?
BENAY LAPPE: Page three of Kit two, bo, there's hka. This is the solution. We've had it all along. Do you mean to tell me we've had this solution all along and you've chosen not to use it and the only, the only answer the Bannu or orthodox authorities can give us.
In Uhhuh we have, you're right. It's here and we haven't used it. Now the conversation is a different conversation.
DAN LIBENSON: Just to clarify what you're talking about is the case where a husband refuses. This is a different case where a husband refuses to give his wife a divorce and leaves her as an una, meaning somebody who's chain stuck with her husband and can't, can't remarry.
This is this problem that's a alive today in the Orthodox world that there's a lot of, uh, feeling like. Like, this is a terrible situation, but there are these husbands who are able to use this power in the divorce, basically, right? I mean, 'cause like you say, like, look, you're, you don't think I should, you know, you, you want me to pay childcare?
Look, let's make a deal. I, I don't have to pay childcare and then I'll give you a Jewish divorce. But if you take me to the regular court and say, I'm gonna have to pay childcare, then I'm, I'm gonna withhold my Jewish divorce. So, so you might be able to get child support from me, but you'll never be able to marry again.
And, you know, you can use that as, as kind of a, a cudgel in the secular divorce proceedings or for whatever other reason that somebody might do. And a lot of, uh. Orthodox or religious authorities say, you know, yeah, that's terrible, but what can I do? Our hands are tied. Our hands are tied. The the husband in Jewish law has the, the right to, to give a divorce and, and the wife doesn't, and, and the right to
BENAY LAPPE: refuse to give a divorce
DAN LIBENSON: and refuse to give a divorce.
And right here where we're seeing right here that there is this concept that, that the, that you would think that the court could say, well, okay, then we're just gonna know the marriage and take away that the husband's power in that sense. And, and the, like you say, the, the tool is there. You have a sense of why there's a, there's, there's been a, why hasn't that tool been used before?
You know, in other words, like why, um, here we're seeing a case where, where Ava is concerned about the wellbeing of the woman. Why was that not used for this issue of wellbeing of the woman?
BENAY LAPPE: The patriarchy,
DAN LIBENSON: but I mean, no, but I mean, like, is there, yes. But like, is there a reason why in certain cases it has been, and in certain cases it hasn't been like you No.
BENAY LAPPE: In, in, in orthodoxy as far as I know, this entire tool is, you know, it, it, it's put into that excuse of well, they could do it because they were closer to Moses and Mount Sinai. And, but it's not for us to do, which I think is, is just kind of laughable. I mean, I think, I think what's going on, it's not that they selectively use it, they don't use it at all.
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, or else there'd be No, I do not. Problem
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh Uhhuh,
BENAY LAPPE: um, you know, there, you, there would be a problem of. The, the, the locus of the problem would be on the individuals in a bait dean choosing or not choosing to use this tool. Mm-hmm. But the tool is not recognized as a valid tool as far as I understand it.
Mm-hmm. Anywhere in, um, Orthodox communities. And why is that? I, I can only surmise mm-hmm. Um, that it's men protecting men and being uncharacteristically ally sensitive to the suffering of women. Mm-hmm. I mean, this entire soya is a, an example of I justification for. Utilizing this tool, right. For the problem of anot and Right.
I, I, I would say it's an abdication of their use of the tradi, I mean, of their responsibility to use the tradition in the way it was meant. But you'd have to ask someone from that community to justify it. Well,
DAN LIBENSON: it's interesting because in Catholicism it's a little bit different because in Catholicism nobody can initiate a divorce.
It's not neither the man nor the woman. Right. And so one of the objections to some of this, like greater use of annulment. Has by, has actually come from women. I, there was a famous case with one of the Kennedys and um, and the, the wife basically said that the husband was using this annulment to get out of the marriage and was making it so that What, so that, now you're saying that for the last 20 years of my life, I haven't been married.
I mean, like that you're saying, you're saying to me that I was never married and you're saying to our children that they were born out of wedlock. You know, that's, that, that there is some objection because it was actually harming the woman, or the woman was, was feeling harmed by it. Here, here it's different because the, in, in the Jewish case, the, the, you could say, well, we, we don't ever do this for a man because the man has the option to.
And to, to, to divorce. This would be a tool that could only be used by women and only in the circumstance where the man is misbehaving or, you know, whatever it might be. Uh, uh, it seems like some of those objections that, that we might know about from the Catholic conversation actually don't apply in the Jewish conversation.
BENAY LAPPE: And another, another aspect that is different in the two contexts is that the annulment of a Jewish marriage does not change the status of the children born in that marriage.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. The
BENAY LAPPE: fact that the marriage, um, quote unquote never happened, if it is a, the children born from that non marriage do not take on the status of Mazare.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, because their parents were permitted to have intercourse. And produce a child, whether within wedlock, within a marriage or without. And there's no halachic disability to a child being born of two people permitted to one another who don't marry. Mm-hmm. So it doesn't change the status of Jewish children to have a Jewish marriage, an adult.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. Is, is there, like, it feels to me like, um, I just wanna make sure before we move on, I just wanna make sure that I fully Yeah. Have this whole marriage thing right? Because it feels like, um, are the rabbis basically saying here that there is no way to be married no matter to, to no matter what you might think the Torah says, or maybe it used to say it, you know, in other words, it does.
It maybe, it used to be that there were other ways to get married, but now there is aren't. What they're, but what they're saying is that, um, there's actually no way to get married properly, you know, officially Jewishly, other than by using the rabbinic tool toolbox, which includes a katuba and whatever other steps.
And so, whereas you might have said, according to the Torah, it looks like you can get married through the active intercourse itself, for example. That we don't have that anymore. That's not, that's not gonna be a valid marriage anymore. Um, and. The only way to get married is, is, is through the particular rabbinic approach.
And by the way, I wanna also note, I think this is right, just to clarify that it's not 'cause it's, it's not that you need to have a rabbi perform your marriage. It's that you have to do, you have to execute your marriage through the rabbinic, the rabbinically ordained formula. But it, it doesn't have to be done by a rabbi.
There's always a lot of confusion about that in, in, among Jews. You know, that, that, that they're surprised to hear that a rabbi doesn't have to perform a marriage. No. But it does have to be performed according to the rabbinic rules.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. Exactly. There there's no sort of ministerial magic that a rabbi per, you know, throws on.
There's no like, because I bless this or it's, there's nothing like that. There's actually nothing zero that a rabbi can effectuate that a knowledgeable lay person and the can't, and, and actually an ignorant. Person can't. It's just that the knowledgeable piece ensures, like you said, that whatever procedure is done is according to the rules, because a knowledgeable person would know, you know, what rules or what documents need to happen and so on.
Yeah. Uhhuh. Um, but we also haven't really connected the dots yet, so I don't wanna interrupt your train of thought, but let's eventually get to how does this tool of, of haka Kushing, what does that have to do with this case?
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh? Yeah, I mean, let's go there because I, I think that is where like my head is turning and I'm just kind of like wanting to make sure that we iron everything out.
So, so if I understand this correctly, they're saying, look, you were so surprised a second ago. When you said, what? You're gonna take a married woman and you're gonna allow her to marry another woman even though she's still married to the first person you, you know, and, and we said, yeah, we're, we're gonna do that.
But the, the explanation is that the reason why it's not quite how you just said it, so shocked in such a shock manner is that the only reason that a woman is ever a married woman is because she's been married within the rabbinic framework. And here we're telling you that we are adjusting the laws of the rabbinic framework such that we can, that we can, uh, effectively annul the marriage or, you know, by, by saying that a divorce is going to take, uh, is going to, it is going to be, uh, it's going to take, uh, it's going to be, uh, enforce.
If it, if the condition was met, whether or not there was any onus?
BENAY LAPPE: Not exactly. Okay. Not exactly. And this is slippery, and every time I learn this, I have to rewrap my head around it and it never quite works for me because it's a contradiction to the Yes. What I think the rabbis are saying here is if a man gives his wife a conditional get conditional divorce document, behold, this is your divorce, you'll be divorced from me if I do not return within 30 days, let's say he goes off on his trip and remember he doesn't want to divorce her.
He just doesn't want her to be stuck as a married woman to him in the event that he dies without witnesses and nobody can find his body. Okay, he goes away, he's chased up a tree by a bear and he doesn't get down from the tree until day 31. And then he comes back and he finally gets home on day 31 and he says, oh, that, that divorce, you know, we've been divorced now for 24 hours.
That should be ripped up because it only went into effect because of onus, because I was constrained from returning by those bears. The Torah gives me the right to have that condition be seen as not, uh, reached, and therefore the divorce not go into effect. And I'm gonna play that Torah card. And, uh, I mean, uh, re God forgives those who are constrained and for undoes all negative consequences of that constraint.
I'm, I have that card. I was born with it as a Jew. As I converted, I'm spiritually the inheritor of that card. I'm playing it. What this line here is saying is, you know, you have the right to play it, but I have the right to say if you're gonna be such a jerk as to play that card, and it would be jerky of you to do that because if any woman knows that her husband can come home and play that card, there's always, she's gonna be uncertain whether the get she has in her hand is really going to be a get forever or one that's gonna be overturned if you're gonna be such a jerk as to continue to play that card, and we can't actually stop you.
This is where the backing up of the radical is. We can't actually stop you and no, we can't actually marry her again. In other words, perform her marriage to a second husband. What we're gonna do to you is we're gonna uproot your marriage. Retroactively, we're gonna do Hakka Kushing in this such a case.
Now you've got no card to play because you've got no, no marriage to play it on. You are not married. She never was married to you. That's a mechanism that they're gonna use if a man insists on doing what the Torah actually allows him to do. So in the end, you don't have as radical a move as you had with the Yes, because that radical move was Yeah, we know what the Torah thinks.
We know that, um, the, the Torah knows the man played his get outta jail free card and they are married again. And yet we're gonna perform this marriage and we're gonna say F you to this Torah. What we say go. It really isn't that. Bold of a move that we're making. But again, this is a later addition only to the Babylonian Talmud.
And I think is, is, uh, an apologetic trying to tone down
DAN LIBENSON: because I'm not totally convinced because if, uh, I'm not, not that I'm saying, I'm not convinced that that's what they're trying, they're trying to say here, but like, it, it, it feels like a little bit logically problematic to me because if what I understand you to be talking about is like, okay, so you have, so.
So, right. So I, I gave this conditional divorce and said, if I don't come back within 30 days, the divorce is, is final. Uh, turns out I was chased up a tree. Uh, so I now come back. It's a little bit of schrader's cat kind of thing. Right. You know, the idea is like if the cat alive or dead, you know? Right. We, it's in a box we don't know right now.
So in a sense he says like, well, I have the right to say that this divorce isn't final because I had onus, I was chased up a tree. I was, you know, I couldn't, it was my fault that I didn't come back, but I also could just say nothing and then, and then, um, sort of allow the divorce to, to, to play out, like to be final.
Right, right. The thing is, is that unless there's a kind of a statute of limitations, then I main maintain myself in that Schrodinger's cat situation indefinitely. Right. I could always come back and say, you know, well two years later it turned, you know, yeah. I didn't come back within 30 days, but that was because I was chased up a tree and it, so now meanwhile, the wife has married another man.
So, so now we're still in this like Schrader's cat situation. She may be an adulterous and she may not be, and it, it depends on actually two factors at this point. Number one, whether the man was, the husband was chased up a tree or not, which we don't know. He is the only one it is. Right? And the other possibility is, is he gonna speak up or not?
You know, is he gonna enforce it or not? That's right. Her being an adulterous is not actually, is is her. The fact that whether or not she's an adulterous is, is a fact in the world. It's just in a box, right? We don't, we, we don't know what the fact is until we look inside it. So the point, the thing about the haka hin the idea of the, the annulment that if, if it's, if the basic idea is saying, but well, husband, if you try to enforce your.
Your claim that she's an adulterous, you know, based on that you experienced onus, you know, then we're going to pull the rug out from under you and say that we're gonna undo the marriage and, and that the marriage never was and never was, and therefore she's not an adulterous. But meanwhile, but all that time, until you decided whether or not you wanna come and enforce your right, she technically may have actually been an adulterous.
So like, it, it feels to me like if you take that all seriously, uh, the, the only, the only answer that really makes sense because the only answer that actually says to her on day 30, you're no longer an adulterous, is one that says. That says we are going to, uh, it's, it's less about the, the annulment. It's more about saying we are go, we are redefining marriage to be rabbinic marriage only.
And what the rabbis giveth, the rabbis taketh away. And so we, and and within that system, we are now going to say, if you give a conditional divorce and that condition is met, it doesn't matter whether or not there's, there's onus, uh, like that, that's the only way that it makes her not actually committing adultery.
For sure. And so that's why this, this piece here at the end feels like it, it really is very, um, well the part about the, the part about the haka, ah, feels to me like it's the apologetic tack on, but it, it's not, it's not really what's going on.
BENAY LAPPE: That's really interesting, and I think you may have named one of the pieces that still has bothered me about this mechanism.
Um, is that it doesn't really solve the problem,
DAN LIBENSON: right. The
BENAY LAPPE: problem of her actually being an adulterous, even though you know she's in Schrader's box and we don't know that that's the case. I, I think that's right. Um, but what what has more bothered me about this is that it's a workaround which backs the rabbis up from their more powerful move of saying that which looks to the Torah as adulterous in which the Torah would name as adulterous, we are going to say is not.
Period. You know, I think that's a cleaner, bolder move and. And I think, I think you are right, that this mechanism
both softens and yet doesn't solve completely the problem.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm.
DAN LIBENSON: I mean, it's, it's very Talmudic like, what I, like what I wanna do at this stage, right? Like, where it is, like what I wanna, I wanna like add another page to the Talmud here, you know where, because there's so much in the Talmud where it's like, right, they, they wanna really get it right.
You know, they kind of wanna, there's like, there's like, we, but if we, if we say what you're saying, then the logical implication is this. And then, you know, and, and that's, you know, I, I like it. It's, it, it can sometimes go too far, but it feel like, what feels weird about this in a way is it's like, it almost kind of like stops and doesn't give you the next.
The next logical argument, which is basically, but wait a second. If you, but, but if, if it's really, if it's really a question of this is that we're only telling the man, like, if you enforce your rights, we're gonna take your right away from you. It's not really solving the problem for the woman, it's just saying to her like, okay, you're committing adultery, but we're not going to enforce it, which actually makes the children mazare.
So it, it, it feels like it's not, it, the, the, unless the conclusion somehow ends up that she's not committing adultery, period, end of story, then I don't think it's a satisfactory resolution.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. So I'm gonna have to walk myself through this mechanism to locate again the problem that you're identifying.
Okay. Let see if I have it.
Husband gives his wife a conditional get behold, here's your get. If I do not return within 30 days goes away. Chase up a tree, comes back on day 31.
DAN LIBENSON: Let's say it comes back on day 35.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, no, yeah. Let's say it comes back on day 35 and on day 31 she got remarried because she had what she thought was a kosher get in her hand.
She
does she know Ava's new law of a known as ine. Well, is she in a world of a known as ine? Yes. Let's say. Let's
DAN LIBENSON: say that she is.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay, fine. She knows she's in a world of a known as ine, so she knows her husband can't. That's what's, that's what's,
DAN LIBENSON: no, no. She, she knows. What she knows according to this last line, I think, is that if her husband comes back and tries to en and tries to enforce, tries to undo the get, the rabbis will come along in and all the marriage.
Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. So I think what this last line does is it says that it's, we're still in a world of an onus ine, but the way in which the mechanism through which we are depriving this man of being able to claim onus to undo the get is through this mechanism. Okay, let me hold on to that. So she goes and remarries on day 35, he comes back and says, Hey, but I was chased up a tree.
Hold it. Hey. But I was chased up a tree
before the bait Dean meets. And this is your Schraders cap box? Mm-hmm. Before the bait Dean meets. Are you saying,
see, I I think the moment he comes back and tries to play his on card is a kind of instantaneous re retroactive annulment that goes into, into motion.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. But like what I'm, what I'm, what I'm saying what I'm saying, like, I think fundamentally that's right. But like what I'm trying to like figure out.
Exactly. So let's, so he comes back ultimately on day 35, she gets married, remarried on day 31. I feel like from day 32 days, 32, 33 and 34, she is committing adultery according to the Torah. And the question is, so, so it, so the only, the only solution that truly makes everything right is one that says that the marriage ended on day 30.
Mm-hmm. And then she's fine. Mm-hmm. But if, if, if what we're saying is the marriage actually ends on day 35. Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Alright. Sorry. When the marriage is annu retroactively, the presumptive adultery is no longer adultery because they're never ne quote unquote, never was a mirror.
That's the, that's it. Right? Right. So, so we don't really have a problem.
DAN LIBENSON: It's, here's my que here's my question. If, if
BENAY LAPPE: it's only presumptive adultery,
DAN LIBENSON: but, but let's say that, let's say that he comes back on day 35 and he sees that she's married to another man. Yes. He's not going to, he's not going. He, he may he he says, he, he says in his mind, I'm not going to insist on my rights under onus to undo this divorce because I see she's happy.
I see she's married to another man, but he continues to have, you are right,
BENAY LAPPE: the right
DAN LIBENSON: to do that.
BENAY LAPPE: You are right. No, you're right. That actually the more problematic case is when he doesn't insist,
DAN LIBENSON: right?
BENAY LAPPE: Because regardless of his insistence or not a condition that goes into effect by virtue of onus, hasn't.
Effectively gone into effect.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: Whether he wants it to or not, or is willing to take or wants to take advantage of that effect. Yeah, you're right. So because the condition went into effect as the result of onus, the condition isn't, a con isn't mole, it's not fulfilled.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Therefore, the get doesn't go into effect.
You are right. You are right. That's a problem.
DAN LIBENSON: So, so that's why, like, I, I, I don't know if this is like what's meant, like the, the, the resolution that I would prefer would be one that would say mm-hmm. Some version of. Because we have the right to As because the rabbis, because we have the right to, because this whole marriage is happening within this new system that we've constructed, and within that system, we actually have the right to undo the marriage.
Uh, as if it never happened, then all the more. So do we have the right to do something that's even less dramatic than that, which is to, uh, which is to remove onus as a category for enforcing divorces. Right. We're just going right Then, then, you know, basically because we have the right, and by the way, this would go even further in terms of the issue of, of, uh, aud in, in modern Judaism is to say, because this whole system is happening within the system that we built, then there is no, our hands are tied.
Right, right. Then, then, then we can do anything that we want to. That's right. And we want to. Have certainty. We want to not have, you know, adultery where that's not actually what's going on. We want to not have suffering. We want to minimize the number of mazare, like we wanna do all these things, and therefore we can modify the rules and regulations to be different from what it would've been under the Torah system in order to effectuate those things.
Now I think the issue that's happening today in orthodoxy, you know, may be this issue that we've talked about of Yuri wrote, you know, the, the, that each generation is less close to God, less wise than the previous one. And they're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, that was the way, like if we could admit that they set up the system that way, that the marriage and divorces we have today has nothing to do with the Torah.
It's simply a rabbinic system. But for whatever reason, the rabbis, you know, Ava did, uh, do this anon. He did, he did make divorces more certain, but he didn't, um. He, he, we look in the Talmud and we see that there's certain other kinds of, uh, things that you can do to, for a man who doesn't give his wife a divorce, for example.
And this has caused all kinds of like issues more recently with all kinds of crimes, but that you can beat up the man until he says, I wanna divorce her. You know, it doesn't have to be, uh, it doesn't have to be fully, uh. Fully, um, what's the word? Like when you, when you, uh, want to do something, you know,
BENAY LAPPE: al or
DAN LIBENSON: volitional?
Yeah, you can be, it can just say, he can just state I want to, even if he doesn't really want to. And it was course, so you can't beat him up until he says that, you know, for example. But they didn't do, they didn't say somewhere here like, we can, um, annul the marriage because the husband won't get, so look, they didn't do it.
What can we do? You know, our hands are tied. So, so when we do this show, I mean like, there are two possibilities I think that flow from the approach that we take on this show, right? One is to say, Hey, Orthodox rabbi is like, you have other options. You know, you, you could actually do it. Um, and number two, that that, and, and for me, the more primary one, that, that whole, that, that, that whole system is crashing.
We're actually talking about building a, a new system. And we would definitely make sure that in our new system, it, it didn't have these problems.
BENAY LAPPE: One easy way to do that would simply be to allow women to initiate divorces.
DAN LIBENSON: Exactly right. Right, right, right. So let by the way, let, let's really, let's really put our thumb on that one.
I mean, like in this version of Judaism, the rabbinic version of Judaism, women don't have the right to initiate divorces, period. There's like nothing that you can do that is inherently horrible, you know, like meaning like I, you know, it's probably, it was always horrible. But I mean, the way that we look at it now, from our perspective, it's we, we don't want, it's not that you wanna like try to like tweak that system so that some of that is softened.
You wanna say like, that is absurd. We cannot live under a system in which women cannot initiate divorces. If that means that, that only that in and of itself is, is the evidence that we need to build a new system altogether, then so be it. And that, right in that, and there's, there's certainly other examples, but that's certainly one of them.
It's like, how can we live in a system where, where women can initiate a divorce?
BENAY LAPPE: Absolutely. Absolutely. Um.
And we simply need to get those people who have that sensibility and sensitivity to the, the obvious moral concern of women as human, you know, full human beings to sit on the law committee and say, yes, I'm actually not sure of the status of conservative, uh, halakha and the issue of women initiating divorces.
DAN LIBENSON: I'm not sure either, but it, but that's why I'm saying to, but I'm, I, it would surprise me if, if, if a woman can initiate a divorce in conservative Judaism because it, I think conservative Judaism tries to make extreme modifications. Wherever it can and feels the need to, but they tend to be in the form of we're going to find a way kind of around this rather than we're going to just change it.
Um,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah. Which, which is a dynamic we see right, right here. And that's why this last piece of this text disappoints me
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh, because
BENAY LAPPE: it, you're right, it shifts the
mindset from Ava's mindset of we can do anything.
DAN LIBENSON: Yep.
BENAY LAPPE: To our hands are tied. We really can't do anything. We can do certain workarounds. Um, but, but the, the damage of the workaround is that it restores that myth of. Our hands are tied. Well exactly. Look in, in some theoretical place.
DAN LIBENSON: Right, which is, well, when I used to teach, uh, when I, when I used to teach law, um, it's like civil rights law.
There was a, um, there was a case, this had to do with like healthcare reform. Maybe this was, I don't remember what class it was that I taught disability law. I don't remember what it was, but I would teach this class this about the, the, um, all the, there was all this like, um, energy behind healthcare reform.
Know in the, in the 1990s and the big story, the big, uh, thing that, that was being used to say why we need to have healthcare reform was what was called drive-through deliveries. It was the idea that you go into have a baby and you know, they say like, you don't really need to be in the hospital after you have a baby.
I mean, you know, it's like, so you could just go, go right home a few hours. Uh, and um, you go right home and most people have an instinct like, let the person be in the hospital for, you know, a day or two. I mean, come on, this is horrible. Like if you're doing so, there was a lot of energy saying, oh my God, there's drive through deliveries.
Of course we need healthcare reform. So one way to, to deal with that is to say, yeah, we need healthcare reform. Let's completely reform the whole system of healthcare in this country. The other way to handle that is to say, oh, let's make a little loss saying you can't have drive-through deliveries anymore.
You know, you have to have one or two days in the hospital after a delivery, and that is what they did. And that takes the wind outta the sails of the whole healthcare reform movement. So in a sense, here, solving this problem in an unsatisfactory way, not only. May not fully solve the problem, but it also takes away the energy from saying, wait a second, wait a second.
Do you mean to tell me that a woman can't initiate a divorce? Because I'll tell you, that's how most of my friends would read this text. Like, they wouldn't say, do you mean to tell me that you a man? Could be the, they'd say, do you mean to tell me that in Judaism a woman can't initiate a divorce? Like, and I would be like, yes.
And they, and they would say, well, that's not right. And I would say, I agree with you. So, uh, that's why I think that the, that this is beyond putting a woman on the law committee that, that this is because, because, um, because I, I think that when you, that at a certain point, I, it may not look, I mean, there are women on the law committee of, of the conservative movement, and, and I, and I think that the, the law committee, even though even with women on it will say, our hands are tied.
We can do workarounds, but we can't upend the entire, uh, so, so, so sometimes, so, so what I'm getting at is like sometimes there's, there's, there's evidence. And, and, and I think that as we go on, we wanna say like, what is that evidence in our world today that it goes beyond getting a woman or an LGBT person or whatever on the law committee.
That's great. We should have that. But that's a stopgap measure. And what we really are seeing here, what you say, you know, is a crash. And the rebuilding after the crash is not to just make up stuff out of scratch, you know? It's to say, no, no, like it fell apart. Now we have a pile of stuff. Let's now sift through the pile and, and take the stuff that's still good and we're gonna rebuild something new.
So it's gonna, it's still gonna be Jewish, you know, but it's, it's gonna include women can initiate divorces,
BENAY LAPPE: right? And
the, the, the unwillingness to. Return to let, return to the era of radical audacity.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, is, is on the one hand, hard to understand. On the other hand, uh, I of course I understand it.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, you know what, when things are crashing, it's, it is an a, not the, but a natural response to say, let's not make too many changes, because that's going to accelerate our demise.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: And the more we can, you know, try to keep things quote unquote traditional, the more that will act as a bulwark toward, um, change it, it actually does the opposite. And, you know, that wasn't the rabbinic approach, but that, that, I think that's the mindset, um, which is really, it's really unfortunate and.
We can't forget, and I don't want people to think that the Talmud is a, is kind of a, a historically flat document and that it ends in this disappointing way. This last piece is an addition a later, a far later addition to the Talmud, um, somewhere between three and 400 years after Ava's very radical move and after the radicalness of the, of the St himself to say, yeah, that's exactly what we're gonna do.
Disregard what the Torah thinks about this woman. Yes, that's exactly what we're gonna do. What I can't understand is why does the st maybe it's like the ST's grandson, like grandson St I don't know, but the st this is a st edition as well to pedal, to backpedal that edition, and I'm not sure why, why it's there.
Um. But
DAN LIBENSON: well, that, that's a good place for us to, I mean, I think that, that this will keep coming up in as we do, because I, I, I think the answer is, whoa, whoa, whoa. We just unleashed something very scary, very powerful here. You know? And if it's like you say, why, why don't we, why isn't Savara taught the way it is?
You know? The concept is s far, you know, that's very dangerous. It's, it's a, you know, I like it, but it's, it's very dangerous to those who are looking for that kind of stability. Um,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, I think it, I think there were two different sts here. Yeah. I think there was
DAN LIBENSON: no, yeah. The stma
BENAY LAPPE: and then I think there was like fluky st.
Who ca who came in, you know, a, a generation later and said, oh, wait a minute.
DAN LIBENSON: Yep.
BENAY LAPPE: Anyway.
DAN LIBENSON: Yep. Alright, let's TV continued.
BENAY LAPPE: Alright, thanks, Stan was fun.
DAN LIBENSON: Thanks. Bye.
BENAY LAPPE: Bye.
DAN LIBENSON: Thanks so much for joining our chevruta today! We hope you’ve enjoyed learning with us… and with the Talmud. You can find links to the source sheets for all episodes in the show notes and on our website at oraltalmud.com. Your support helps keep Oral Talmud going. You can find a link on the website to contribute. We’d also love to hear from you! Email us with any questions, comments, or thoughts at hello@oraltalmud.com. Please, share your Oral Talmud with us – we’re so excited to learn from you. The Oral Talmud is a joint project of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva and Judaism Unbound, two organizations that are dedicated to making Jewish texts and ideas more accessible for everyone. We are especially grateful to Sefaria for an incredible platform that makes the Talmud available to everyone. It’s free at sefaria.org. And we are grateful to SVARA-nik Ezra Furman for composing and performing The Oral Talmud’s musical theme. The Oral Talmud is produced by Joey Taylor, with help from Olivia Devorah Tucker, and with financial support from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. Thanks so much for listening–and with that, this has been the Oral Talmud. See ya next time.
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