PETER S. KNOBEL
When one of the many individualized or standardized progressive ketubot are used, the bride and the groom sign the ketubah, and both men and women can serve as witnesses. The promises are always mutual; they affirm the quality of the relationship as well as a commitment to Jewish life.* In North America , civil divorce, at least, has been substituted for the get, and most Reform rabbis will remarry people who have not obtained a get.** The almost exclusive recognition of civil divorce is due to the lack of power a woman has to initiate divorce proceedings and the many abuses that occur when men refuse to give their wives a ger or they extract extraordinary conditions. In Reform Judaism we have abandoned the category of aguna on ethical grounds.
Jewish marriage is an agreement, a brit, between two Jewish adults who love each other and want to share faithfully every aspect of their lives. It is the individuals who enter into the contract by signing the ketubah in addition to the two witnesses and the officiating rabbi. They exchange rings and make a declaration of sanctification, and they share a cup of wine over which the seven blessings describing marriage are recited.
In the halakhah, only a woman’s status is changed completely. She becomes permitted sexually to her husband and forbidden to all other men. Her husband’s status, on the other hand, hardly changes. He is still permitted to most of the women to whom he was previously permitted, except for certain relatives of the bride. Although monogamy is the norm in Orthodox Judaism , in countries where it is standard for men to have more than one wife it is still potentially and maybe actually permissible. In addition, 2 married man that“commits adultery” with an unmarried woman is still not subject to the same penalty as a woman that commits the
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