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LOVE AND MARRIAGE

same offense. If a woman commits adultery, her husband is required to divorce her and she loses the monetary settlement of the

ketubabh.

In an extended analysis of the Jewish wedding ceremony, Rachel Adler points out that two different visions of the relationship of husband and wife are presented: possession and covenantal

partner:

By the time of the Mishnah ...a wedding has become a religious event of cosmic significance. Taking a woman to wife is categorized as a unique kind of acquisition, blending characteristics of both purchase and the religious act of setting goods aside for sacred donation, hekedesh. The ceremony of taking acquires a new rabbinic name reflecting its sanctification: kiddushin.*

The ceremony is about normalizing the place of women. It represents a view of women that Reform Judaism rejects. The maintenance of the ceremony of kiddushin, even in its egalitarian­ized form, is insufficient to symbolize the radical nature of the change that Reform Judaism has made in the status of women. A new ceremony would mean that women were more than honorary men, but that they were full partners whose gender is acknowledged as being part of the original creation of humankind:

Mishnah cannot make women into men. But it can provide for a world in which it is normal for women to be subject to men—father or husband—and a system to regularize the transfer of women from the hand of the father to that of the husband. The regulation of the transfer of women from the Mishnah ’s way of effecting the sanctification—that is, special handling—of what, for the moment, disturbs and disorders the orderly world. The work of sanctification becomes necessary in particular at the point of

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