PETER S. KNOBEL

danger or disorder so as to preserve the normal mode of creation so that maleness may encompass all, even at the critical point of transfer.”

We can reinterpret a ritual, or we can create a new ritual to symbolize the newly understood reality. This is the choice that Ra­ chel Adler ’s description of marriage as Brit Ahuvim poses to us. Most Reform Jews would already understand their marriage to be an egalitarian covenantal partnership.*® The double kinyan is un­derstood to accomplish this, but it already changes the halakhic paradigm, because a double kinyan invalidates the transaction. Further, a man cannot bestow himself on a woman; he must declare “you are mine” and not“I am yours.”*

A woman cannot initiate a marriage. I would have thought, if she[the wife] gives him[the husband] money and betroths him, it would be a valid kiddushin: therefore Scripture wrote,“When a man taketh,” but not,“When a woman taketh,” nor can it result from mutual exchange:

It is the woman who must be acquired, because only the woman undergoes a status change. She will belong exclusively to that man. The man will not belong to the woman because, in relationships, men are subjects but never objects, unless they are slaves. Hence, a man can validly declare,“Be espoused to half of me,” because he may divide himself among as many women as be chooses, but if he declares“I hereby espouse half of you,” no kiddushin has been effected, because unlike a slave who may be owned fractionally by several masters, a woman can only be espoused as the exclusive acquisition of one man.*'

Rachel Adler also rejects mutual kinyan for the additional reason that it is a continuation of the commodification of people.” She argues that this does not reflect contemporary egalitarian Jewish

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