DANIEL SCHIFF

adultery as married women could well have been grounded in this sure textual foundation.

Beyond these two reasons one could even have fashioned a credible halakhic case that a sexual relationship between a married man and a single woman ought to be considered adultery. After all, an individual who so much as engages in an“appurtenance” of one of the three transgressions that demanded that a Jew forfeit his life rather than commit them, was considered to have transgressed.> One could surely have built a respectable case that—at least from the time the ban on polygamy came into effect—a sexual relationship between a married man and a single woman represented a condemnable appurtenance of adultery. But no such case was forthcoming. With one Israeli exception,” even the compelling demand of equality failed to terminate the silence surrounding adultery. As a result, virtually all progressive Jews remain without explicit guarantees of the equal application of precepts of adultery for men and for women.

Even if the challenge of equality were overlooked and mamzerut were absent as a spur, the vast twentieth-century changes in the ethics of marriage and sexuality should have supplied ample material to evoke multiple questions on adultery within Reform Judaism. the fact that, through more than one hundred years, the sum total of progressive pesikah on adultery amounts to only two teshuvot, is remarkable. The first of these sh eilot, not posed until 1986, is itself instructive as regards the development of the thinking of Reform Jews about adultery since 1869:

One of the partners in a marriage has engaged in an adulterous relationship, and the marriage has terminated in acrimonious

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