REMEDIES FOR IMPEDIMENTS TO MARRIAGE
mamzerim(BT Baba Metzia 104a). Through the legal fiction of reinterpreting five words in the ketubah:(“When you come under the marriage canopy, be my wife”), Hillel effectively annulled the betrothal of the Alexandrian women because they had not completed the requirement of their first marriage by entering the huppah with their betrothed.’
MARRYING A SLAVE
Maimonides(1135-1204) ruled in the Mishneh Torah about a Jewish man who married a slave women after having been suspected of having sexual relations with her:“If a man was suspected of having intercourse with a slave girl who was later emancipated he may not marry her”(Laws of Divorce 10:14).
The elders of a twelfth-century Egyptian Jewish community asked Maimonides what action they should take in a case like this regarding a young man of their community who had purchased a Gentile female slave and was living with her.
Instead of applying his own halakhic verdict, Maimonides responded that“a beit din should force him either to send her away or to emancipate and marry her.” He justifies this action, relying on three talmudic decrees, without explaining their relevance to his feshuvah: 1. Takkanat hashavim(the“Regulation for the Penitent”);® 2.“It is better for him to eat the gravy and not the fat itself.” 3.“It is a time to act for God ; they have violated Your Torah.”*
The Rambam did not explain these three Talmudic takkanot (provisions or regulations). In a recent study I proposed that Maimo nides was sanctioning the lesser of two evils, and this justified his self
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