REMEDIES FOR IMPEDIMENTS TO MARRIAGE
time, and our Rabbi’s Manual maintains the prohibition. We therefore urge that the rabbi not officiate at the marriage.
Reform Responsa are often lenient in removing legal barriers to marriage, such as in the cases of a cohen and a divorcee or convert, allowing a childless widow to remarry without halitzah. Most of these cases involve violation of negative precepts that, although they are prohibited either by the Torah or by rabbinic law, are nevertheless valid marriages post factum.
Accusations against Reform Judaism that it is always permissive, especially in matters of marriage, are proved false in the above responsa. The long debate whether a man may marry his brother’s widow as well as the modern teshuvah about marrying the sister of an ex-wife, were both concluded with prohibitive answers. On the basis of deep halakhic research and modern studies in the social sciences. the members of the Responsa Committee in 1925 rejected the marriage of the wife of a deceased brother. Almost seventy years later, the Responsa Committee of 1991 prohibited a man from marrying his ex-wife’s sister. Both decisions emphasized the greater stringency of consanguinity relating back to the forbidden decrees of marital relation, whose roots are in biblical laws of incest.
In removing halakhic impediments to marriage, Reform does not attempt to find the easy path. It bases its decisions on principles of pesikah and applied ethics.”