ng ag ot eh QS Te CHE RP: pt ML. ed ep(bp mi
firmly,“This is the law and one may not change it." In other words, whether a man is obedient or disobedient to the commandments can never invalidate his marriage and family rights.
This reluctance of Jewish legal tradition to invalidate marriages when such will break up the unity of our people has its august precedent in the relations of the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai to each other. They disagreed as to the permissibility of a certain form of levirate marriage. Then the Mishnah says, after stating the disagreement(Yevamot 1.4):"Although these forbade and those permitted these declared unfit and those declared eligible, nevertheless, the school of Shammai never hesitated to marry women from the school of Hillel nor did the school of Hillel hesitate to marry women from the school of Shammai ." Bertenoro, to make the situation unmistakable, says,"Even though, according to the interpretation of one school the children of the marriages which they prohibited would be deemed mamzerim, the two groups nevertheless intermarried."
To sum up: If we keep from getting lost in the maze of separate enactments and customs and look for the basic spirit of our halahic tradition, we find from the days of the schools of Hillel and Shammai , through the Talmudic and Gaonic laws pertaining to apostates, and in all the complicated laws in regard to the hostile sect of Karaites , that the ruling spirit of the tradition was to maintain as much as possible the unity of our people.
Clearly, then, anybody or any group which seeks to declare another group of Jews unfit to marry with according to Jewish law is violating
the basic tendency of the law. Even though certain specific
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