30 Mark Washofsky

refuse to comply with the order of a valid rabbinical court(beit din) to issue her a get." In support of this idea, he marshaled an impressive array of halakhic texts, from the Talmud , the codes and the responsa, from the rishonim and the aharonim, texts which he analyzed and elucidated in the customary rabbinical style. Yet none of this argumentation impressed his critics. One of these, R. Menachem M. Kasher, sternly rebuked Berkovits for his temerity in raising the idea of stipulations in marriage, given that the use of such stipulations had been unequivocally rejected by the great poskim of previous generations. The stature of these authorities, along with their sheer number(Kasher estimated that 1500 rabbis had explicitly rejected“conditional marriage” [kiddushin al tenai] under any circumstances), demonstrates that “there is no excuse to raise again a question which has already been examined and decided by all the sages of Israel . Their rul­ing must not be doubted.”""? The rabbinical opposition Kasher cited had been stirred by a previous proposal, floated in 1907 by an assembly of rabbis in France , that called for the use of stipu­lations in marriage as a remedy for the agunah." Berkovits, too, mentioned that proposal but argued that his own plan was free of the difficulties that had led the poskim to reject it. Yet the halakhic consensus had been formed:“stipulations” of whatever kind are not to be entertained in Jewish marriage, no matter the Talmudic and halakhic argumentation that might be brought in their favor.

A similar fate befell Rabbi Shlomo Riskin , who called in 1989 for the rabbinical courts in Israel to coerce husbands to divorce their wives when the latter refuse conjugal rights on the claim that“he is repulsive to me”(ma'is alay)."* This claim, mentioned in the Talmud , is taken by such medieval authorities as Mai­ monides and Rashi as grounds for coerced divorce, and were the rabbis to accept it as such today, the legal position of the wife would be vastly improved. By“rebelling” against her hus­band—that is, by declaring him repulsive and refusing him con­jugal rights—she would set into motion a chain of events that, given the power of the Israeli rabbinical courts to adjudicate divorce law and to enforce their decisions, would lead inevitably (in most cases) to her freedom. The difficulty is that the rabbis do not accept that claim today as grounds for coerced divorce. Riskin attributes this state of affairs to the influence of R. Ya'akov Tam, the leading Tosafist, who feared that the stability of marriage