MARK WASHOVSKY

standards of Jewish religious life-are conspicuous by their absence. Kluger presents himself as the oracle of the halakhah and not its legislator; he arrives at his decision not by making new law but by applying the canons of textual logic so that the sources might yield up the correct answer already contained within.

A closer look, though, reveals that Kluger's ruling depends upon a daring exercise of rabbinic discretion which, though concealed beneath the surface, compares well to that which the Rambam employs openly. Consider the manner in which he determines that this conversion is undertaken"for the sake of Heaven". Even if we do not define the concept, as some do, as an exalted, virtually unattainable level of religious purity,” the requirement that a convert come to Judaism leshem shamayim would surely seem to require positive evidence of his or her religious sincerity. Kluger stands this presumption on its head. A decision to convert can be judged as leshem shamayim in the absence of positive evidence to the contrary, that is, that the individual desires conversion in order to obtain some temporal object or goal. In our case, the woman need not convert in order to cohabit with her Jewish lover, since they will remain together in any event. In this strictly formal sense, the conversion is not contemplated for the ulterior motivation of marriage(leshem ishut); by process of elimination, therefore, we may conclude that the motivation for the conversion is religiously sincere.

The problem with this designation is two-fold. On the level of fact, the fit is unpersuasive. We have here a clearly non­observant Jew who is quite prepared to embrace another religion if necessary in order to marry a Gentile woman, whose attachment to Judaism can hardly be any deeper than that of her prospective husband.*® It is one thing to say that, technically, this couple do not need the cooperation of the Bet Din in order to marry. To conclude that their motivation is leshem shamayim-and Kluger explicitly applies that label to them- is precisely the kind of

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