should the Bet Din turn him away the prospective convert will go to a Reform rabbi."We cannot worry about this...a proper Bet Din must act strictly according to halakhic procedures” and not violate them in order to save an individual(the Jewish spouse) from committing a sin. Citing Rambam ’s decision, he notes that the issue there concerns the owner of the Gentile maidservant, who can convert her upon his own authority, and not the religious court. If an individual may transgress the law in order to save himself from a greater sin, this does not mean that the Bet Din, which represents the rule of law in the community, is so entitled. Besides, the"lesser of two evils" argument, which plays such an important role for Rambam , Kluger, and Hoffmann, does not really fit our case. Grodzinsky points out that if we allow the conversion of a Gentile wife, her husband will thereupon become a transgressor of the commandment against sexual intercourse with a niddah, a rule which does not apply to Gentile women. That transgression, punishable by karet,”> is a more serious one than that of cohabiting with a Gentile, which does not carry that harsh punishment; we are not, therefore,"saving" a Jew from sin by permitting the conversion. In other words, Grodzinsky concludes, none of these extralegal considerations justifies the conversion. It can be permitted because, since it is not undertaken"for the sake of marriage", there is no halakhic barrier to it, even if it is not good policy for the Jews in general or for this Jew in particular.
Ultimately, for these lenient authorities, conversion for the sake of marriage can be allowed only on the basis of the legal argument formulated by R. Shelomo Kluger. In this they differ from Rambam , whose similar ruling is presented as a conscious deviation from settled halakhah. By reasoning that such conversions do not technically fall under the rubric of leshem ishut, they expand the boundaries of the permissible in Jewish law, allowing it to include a phenomenon which clearly would not fit within previous conceptions of those boundaries. That"reasoning’, however, that close adherence to purely legal argumentation, should not blind us
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