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Be sure to join us at 5:45 this Sunday evening for the Zoom shiur with Rabbi Broyde! Full details below.
I'm also excited to announce that we will have a Zoom shiur with Rabbi Shlomo Weissman, the administrator of the Beth Din of America, on March 17th. Save the date!
Perek 9 engages with the Ketubah obligation in purely technical terms, applying to it the rules of claims and evidence that apply to any and all financial transactions and disputes. Please note that the perek swings between the presentation of broad general rules and their specific application to Ketubah. Just hang with it!
Whenever two people are in a financial relationship and a dispute arises, there need to be basic rules and guidelines as to how that dispute gets adjudicated. The same is true about the Ketubah commitment that a husband makes to his wife, in which he pledges a sum of money in the case of the marriage ending through divorce or through his predeceasing her. The Mishnayot in our perek are concerned with formulating rules about the following kinds of cases:
(1) A widow, who is entitled to claim her ketubah payment from her husband’s heirs, may find herself as one among many creditors that the heirs are now responsible to pay. Should the widow have any kind of preference over other creditors? Mishna 2 considers this question in the case of the widow being able to make first claim on any money that is still owed to her late husband. And Mishna 3 asks whether the widow might even be able to come before the heirs in claiming property that is not real estate.
(2) Mishnayot 4 – 6 lay out the general rules for when and whether a husband or his heirs may demand that a wife swear to the correctness of her claim in order for that claim to be accepted. Mishnayot 7 and 8 (which really function as one Mishna, with 8 elaborating on each of the case headlines in 7) then apply these rules specifically to the claim for Ketubah payment. In principle no oath is necessary when a woman claims her Ketubah, but special circumstances that raise doubts as to whether the sum may have already been paid, as well as special protection that is extended to heirs who are deemed “orphans” may change that calculus.
(3) Mishna 9 deals with the questions that arise when a woman may lack the necessary documentation to substantiate her claim. Rabban Gamliel rules that the amount of documentation required is actually subject to situational circumstances which might make it less likely that a person will have a particular document, in this case that a wife would have her gett extant.
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