The Most Ambiguous Concept in Jewish Law
by Rebecca Honig Friedman
“Ketubah money” is “one of the most ambiguous, least clear concepts in Jewish law,” writes Rivkah Lubitch in her YNet column, in which she keeps track of Israeli Rabbinic court proceedings. It’s an ambiguity that might be costing an Israeli man $1,000,0000:
A Haifa Rabbinic Court recently ruled that a husband was required to pay his wife the “ketubah money” (the sum of money a husband stipulates in the ketubah) - in this case, one million dollars, since that was the amount he promised her under their chuppah.
Lubitch claims such an amount is generally deemed excessive from the get-go and that a responsible rabbi would not allow it to be put into the ketubah, or if it is put in, it’s generally considered a meaningless sum. In this case, though, the Rabbinic Court took the contract and the specified sum of money at face value. Which is perhaps a stringent approach that shows a lack of compassion for the man in question, but makes a strong statement to others: Jewish law and halachic contracts should be taken as seriously as secular law and contracts.
Interestingly, while Lubitch often writes about the Rabbinic Courts’ injustice toward women, here she acknowledges a point where the system wrongs men:
The principal victims of this situation are men, who discover one bright morning that they brought financial disaster upon themselves during a moment of weakness.
But not to get too far off course, Lubitch points out that women get cheated here, too, “particularly due to the fact that they rely on this money which they will likely never receive”:
Most of these women assume that they will succeed in getting the “ketubah money” from their husband, if he was the one responsible for the family breakup. However, only a minority of these women succeed, and the attorneys or private investigators that they hire often give them false hope.
The point is, money is money, and amounts shouldn’t be thrown around in official Jewish legal documents as if they were meaningless. Fuzzy accounting does not belong in Rabbinic Court.
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
