Hello Everyone,
Over the past few weeks we have studied the basics of divorce law in the Halacha. We saw that since the ability to grant a divorce is ensconced solely with the husband this enables the husband to extort various concessions from his wife who seeks to end the marriage.
In order to prevent this abuse various suggestions have been made. One suggestion was to make marriages conditional. That is to say that if the wife seeks a divorce and the husband refuses to accede to her request then the marriage shall be annulled retroactively. This suggestion was made in the late nineteenth century and is occasionally made again. The great Poskim of every era reject conditional marriages for reasons that we studied last week.
Today we will study the idea of introducing penalty clauses into the marriage. If the husband should refuse to grant a divorce then he will be subjected to financial penalties. Annulment would be simpler since the marriage will be “erased” but it is possible that a husband may prefer to pay the penalty and the woman will not have her divorce.
Nonetheless various penalty clauses have been proposed and they have been proven to be useful in persuading recalcitrant husbands to give גיטין to their wives.
Today we will study the theories that come into play when composing these clauses.