This week, we will review two other teshuvot written on the 17th of Tammuz, both of which note the date with the hope that the current sorrow of that day and time of year will soon be replaced with happiness and joy,.

The first teshuvah was a query to R. Moshe Feinstein, ztllh"h (Orah Hayyim 2; 27), as to whether a person could stay up late into the night to study Torah even though that would mean he would sleep too late in the morning to attend minyan. I was struck by the teshuvah because I once heard someone ask R. Lichtenstein (le-havdil bein hahayyim u-vein hahayyim) the exact same question, with the same response. Both assumed that attending minyan is not simply an act of special piety, but is an obligation upon male Jews. R. Moshe notes that the Shulhan Arukh rules that one has to walk up to 4 parsa (a walk of at least 72 minutes) to attend minyan, meaning that one is obligated to join a minyan even if it causes some trouble.

In addition, R. Moshe mentioned that some people might think the only value in attending a minyan is that the gemara tells us that God is more likely to respond positively to prayers offered in the context of a minyan. Even if that were the only reason to attend minyan, R. Moshe points out, we would still be obligated to pray in the manner that is most likely to be effective— prayer is not a ritual, it is an act of relating to God through the mechanism of making requests, and must therefore be done in the most effective way possible.

R. Moshe also notes that the questioner can simply substitute the times, going to sleep earlier than usual, but using the extra time he gains by getting up earlier to study. I assume the questioner knew that possibility, but thought a) he could pray faster without a minyan (there’s no travel time, no repetition of the Amidah, no kaddish), and b) that his body was better able to function at night than in the morning. The first clearly did not impress R. Moshe, because of the values in minyan attendance. More interesting is his complete rejection of the second. Despite the questioner’s clear assumption that he functioned better at night and could make most efficient use of his time by learning during those hours, both of these rabbis refused to concede the point. Apparently, they both believed that while we might get used to one arrangement of our sleeping time, with sufficient effort and practice we can train ourselves to a different pattern, one that would allow for both learning Torah and attendance at minyan.

An even more interesting teshuva comes from Minhat Yitshak (8;130), where he was asked about a civil marriage that had ended in civil divorce. The woman had come under the influence of a ba`al teshuvah and had become observant herself, and the two of them now wished to marry. However, the first husband absolutely refused to give his former wife a get. Aside from having never been raised with any sense of Judaism he was an atheist and felt that it would contradict his principles to cooperate in a religious ceremony (it’s worth noticing when people claim not to believe in something, but take its view of the world seriously enough to object). The Minhat Yitshak was asked if there was any way to help this woman, and I think his answer is instructive, because despite his general conservatism(I saw another teshuva of his, also written on 17 Tammuz, where he prohibited having a voice-mail system that would operate on Shabbat and Yom Tov to do anything other than announce that the office was closed and when it would re-open), he adopted a remarkably lenient position.

Although he was very clear that it would be preferable to have the woman receive a get, he pointed out that the couple had lived in the woman’s parents’ (nonobservant) household, so that all of the people who saw them living together were either relatives or not valid witnesses by virtue of their lack of halakhic observance. Even so, there is a general principle that when Jewish men have marital relations, they intend it to be for the sake of creating marriage (halakhah assumes that having such relations without a marital context is so personally demeaning that no Jewish man with a sense of self-dignity would do so). To solve that problem, Minhat Yitshak suggests that people who demonstrably do not believe in halakhah in any way might be exceptions to that general rule. An atheist, in our example, would clearly give no thought to the Jewish concerns with keeping all sexual relations in the context of marriage. Third, he notes that the woman kept her name during the first marriage (interestingly, although the teshuva was written in 1980, he was puzzled as to why a woman would choose to do so), which helped him assume they did not fully intend to be married.

The husband’s recalcitrance meant that unless there was a way to invalidate the first marriage, the woman would be forbidden to remarry until that first husband died. That creates a general problem of `iggun, of leaving a woman chained to a marriage that is no longer meaningfully alive, as well as the specter of this woman giving up her new-found religiosity. Both factors, and I was especially struck by the seriousness with which he took the first, led Minhat Yitshak to rule that she could marry the second man even without a get.. As he allowed for the building of a mikdash me`at in the Jewish people, may we all see the building of the actual Mikdash, bb"a.

Please note that following Tish`a B’Av, Halakhah in Brief will take off until Rosh Hodesh Elul.