[Avodah] Ahab

[Zev Sero via Avodah]

On 11/26/2015 09:19 AM, Akiva Miller via Avodah wrote:
> R'Zev Sero wrote:
>> Surely she did convert. ... And she did accept her
>> new country's god ... But she didn't abandon her
>> old gods. She must have accepted the obligation of
>> mitzvos, including the obligation not to serve avoda
>> zara, and that if she were caught serving AZ she
>> could be executed, but either she intended to break
>> her obligation and expected not to be caught, or she
>> originally intended to abandon her gods but later
>> backslid.

> My understanding is that if one accepts an obligation with intention
> to break it, that does not count as accepting it at all.

> This is not quite the same thing as "I accept the obligation, but I
> don't think I'll be strong enough to do it 100%", which *would* count
> as acceptance. This level must surely be okay, since every ger is
> human, and no human is perfect; there will inevitably be some
> failures, and that doesn't affect the validity of the acceptance.

Actually there's a teshuvah in IM where he addresses precisely such a
case and paskens that the giyur was valid. The woman confessed that in
the mikvah she had the specific intent of committing an avera, because
she didn't have the strength to avoid it, and RMF ruled that all that
matters is that she wholeheartedly accepted the obligation not to do
this avera, and that what she was going to do was wrong.

As I've pointed out before, the language of the gemara (which is cited
verbatim by the Rambam and the Shulchan Aruch) seems to imply that we
*expect* a ger to do averos. He is not told "Now you can eat chelev and
break shabbos, but if you go through with this you won't be able to";
rather, he is told "Now if you eat chelev you don't earn kares, and if
you break shabbos you don't earn skillah, but if you go through with this
then eating chelev will get you kares and breaking shabbos will get you
skillah". It's as if his *not* doing these things is considered unlikely.


On 11/26/2015 10:21 AM, Saul Guberman via Avodah wrote:
> So was the switch to matrilineal descent from a takana Ezra or before?

There was no switch.  It's de'oraisa.

-- 
Zev Sero
zev at sero.name