[Avodah] Having a boyfriend equivalent to being married?

[Chana Luntz]

I wrote:

> On Mon, December 17, 2007 7:52 pm, Rn Chana Luntz wrote:
> : A chazaka in general is a rebuttable presumption.  That is, 
> we assume
> : something, usually about an existing status continuing, if we do not
> : have the information to know to the contrary....

And RMB replied:

> That is a chazaqah demei'ikarah, which is different in kind 
> than our case, a chazaqah disvara.

Why is our case a chazaka d'svarah and not a chazak demi'ikara?
Assuming we are talking about somebody known to be a kosher yid, then
all we are saying is that we assume he continues to be a kosher yid, and
would not do something like a bias znus (any more than he would do
something like serve us treif food) so if he actually engaged in biah,
he must have intended kiddushin.  If however he is mukzak as somebody
involved in znus, he has lost his chezkas kashrus in this regard, and
therefore we make no such assumption.

 The former is a 
> presumption that nothing changed until the moment a change 
> was observed, the latter is a rule of nature or rule of 
> thumb. The example of a distinction I posted yesterday (which 
> was still more recent than RnCL's post) was a chiluq made by 
> the Sheiv Shmaatesa, that a CdS is not asserted where there 
> are eidim, even in a case like terei uterei where the eidus 
> still leaves you with a safeiq. However, for a CdM, we would 
> assume nothing changed even where two of the eidim claim it did.

I confess I don't understand this Sheiv Shmatesa.  Two eidim are the
sina qua non of establishing a change of status - marriage spring to
mind exactly.  Isn't that the whole point of the pasuk, that by the
mouths of two eidim the matter is established?

> That said, I think that RYBS's position inclines us to say 
> that neither kind of chazaqah is a form of rov.

You don't need RYBS's position - the gemora in Yevamos that I quoted
expressly gives a case where the chazaka points one way and the rov
points another.  The chazaka if a man leaves town childless is that his
wife is roi for yibum if he then dies. On the other hand, if he leaves
with his co-wife, then given that rov women conceive and give birth, if
there was enough time for that to happen, the rov would point to the
wife left behind being permitted to marry. If chazaka was a form of rov,
then the gemora could not make this distinction. 

 And thus he 
> could still say tav lemeisav is a law of human nature, even 
> if that law might come into play rarely because of the 
> prevalence of other laws. Or, it could be that he insists 
> that tav lemeisav is true even in rov women today, and the 
> women who think otherwise are just in denial.

I think he has to be saying the latter. The context in which RYBS made
his famous statements about tav lemeisiv was to rebut an idea that one
could use mekach taus as a way of uprooting marriages, on a regular
basis, that had ended and where the husband was withholding a get.  If
there is a general principle that a woman really truly wanted to get
married (even if she subsequently doesn't think so) then there is no
mekach taus involved.

> The notion that chazaqah holds even when the circumstance it 
> describes is a mi'ut can be supported by a case in Chullin. 
> Lechat-chilah, the chalaf should be inspected before every 
> shechitah. Bedi'eved, if it is found kosher in one check and 
> pasul much later, every animal shechted until the failed 
> inspection is kosher. Even if someone use the knife to hack a 
> bone, we do not assume the nick came from the bone. I would 
> presume, though, that rov cases such a knife would have been 
> nicked by the bone and not the very end of the last siman cut.

 You seem to have lost your distinction between Chazaka d'svara and
Chazaka d'mikara here - this is clearly a chazaka dmikara.  BTW, so I
think, is tav l'mesiv.  Certainly RYBS was applying tav l'mesiv as a
chazaka after the woman has gotten married, or purported to get married,
and we are questioning whether that was really what was intended - ie
that what seems to be her putative status and the way she was known was
indeed intended.  I would have to think about whether that is true in
the cases discussed in the gemora.

I think there are any number of cases where a chazaka and a rov come
into conflict - I think there is some significant discussion in the
rishonim about this - tosphos certainly discusses it in several places,
although I would have to look it all up again, as I don't recall the
details - not a project I can embark on in the next little while, what
with work commitments.  Will try and look when I can.
> 
> SheTir'u baTov!
> -micha

Shabbat Shalom

Chana