[Avodah] the cohen gadol and marriage to a pubescent girl

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 03:32:27PM -0500, Josh Skolnick wrote:
: There have been many responses so far implying that a change of outlook is
: warranted, which I would agree with, however what should be the outlook.
: What I mean by this is do we say that a young child can get married to
: anyone, or only to certain people? ...

Interesting question: Is the implication that we ought to be getting
married that young, or that this is something specific to the kohein
gadol?

:                                          Where do we draw the line regarding
: our attitudes towards derech eretz, meaning do we allow the members of our
: society to urinte publicly...                                   because in
: previous times this didn't take on a negative connotation.

This I find less intriguing. The issue isn't that we shouldn't fit the
mores of the times. It's that those mores would conflict with halakhah
if we had a kohein gadol. In your original case, "darkhei no'am" would
have to be subsumed by a specific chiyuv. Perhaps we would say that it
must be more na'im in the long run. There is no chiyuv involved in this
scenario. So, what's the conflicting motivation against adopting current
mores?

Or in light of your earlier question, perhaps we would say that we are
wrong to be bothered by it or perhaps we would say that being married
to the kohein gadol should be such an exciting fate and mission in life
that the cost should be ignorable by comparison.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             It's nice to be smart,
micha at aishdas.org        but it's smarter to be nice.
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