[Avodah] surgery and transplants

[Yitzhak Grossman]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009 15:27:29 +0300
Eli Turkel <eliturkel at gmail.com> wrote:

...

> 7. Malbim on prohibition to remarry one's wife after she has been
> remarried (based on Sifre)
> and divorced" . To prevent a case where a rich man offers money
> to a poor man
> to divorce his wife which he will marry under the understanding that later
> the rich man will divorce the woman and she can return to her poor husband.
> Of course after living with the rich man she is no longer interested in the poor
> ex-husband. This can lead to jealosy and then to bloodshed
> 
> Thus the Torah is teaching us that it is despicable for a rich man to coerce a
> poor man with an offer of money to do activities he wouldn't want to
> do otherwise

I don't think that this is a fair reading of Malbim.  As you yourself
note, his focus is not on the "despicability" of the rich man's
"coercion" of the poor man by tempting him with money and making him an
offer that he can't refuse; rather, it is clear from both his language
here as well as the context of his entire discussion there that the
objection is to the poisonous consequences to marital relationships
attendant on wife-swapping, which he suggests can ultimately result in
bloodshed, something very familiar to any student of literature, with
its many analyses of love triangles and romantic dysfunction.  I don't
think that an extrapolation to offering a poor man money for his organ
is quite warranted.

Yitzhak
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