[This remarkable passage, which I intend to discuss more fully in a future post, בג”ה, was first brought to my attention several years ago by a letter to the editor published in Hamodia , if I recall correctly.]
Now that these cheerful introductions have been made, we move on to the primary themes of this post: Halachah, ethics, decency, love, beauty, and constancy,
An issue that I find most fascinating is the intersection between Halachah, morality and decency. I recently encountered a classic example of this intersection in a brief responsum of Rav Yisrael Yehoshua Trunk of Kutna. He was asked about a woman who had contracted ‘the disease of the pox’ (probably smallpox) three months after her engagement, and as an effect of the disease, her face had become “wrinkled”, and she became “repulsive in the eyes of the fiancé, who does not wish to marry her”. The Rav of Kutna begins by ruling that as a matter of law, the man is perfectly entitled to break the engagement, without financial penalty, but he then insists that as a matter of “מוסר ויראה” this is wrong, and makes an eloquent and stirring plea to the man (and his parents) to not be faithless toward the completely innocent and blameless girl with whom he has entered into a covenant, and to not humiliate her by breaking the engagement. Notwithstanding the Talmudic dictum that אין אשה אלא ליופי, he reminds them of the even more ancient (and better known) Biblical admonition that שקר החן והבל היופי, and assures them that he will merit children who are “proper and fearful of sin” if his intention shall be לשם מצוה: