the gemorrah seems to say that she died while he was in the midst of the avodah it would be a problem because he would have two wives and yet i would think that whenever the wife died it is l'mafrayah and the other women is then married to him (that was the condition of their marriage, no?)
david berkovitz, passaic, nj
(Please forgive the delay in response. Technical problems prevented the mailing of a number of responses.)
At this stage of the Gemara, the condition being discussed is, "This is your Get on condition that your co-wife does not die." Since the co-wife did die in the middle of the Avodah, the divorce never takes effect. This is what the Gemara means when it states (beginning of 13b) that it becomes apparent l'Mafrei'a that the Get of the surviving wife is not a Get. It turns out that the Kohen Gadol was married to two women for the first part of the Avodah, before the co-wife died.
Thus, it was not the condition of their marriage that when the co-wife dies the other wife becomes married to him, but, on the contrary, it was a condition of their divorce that when the co-wife does not die, their divorce takes effect. Therefore, since the co-wife did die, it follows that the divorce never took place.
Kol Tuv,
Dovid Bloom
I appreciate very much your persistence.
Again, when the avodah began, he was married to one woman and the other had the get in hand (when the first did not die), once the first died, the condition of the 2nd is fulfilled and she is now his wife, not divorced, while the first is dead, ie. her death and the non-divorce happen simultaneously, so i still dont see when the man and the women were marred all at the same time.(at the beginning of the avodah he was not married to the second and the second becomes his wife only when the first dies.
Please pardon me that i'm missing something and not seeing your teretz.
David B
The point is that when the Avodah began, he was actually married to two women.
1) The scenario is that, to start off, he married two women. Then the Gemara states (3 lines before the end of 13a), that before starting the Avodah he handed one of the wives a Get and made the following condition:
"This is your Get on condition that your co-wife does not die before the end of the avodah."
This means the following:
(a) If the co-wife survives until the end of the Avodah, the Get of the second one applies l'Mafrei'a from the beginning of the Avodah, so l'Mafrei'a he was not married to the second woman for any moment of the Avodah, which means he did the Avodah with only one wife, which is what we are looking for.
(b) If the first wife does not survive until the end of the Avodah, this means that the Get of the second wife never applied. Therefore, he remains married to the surviving wife, and consequently he possessed a wife during the entire Avodah, which is also what we are looking for.
2) So far that seems a good solution, but the Gemara now points out that there is a problem. What will be if the first wife dies in the middle of the Avodah? He now automatically remains married to the second wife, but we must not forget that this is not something new because up to now he was also married to the second wife. This means that he was married to both the first wife and the second wife for half of the duration of the Avodah. This contradicts the Halachah that the Kohen Gadol must not have two wives ("two houses").
3) So the crucial point is that he was married to the second wife also at the beginning of the Avodah. If the first wife would have survived until the end of the Avodah, the Get of the second wife would have applied l'Mafrei'a which would have meant that he was never married to the second one. However, if the first wife does not survive, then he was married to the second one all along, which means that he did some of the Avodah while married to two wives.
Kol Tuv,
Dovid Bloom