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Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, executive vice president at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for Jewish learning and community building based in New York City. You can check us out and learn more at hadar.org. Today might be a little bit of a harder question because the question which I'll read in just a second it has underneath it and I anticipate us unpacking all sorts of values questions, gendered questions, emotional relationship questions, so we will do our best to really do justice to all of these different levels of the question.

Here's the question. It's a little bit long but I'm going to read I'm going to read the whole question. Since the technology of reversible vasectomies is relatively new and very different from previously understood mechanism of castration, I don't think there is much modern halakhic discussion as to whether this might be permissible or not. In addition, the idea of it being reversible might change some of the previously understood halakhic prohibitions.

And then we get this sort of specifications. For the purpose of this question, let's assume that other forms of birth control, pill, IUD, condoms, have been tried and found to be not sustainable for various reasons, and that having more kids isn't medically or financially feasible, if one feels that they need any heter or permission for birth control in the first place. What I want to do in this episode is to really invite invite you and invite us to answer this specific question. We are on this show and in general so cognizant that there are so many different life experiences and that halakha really needs to be applied to particular situations and it's not painting with a broad brush.

I could imagine that there are aspects of what will come up in this discussion that could be relevant to like a maybe close tangential question of similar procedures that might come up in particular in gender transition surgeries and I just want to really invite us to not address that question here. It's probably very valid and I imagine will have different answers and play out in different ways, different considerations, and what we're going to consider today is how we might approach this question of reversible vasectomy specifically in a case of heterosexual couple who have children already and whether this is an option for them.

Rav Eitan: So yeah, I really appreciate second that framing. Every question is its own thing and it's really helpful to sort of narrow in. In your spirit of framing this, let me offer a couple other framings, which I think are important. First thing, which is you know such a dizzying part of our life right now, we live in such a rapidly changing technological environment and medical technology environment. This is being recorded in 2026. Even by the time the episode comes out or a couple years hence, (we like these episodes to have a shelf life, they're not just meant to be a news bulletin). It's very hard to say where all the technologies will be on this front.

The questioner himself says, "Oh the technology of this is relatively new," right? So in terms of us keeping up with you know what is the most current, that's hard for us even to do in the context of the time in which we are recording this episode.

Rav Avi: Right, like from the time that they submitted this question to now potentially the procedure has changed.

Rav Eitan: Right. And I'll say even in terms of looking into this, I know there's already new non-hormonal male birth control pills that have just passed human safety tests and they may be on the market and as we get into the episode we'll see why you might think about these different things differently, but caveat number one is the episode is really going to try to be about texts and about the values and ideas that animate them.

That's not going to be completely stable in terms of its application to very specific case questions. Another framing. One of the things that I think is really important to just sort of be conscious of is whenever you are fielding a question like this about a couple that is essentially trying to figure out a system of birth control for them as a couple. But it's going potentially to affect one of their bodies and not the other in terms of the in this case the surgery or the procedure. You have sort of two different ways of thinking about questions like that. One is to think about the couple as a pair of autonomous individuals.

They happen to be linked to one another but really to think about in this case if the man is having the vasectomy, what are his obligations on his body? What are the windows of an open future that should be left for him that might go beyond this relationship and are not completely limited by this relationship? That's one way of thinking about it. It's actually really important for thinking about agency, possibility. Marriages we hope are forever. As a child of divorce, I know they are not always forever.

Sometimes it's good that they are not always forever. But then it's also important and in some ways I think this is the spirit of the question as it comes in. When you are living as a couple, when you are living if we want to take the language of the Torah as one flesh, as one body in a certain way, there's also a way in which answering for one person is actually answering for the unit and considering the couple as a unit as opposed to just individual bodies is a different way of looking at the question and we sort of have to keep in mind those two frames as we engage it.

Rav Avi: Yeah that's so interesting I really I really appreciate those different ways of thinking about it.

Is this a question about whether a couple can use reversible vasectomy as a form of birth control? Or is this a question about whether a man can get a particular procedure on his body?

Rav Eitan: Yeah and the last piece which you said but I also just want to kind of underscore and add one other dimension. We're not here going to answer Judaism's perspective on birth control. That is to say, forget about the means of getting to it, what are the considerations of when is it permissible to decide to stop having children or in what context etc. Really important question maybe we'll get to in another episode. But that requires all kinds of other texts and other considerations.

And there I do want to note what is relevant there and I think is relevant here as well is the way the decisions in the context of a heterosexual couple decisions around whether the man or the woman are using birth control on their body, taking medications in one way or another. This can very quickly create a kind of imbalance or a burden on one party more than on the other. For instance if it's assumed which most people assume that a condom as a form of birth control is completely off the table when you are talking about a halakhic approach well that's going to immediately put all kinds of burdens on the woman to be the one who has to do whether the physical or chemical things to prevent that. And the second you put a condom on the table or recognize that there have been poskim in lots of contexts that have entertained that in the context of what are the options for this couple together that can shift the balance in various ways.

Rav Avi: This questioner is saying it's not an option for us let's not discuss it. And and what you're saying is if you are not like this couple and it is an option it's worth looking into that also.

Rav Eitan: Correct. And again might be another episode. But I want our listeners maybe it's just by way of building some degree of trust in our conversation here to know that yeah those factors would also be on the table for us to discuss if we were going into depth about them.

Rav Avi: Okay so where should we put our attention in this episode?

Rav Eitan: Okay so I would love for us to talk about two things. I want to start with one thing which might surprise our listeners or at least a number of them which is related to this and then get to the heart of the question of this proposed operation. So the first is a verse from the Torah in Devarim chapter 23 where the Torah says lo yavo petzuah dakah u-khrut shofkhah bi-kehal Hashem.
I would translate it broadly as someone a man who has had sort of maimed genitalia is not eligible to come into the community of God which is understood in rabbinic tradition to mean to be married to a Jewish woman. Okay that is to say that actually with the certain kind of scenario of something happening to that part of the male body, that man becomes ineligible for marriage. And so before we even get to the vasectomy, are you allowed to do the vasectomy, are you not, the consequences of having an operation where you might be considered in this category of pitzua daka or krot shofcha are you sort of have to clear that bar of it making sense to say we're planning this as a couple moving forward as a strategy for remaining together without having further children. Can they remain together?

Rav Avi: So you're bringing this as this is the root of the questioner says this new technology of reversible vasectomy, presumably they're asking the question about reversible has an underlying assumption that vasectomies are not okay halachically, this verse is the root of that?

Rav Eitan: Well, I would say this verse is getting to an even more fundamental or more consequential question, which is irrespective of the question of whether you did something forbidden or permitted, is the outcome of having some kind of I want to hold off on saying whether a vasectomy fulfills this criterion, because I think we're going to say it does not.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so maybe you would use castration right now.

Rav Eitan: Yes, let's say simply a man who is castrated would be an unfit mate, okay, for a woman. Now, that might also be true on a physical level depending on what the expectations of the relationship are, but this is a verse that simply you have to be accountable to in the halachic conversation if you're dealing with it.

Rav Avi: So you're saying this is much this sounds much more extreme actually than it's not allowed, right? Like it could be not allowed to carry on Shabbat and I could carry on Shabbat and right, it doesn't mean I can't practice Shabbat anymore. But if I but this particular law actually not only would it be forbidden, it would actually sort of like negate your marriage?

Rav Eitan: or make it forbidden for you to remain married, etc. So here I just want to sort of review for our listeners the way this gets contextualized and for some authorities marginalized such that the question here definitely gets off the ground.

Rav Avi: Yeah, because there's a lot at stake here.

Rav Eitan: A lot at stake. So already Shmuel in the Talmud says if this kind of maiming of the male genital organs happens bi'dei shamayim, by the hand of heaven, then the prohibition doesn't apply at all.

That is to say having this occur to you, the opposite would seem to be bi'dei adam, at the hands of a human being, it really matters whether this was done intentionally by human agency as opposed to it happened to you.

Rav Avi: Yeah, what does that mean God did it?

Rav Eitan: How do you define it? So here you get predictably a little bit of a debate, we'll just review it quickly. The Ri says if you were born with the condition, then that's fine, but anything that happens to you after birth, right, is a problem, the verse would be you would be subject to the verse. The Rosh says anything that happens at birth or some kind of freak trauma.

He actually talks about like what if you were struck by lightning, okay, and there was some maiming of your body as a result, is fine. That's what Shmuel means. But if you got sick and as a result that part of the body was damaged, the law would apply to you.

Rav Avi: Sick is different than freak accident? That's interesting. You would think sick might be more so something that you would say from heaven.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I well we'll get to people are going to say that, but according to the Rosh it's sort of no, like a lightning bolt as it were is like God doing this to you. Getting sick is your body sort of naturally breaking down, right, something like that. For him the opposite clearly isn't by hands of person, it's more like you don't see direct divine intervention.

Rav Avi: Yeah, but it's also not like it was preventable or something because no one chooses to get sick in that way.

Rav Eitan: That's right, that's right. And that's the direction the Rambam goes. The Rambam says no, no, no, as long as it wasn't done by people, right? That is to say getting sick also is in the category that Shmuel is meaning to exclude here.

Rav Avi: But does people for him mean like an attack, like someone attacked you, a person did it, or that would just mean like intentionally?

Rav Eitan: Great. So the Shulchan Aruch cites the Rambam, actually cites the most lenient opinion, but later interpreters want to know well what about human operations to deal with illness? Right? It's not an attack, it's something where they're intervening on your body to help you, but the consequence, right, of the intervention is leaving this body part altered, disfigured, maimed, et cetera. So the Tzitz Eliezer and a number of other later poskim, they will say, no, no, no, anything you need to do for an operation, including something like cutting the vas deferens, which is the tube through which the sperm flows, to avoid infection and the like, that's considered b'dei shamayim, considering you're just sort of acting with respect to what happened at the hands of heaven. This comes up most practically with prostate surgery for men, and the only way you may be able to remove the prostate or remove a piece of it is to cut that part, right, of the sexual organ and it can affect sexual function to have an operation like that.

But the Tzitz Eliezer adds another piece here, which is the most important. He holds that the reason you can have a removal of the prostate gland and effectively perform a vasectomy along the way, right, is because it is internal to the body and you are not actually touching the direct sex organ. And so anything that is not something that where the organ itself is affected as opposed to a tube leading to it is not in the category of petzua daka.

Rav Avi: And what time period are these discussions? Like what kind of surgeries are happening?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so the Tzitz Eliezer passed away in 2006. He's dealing with the prostate removal that is done today, that's to my understanding no advance there, he's already well aware of radiation therapy and other things.

Rav Avi: So these are pretty relevant sources.

Rav Eitan: On that last, the last source of the Tzitz Eliezer is, with the caveat from the beginning of the episode, more or less operating in our medical environment on this. And what's important there is it just establishes the notion as we have to get to the question of when it might or might not be permitted to engage in that kind of affecting of sexual function, but the Tzitz Eliezer is clear that an operation like a vasectomy, if it is internal to the body, is cutting off a tube but not doing anything to affect the main organ, is not what the verse is talking about, is covered by Shmuel's exemption.

It does not present an impediment to the couple remaining married under this verse.

Rav Avi: It's sort of like if it doesn't look like castration, it's not castration.

Rav Eitan: Something like that. Something like that.

Rav Avi: Yeah, let's not make, let's not make this prohibition bigger or or more extensive than it needs to be?

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And again, this doesn't mean that there's no cases where a certain kind of operation wouldn't present this concern, but combining the broad approach of the Tzitz Eliezer to say anything done to intervene for health purposes and anything that is internal are not covered by this, the overwhelming majority of cases that people would encounter, certainly in the medical context, are not going to be covered by this verse, and it's limiting it essentially to someone who comes from a culture where castration was broadly practiced for any number of other reasons.

Rav Avi: So it sounds like we're pretty squarely right now with these sources and with this entire question actually in the framework of a procedure on a particular person who has a particular body and really discussing the procedure as healthcare and really not as birth control at all in the context of these sources.
There's certainly no other person who matters here. It's about you and your body and what your body needs to stay healthy. And it sounds like we're going to come out in the direction of like, you, you can do what you need to do and it's not going to jeopardize your marriage.

Rav Eitan: That's right. But let's say there's not a health concern on the line in the sense of a cancer or something that needs to be removed. To the extent there's a health concern, it's related to birth control or there might be a health concern that the woman in the relationship it is unsafe for her to have further children, but the operation happening on the male body is not because he needs this to be healthy. Okay. So now we've got to, we've got to sort of explore that more core question of doing this procedure at all.

Rav Avi: Yeah, okay. So where do we go now?

Rav Eitan: So there's an earlier episode from this season which you might want to pause and listen to first here, because we're not going to recover all the ground we covered there, which was about neutering pets. And as we talked about in that episode, there There is a verse in the Torah which essentially forbids animal castration. That's how it's understood.

You can listen to the episode for that. And the Midrash Halacha on that, the early expounding of that verse, after sort of expanding all of that, says minayin af ba-adam? and how do you know that this applies also to human beings? And the answer is because the verse said uv'artzechem lo ta'asu, don't do this act of castration in your land, anywhere in your land. And the Midrash seems to pick up that it says uv'artzechem, your land, as opposed to just saying uva-aretz, in the land, indicates I'm also talking to you.

Rav Avi: Wow, we really, you'll have to go back and listen to that episode if you haven't, but we really put a lot on that one phrase in your land.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's right, and we really do. And like a lot of Midrashim like this, there's close reading, but there's also some deeply held conviction here. And as we spoke about in that episode, there does seem to be a kind of concern of some combination of not deforming the images of God and the animals that were created a certain way in the world, but the focus is on the reproductive organ here in the verse. So there's a sense that taking this kind of blatant step to prevent someone from having procreative abilities is part of the prohibition linked to honoring God's creation and its purpose and those initial blessings in the early chapters of Bereishit.

One piece that we noted also in that episode is if you're just following through that logic, so this actually isn't about a male or a female per se. That is to say, any human being in our context, it would be forbidden to have this kind of sterilization or depriving of procreative abilities. But in that episode we noted that there is a gap that opens up for one sage, Rabbi Yehuda, who suggests that actually maybe the prohibition on sterilizing or on removal of sex organs doesn't apply to women in the same way that it does for men.

Rav Avi: Right. And there he was talking about female animals or he's already talking about women, human women?

Rav Eitan: I think it's been blurred there already. He just says nekeivot, females. And once the larger Midrash has said this is also true of human beings, it at least plausibly can carry over, but again, that was Rabbi Yehuda's view. The majority view in the Midrash doesn't see a gender difference. Whenever you get a gendered distinction at least being proffered as a possibility of, oh, this prohibition doesn't apply to, let's say according to Rabbi Yehuda, to a woman. And again, what that means it doesn't apply, does it mean it's permitted or it's rabbinically forbidden or there's just no consequences, but that there's some gap.

So on the one hand, that opens up more agency and flexibility for the non-subject party. That is to say, if someone tells you, oh, you can maim your body, well, if it would be useful for you to do that or to go through a procedure that might be considered covered by this, oh, I'm not covered by it, that gives you more flexibility, right? Like exemptions from requirements give you more flexibility, more agency. They can also in their own way deprive agency and dignity because suddenly, oh, all the energy for any kind of body modification that has to happen will go onto the exempted party, in this case potentially the woman.

We are told a story about Rabbi Chiya, well-known famous sage, and his wife Yehudit. They had two twins, Yehuda and Chizkiya. One way or the other, it says she had a horrendous pregnancy. It was awful. And she, get ready for this, disguises herself and goes before Rabbi Chiya her husband. She says to him, qua anonymous woman, is a woman commanded to procreate?

Rav Avi: It's like she made an alias email address and she emailed his rabbinic email.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. And he responds, no, which is one of the main, that's actually the dominant answer in rabbinic tradition, which is of course it takes To make a child, one of the explanations for having a gender gap around this, always found this pretty compelling and intuitive is the woman puts her life at risk to a certain degree, and certainly even more so back then by becoming pregnant, having a child. You can't really have a mitzvah on someone for something that will endanger them.

So the dominant view becomes something like women have the right to have children, to demand a relationship with a man who's capable of giving them children, but they not strictly responsible for going around and making sure that, well, I have to find a way to bear a child. Okay. So he says no. She goes and drinks a potion that sterilizes her. Finally, it emerges what happened here.

That is to say Rabbi Hiyya figures out that she had dressed herself up, disguised herself, and he says, and I will let the listener supply the tone here because I think you could read it in very different ways, he says, oh, I wish you had given me one more belly of kids because the Talmud says they had actually had two sets of twins. There was Yehuda and Hizkiya who grew up to be well-known sages and there were two sisters, Pazi and Tavi, who are also known from elsewhere to have been extraordinary individuals. So Rabbi Hiyya says, that's too bad, we could have had another set of amazing twins.

Rav Avi: Our kids are so awesome.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, something like that. Okay. That's the end of the story.

Rav Avi: It's an amazing story. I just imagine that we have listeners who feel so much kinship with this woman. Of like, what does it mean to have a really hard pregnancy, what does it mean to have a hard twin pregnancy in particular, and what does it mean to feel like you need an out? Like you just can't do it again.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. So, what's important for our question is, what does this story imply about sterilization? That is to say, the Talmud seems to take it for granted that once this woman finds out that she is not obligated to procreate, Yehudit is allowed to take a sterilization potion.

Why is that okay? And what are the ramifications more broadly? Does the gender dimension matter here? Does the potion as opposed to a surgery dimension matter here? Does the fact that she was in pain matter here? Those are all three variables in the story that we don't actually know from the story whether they are defining variables or incidental variables. So look, it's a little bit of an underdetermined story, right? Like we've got these variables, but how do we produce guidance?

One other piece of Talmudic evidence that is important here and which closes a few doors, the Talmud in Shabbat is talking about all kinds of stuff about medicines that you can make on Shabbat, you can't make on Shabbat, you can use on Shabbat, you can't use on Shabbat. And it sends it into a long tangent of medicine.

Rav Avi: Like pharmacy Torah.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, exactly. Just on like a Tuesday, okay? And they're talking at one point about jaundice. Have a case of jaundice. What do you do? And they have a particular kind of remedy for jaundice, but they say, just so you know, if you take this medicine for jaundice, you will be sterilized.

The Talmud actually when it asks, how could you do that? How could you sterilize yourself? I thought, right, they say, and this is with drinking a potion, I thought it's forbidden to castrate, but they clearly here understand sterilize, remove the sexual function of a human being, okay? That passage is important because it shows that they read the core prohibition here at least at first as applying to any form of sterilizatio, to anyone.

Rav Avi: That jaundice text is about women also, we think?

Rav Eitan: It seems like, well let's put it this way, I think it's certainly about men, and it seems to, right, say you can take this, the Talmud tries to figure out how could that be okay? One of its proposals is oh maybe it's only an old person who can take this potion. What you just said. They're post-fertility age.

They reject that interestingly because they report Rabbi Yochanan thought at a certain point in his life that he was no longer fertile and then he did something and as a result He was back in the game. Yeah. We can also refer to Sarah Imeinu.

Rav Avi: Right, like when can we ever say that someone is post-fertility?

Rav Eitan: How do you know, etc. So they end up saying, no, it must be that this permission to drink a potion and become sterilized only applies to a woman.

Now, that passage is probably referring to, informed by our story of Yehudit, right, who drank a potion, was a woman and it was okay. We could do some textual archaeology and, you know, do we have actually maybe some competing views here, but as a bottom line, what's important about that piece is, it does establish that at least the voice of the Talmud takes for granted that there is a gap between what is available to women in terms of sterilization as opposed to what is available for men. There's still an underdetermination of what it means to say the woman's case is treated more leniently.

At the end of the day, she's drinking a potion, not having a hysterectomy in this case. And she is also back to the Yehudit case and we're also described that she had tremendous pain, right? Right. Maybe you need to be suffering tremendous pain in order to justify it, or you know, to have had done that and then to expect that it will happen again. And so, you know, here too, you get authorities like the Beit Shmuel, they'll just say, no, the pain factor's insignificant, that's incidental.

A woman can always sterilize herself with a potion. Right. With a potion, okay. The Bach says, no, no, no, it's only permitted when there's a reason or a need, there's some tza'ar, you might define that broadly, but you can't just say, my life would be better if I do it this way. You would actually need to be coping with something like Yehudit.

Rav Avi: So on the one hand he's more strict and on the other hand he's more attentive to women's experience and also more careful with women's bodies.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and maybe going back to our framing on this, sort of also not willing to put women in a marginal category that we just care less about the form of their body or this or that or the other thing. But yet, but it restricts, you know, sort of license as it were for doing this.

Rav Avi: But if you're Yehudit, you actually just wanted permission.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. At least for the potion. Yeah. Right. We don't know. Would Yehudit have considered tubal ligation? Okay, I mean and that's the case that most modern poskim are dealing with. And you know Rav Moshe Feinstein will say, you can't do tubal ligation. That's a direct operation on the body that is severing part of the reproductive organ. That is a form of sterilization that is not allowed. We only allow the potion.

Rav Avi: And for him that's not allowed because it's a form of castration so to speak? Essentially.

Rav Eitan: That's right. It's the same rule. Whereas Rav Nachum Rabinovitch permits tubal ligation because he says, that's not castration, it's indirect, you're just cutting off the tube from the organ as it were. And importantly he says, you can't see it.

Rav Avi: It's an internal surgery.

Rav Eitan: It's an internal operation and therefore it's like a potion.
Meaning a potion he wants to say, that is an important variable for being internal. But an internal surgery is the same. Right. So this is a controversy, right, even within the world of agreeing, here we're speaking about the case of, the case of a woman that has been determined by the Talmud to have more leeway, still arguing what exactly are the parameters here? And you hear different considerations.

Is it about the external image of the body? Is it about shutting down reproductive function?

Rav Avi: So, let's say that our version of the word potion would be pill, right? It's something that you eat. It sounds like he's trying to say, let's look at the outcome of what this intervention is. Let's not say like pills are allowed but procedures are not. If it's better, safer, preferable to do the procedure, that's not a significant distinction, a pill versus a procedure.

Rav Eitan: That's what Rav Rabinovitch would say, 100%. Now, since you now mention the pill, right? If we think about the pill as a form of birth control, which some, we're not again, not the main focus of our episode, but I want to engage it on this point. There is broad acceptance of women taking the pill as birth control when it's appropriate to be on birth control. Isn't that sterilization?

Rav Avi: Yeah. How is it different?

Rav Eitan: Well, it's temporary. Yeah, right. You go off it, you're fertile again, whereas Yehudit is drinking a potion that's not knocking her out for a few months.

Rav Avi: It's permanent.

Rav Eitan: That's it, right? And that's the whole setting of the whole story. She doesn't want to ever have to go through that again. And that distinction between permanent and temporary becomes pretty essential and leads us back now to the reversible vasectomy question. So before we get to the reversible, let's assume an irreversible vasectomy.

The questioner assumes and now hopefully has a little more of the text basis for why this is the case. Well, an irreversible vasectomy is not permitted under Jewish law. And that is, right, simply put, I think, a correct, right, a correct determination. And that's because you see the Talmud was not even willing to allow a man to drink a potion that would have as a side effect sterilization.

So when you talk about the active shutting down of the male reproductive capacity, the sources that we have here, it doesn't matter if you're doing an operation, you're doing a potion, whatever it is, they have essentially said that is a gender gap between men and women. There will be no place for permanent sterilization of a man under that textual regime.

Rav Avi: And does it matter at all whether they have children already? Meaning this is coming from this underlying, you know, command, mitzvah to reproduce. If you've already reproduced, does that make any distinction?

Rav Eitan: Right. So I want to say it's a little bit complicated in that in principle, my surface answer to you is no, not really. That is to say, the question is whether you are the type of person who has this obligation and in theory had it at some point in your life and that remains with you.

Rav Avi: If you are obligated to reproduce, having reproduced in the past isn't really relevant to whether you're obligated still.

Rav Eitan: If you watch the way the main contours of the discussion go, it just seems like that's we're not interested in your particular case, do you have enough kids and maybe there's still a positive value to having more kids even beyond the minimum.

Maybe those kids, God forbid, will not survive and then you have the obligation to try to replace them. But in practice, when poskim, which we'll circle around to, get to really difficult situations where if it feels like this couple has to stay together and they can't have any kids anymore and I have to assess what my options are, well at that point, to the extent there's a mitigating factor of well the man has already fulfilled his obligation to have children, that may be pulled out as a further mitigating factor. So I would say it's not in principle an override switch, but it is something that will come up when poskim are searching for their way out of difficult situations.

Rav Avi: Yeah. This is a good time to take a quick break. We'll get right back to this episode, but first, I want to let you know about an upcoming program at Hadar that I think you're going to love. It's in the summer July Learning Seminar on July 12th through 16th of 2026 in New York City. This is really an incredible week of immersive learning, led by Hadar's stellar faculty and designed for learners of all backgrounds and all levels of text experience. Come connect with an incredible network of people working to build more meaningful Jewish lives. Visit hadar.org/july for more information. Now let's dive back in.

Okay, so it sounds like an irreversible vasectomy would be not okay.
The question then becomes like would a reversible one be okay? And then maybe we will maybe need to get into the question of like what does it mean to be reversible? Is this actually reversible? But where does that, where does that question take us? Does it open something up for us?

Rav Eitan: So if something is truly reversible, okay, let's say the most extreme form of that is something that you do that simply fades over time. That is to say, imagine a potion that doesn't sterilize you, but taking a pill that temporarily makes you infertile, which is how the contraception pill works, which is to say, if you go off it, your body reverts to its prior state.

Rav Avi: Right.

Rav Eitan: That has gotten very broad buy-in from poskim, from halakhic authorities, who will will say, well that's not sterilization at all.

That's just contraception. Yeah, which again might or might not be appropriate in certain or these contexts from other perspectives, but what you're talking about is something that is not permanent at all and therefore doesn't actually really fall in the category of sterilization.

Rav Avi: And that acceptance around the pill you think is gendered or not really? It's actually just about the temporariness.

Rav Eitan: So the Tzitz Eliezer has a very interesting line.

He's mostly talking about the case of a woman and questions of tubal ligation and the like, but he says, if you can really establish that something is temporary, then you can claim that it's just not under the rubric of serus. It's just not under the rubric of sterilization, castration, etc. And while he's saying that in a very local context, it does seem like what he means is you have to understand that the whole category of sterilization is something that is permanent. That is its essential piece. That's the essential part of the Yehudit narrative and that's the thing that the Torah is fundamentally concerned about.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so the permanence matters tremendously for this story. So is reversible the same as temporary?

Rav Eitan: Okay, so that I think is actually key and maybe the rub here. The same Tzitz Eliezer that says if we could find a procedure, an operation, etc. that was completely temporary, it would just not be classified as being part of this prohibition. Yeah, the very same in the same paragraph says if you need a second operation to undo the first operation, well fundamentally that's a permanent thing until you undo it. When you take the pill, if you just stop taking the pill, reproductive function will be restored. If you do a quote-unquote reversible operation but never reverse it, that's a permanent operation. That was permanent.

Rav Avi: It's sort of like saying if you had two surgeries, the first one wasn't reversible just because you got a second one.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, there's something about saying, right, a second surgery doesn't mean the first surgery never happened. It just means you had two surgeries and now you're yet in another state. And I would say that's almost a conceptual claim of when you did the first action, you were doing something that we otherwise would classify as forbidden.

And the notion that you now could undo the consequences doesn't really launder that first action. That's one piece. But the Tzitz Eliezer I think also here and he's not alone among various poskim have some degree of skepticism, I think we might say healthy skepticism about things that are promised to be reversible that may not always be so. That is to say even my understanding...

Rav Avi: Meaning surgeries are unreliable?

Rav Eitan: Well, depending on the context. Even here, I'm not a doctor. My understanding from looking into this is what we're talking about here as a reversible vasectomy is something that in the best of circumstances has a 60-90% chance of being successfully reversed.

Rav Avi: Okay. Wide range. 60 to 90.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And as time passes, my understanding is the rate of success can go down much lower.

That is to say you wait ten years or something like that, it could go down to thirty percent. So even just semantically, I think for both the listeners to be clear, I'm sure the questioner is clear on this, but for the listeners to be clear and to understand the mindset of the poskim who are resistant here, reversible means chance of reversing. Or it means here more like not irreversible.

Rav Avi: Yeah, not 100% irreversible.

Rav Eitan: But this isn't like a light switch of flip it on and off a hundred times and it could just be in either position.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I imagine this is not the answer that the questioner was hoping that you would say based on the way that they submitted this question. They were maybe hoping for a different for a different outcome, but it's also helpful to remember that some of the like trapped feeling that I hear in this question of But we've tried everything else and it didn't work. Even just in that last comment, you're giving us a little window into like we don't know what's coming on the market.

Maybe there will be other options also. It sounds like you're pushing them to put this this option also on the doesn't work, not feasible list.

Rav Eitan: So I want to say a few more things about this, and as is our way on this podcast, we also try to not only or even mainly give answers and more give frameworks for thinking and a kind of what would you have to say kind of formulation to get somewhere. So first, I want to just sit with the, to the extent one comes to this restrictive answer.

I think we're always invested in, you know, well which what makes sense about that, or what's the value or the attitude about that? So first of all, broadly speaking, right? I think it's important to note, said this at the beginning, but I want to circle back to it. There is something, I think, very powerful and very important about recognizing that we don't know where life takes us, even when we are in relationships that feel like they are the anchor of every single part of our life, God forbid, tragedies can happen, things can go in unexpected ways. The notion of preserving one's body and one's ability to be in different circumstances in the future, to be able to procreate with another partner, is one of the things that is being taken seriously here when there's sort of a resistance to making permanent changes that will disable that. We've seen the exceptions that were laid out for Yehudit, at least under some interpretations.

But here too, I do think there is a difference—here I would play up the female agency piece of this—there is a difference between the male and the female body on this front, of the male body just does not have to carry and gestate a child, go through the pain, go through the risk to life and limb. It makes sense, I think, it's certainly a coherent approach to see a tradition that might say: our default claim is no one really should sterilize. But we recognize there are these mitigating factors for women where at least if it's indirect, maybe with the Bach, if it's pain, if it's internal, we're going to think about that differently.

Rav Avi: So what I appreciate about that is on the one hand, for people who run an egalitarian Yeshiva, we might bristle anytime we see that there's a distinction in halakha between men and women.

But here, where there is a distinction in biology, we might say like, you know, it's like an equity versus equality kind of question that people would raise to say actually, to have a halakha that couldn't see a difference between the way you would apply a biological obligation might be more problematic than a halakha that is responsive to saying: women have different bodies, they have different biological relationship to reproduction, and to not have different halakhic outcomes and rules would be a gender-blind insistence in a way that actually would sort of erase women and women's experiences.

Rav Eitan: That I think is some language and thinking for how you would sit with that conclusion and, you know, not chafe at it and go with it. As we said though, I think it's also important to note that okay, but that can also end up putting a certain kind of burden on the female body as opposed to the male body, to the extent that there is a couple here that's actually trying to navigate this as a couple. And this goes back to that question of the frame of on the one hand the autonomy of the different parties here and on the other hand them being a unit coming and asking about this.

And I also understand how a questioner would come to this with a sense of okay, but as a unit, how would we how would we think about this, or how could this be possible? So at the end of the day, I don't think there is actually a lot of maneuverability here, or necessarily even should be, on the front of simply saying yes, it's fine for the man to sterilize himself. And even on the temporary front, I also share some of the skepticism of the question of to what degree is this really temporary, how much can we trust that, but again the technology may develop there. I want to raise two other things from the tradition that to me are—these are more moonshots to be honest, if you ask me, that is to say they feel like the kinds of halachic arguments you make when you're invoking kind of a larger principle or a workaround because you're trying to be faithful to the system but there's certain values that are just clashing with one another and they're less directly about this issue and more broadly.

So one is if you go back to the sterilization of pets episode you will find there was this one outlier view of the Ra'avad who said that well if you ask a non-Jew to do a prohibition of sterilization that's okay.

Rav Avi: That one really felt like a workaround.

Rav Eitan: It's both a workaround because it's a workaround and also because no one agrees with him.

Rav Avi: It was marginal.

Rav Eitan: It was marginal. Everyone basically thinks you can't do that. There is a principle that gets invoked in halacha which is when you are in an extremely pressing circumstance, you feel your back is to the wall, you will sometimes rely on one outlier position of a great prior rabbi and even though it's not the way the whole discussion has gone, it's the limb of the branch of the tree you're clinging to not to fall off.

So I would never really give this as a direct guidance to someone asking me I don't think though you never know the case, but I want our listeners to know that I can imagine someone saying I am feeling like this is the only way my marriage is going to hold together this relationship is going to move forward whatever it is and I need to rely on the Ra'avad which would mean essentially going to a non-Jewish doctor to have the vasectomy performed and that being something that the Ra'avad would think is okay. Again that's really I would say that's an out there do not break glass except in case of emergency sort of piece but okay that's one thing I want to share. The second thing I want to share which maybe gets a little more substantively to this notion of what would it look like to have a couple be considered as a unit? The question is coming from the unit of the two of them as a single body as it were rather than just two individuals in a relationship trying to figure out what they do.

So there we have this extraordinary statement that comes up a number of times in the Talmud based on the Sotah ritual which involves a woman who is suspected by her husband of infidelity and it turns out that she did nothing wrong but he suspected her and lots going on there but in the course of the ritual there the prescription for clearing her name and bringing them back together is to write out a whole oath formula on a piece of parchment. It includes God's name. You scrape off the ink including scraping off God's name and then that creates this potion that she drinks and it clears her.

The rabbis are fascinated by this because they say wait a minute it's forbidden to erase God's name. Why is the Torah telling me in this ritual why is that

Rav Avi: part of the procedure?

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And their conclusion is bringing harmony between a married couple is so great that even the divine name is erased in order to make it happen which they also understand and translate as sometimes you violate certain standards you would otherwise normally hold in order to prevent a marriage from breaking up.

Rav Avi: I certainly didn't hear it the first time when I was saying that the story we had about Yehudit had so many valences but actually you have another story here that you're bringing us of a woman drinking a potion in order to save her marriage in relation to her marriage it's an unexpected parallel that I would not have come to.

Rav Eitan: Yeah 100% it's a brilliant connection I think to make and lest this sound all pie in the sky this principle is invoked to justify deviations from what are otherwise sort of standard assumptions of law in order to keep people together. So I'll give you the most on point one which is if you read the Talmud in a simple way it says that if a man's been married to a woman for ten years and they have not conceived he must take another woman. Right. The proof for this incidentally is the Abraham and Sarah story who are together for ten years in the land of Israel and at the end of that Sarah says hey you gotta marry Hagar and they take that as a paradigm.

Just because you're with someone doesn't mean you don't still have an obligation to have kids. Gotta take a second wife.

Rav Avi: Fascinating thing to learn from because that worked so well.

Rav Eitan: Right, exactly. So among the things that didn't work so well there was the polygamy, which of course ends up falling out in later Jewish practice and norms, but which makes this halacha much more complicated. Because then it doesn't just mean you are supposed to as the man take a second wife, once you are in a monogamous environment, it will mean ten years of infertility means divorce.

Rav Avi: Yeah, right.

Rav Eitan: All the Ashkenazi poskim, the Rama and the Shulchan Aruch, they say, oh we don't enforce that at all. You just let people who love each other and want to be married stay together even though they're infertile. So it's out there in the culture but basically it's like, maybe they should do that, but they're going to have to decide that on their own, we're not going to enforce it. And when later commentators try to understand and say what do you mean, how could you not enforce it, it's a black letter law in the Talmud.

The answer is invoking this sotah ritual, which is to say here's an example where in order to not force these people who love each other to divorce, we will erase the divine name, we will erase this specific halacha in this context, we will let it basically be abandoned. Now, the astute listener will, as I think when I say it, note all the ways that might be different. There's a difference between passively allowing yourself to be in a relationship where you seem not to be conceiving as opposed to the question of an active operation that is intervening. I'm offering this less as guidance of psak of how to move forward but more as language and a spirit that I think may capture some of what whether the questioner or other listeners are grappling with.

And just to note that if there are decisions that are made in the context of addressing issues like this that don't square one hundred percent with all the details of how the halacha would normally come out and they are in the name of preserving a loving, sustaining marriage, you would not be the first people to grapple with that question and to come out on the side of figuring out how you stay together while doing right by each other.

Rav Avi: Yeah, this feels beautiful and it's surprising to be learning it from sotah and really interesting. It's like we could be so quick to say like well, if I had a red pen and I could cross out some pieces of the tradition wouldn't I wouldn't I get to that sotah ritual first, and it's a good reminder to stop us from doing that and say well what might we lose down the line if we take an action like that. But it still to me feels a little bit like it puts us in this position of, well, she can drink the potion but only if she was in a lot of pain.

It's like okay this could help me get off the hook, but only if it's like my marriage is at stake, right? Do I have to submit this question and then say, and if we don't, we can't go on as a couple, in order to get here? That still feels extreme.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think look, maybe the most creative thing that I might say about this and want to sort of explore as a sort of extension of what does it mean to say it's really important for us to keep a couple together? In a way what it's saying is we treat them as a single body. The Torah itself talks about marriage as creating one flesh. There's a way in which you don't just have sort of an agreement between two people, but there's a sense of them being linked.

Is there a way to talk about well if her life is at stake, for instance, if she gets pregnant again, or it's a very important health consideration for her, it becomes a health consideration for them and for him because this bodily unit, this marital body as it were, needs to address this topic. At that point, essentially it's not a question about male sterilization, right, on its own. It becomes a question about the unit of the couple figuring out how are they going to address this. That doesn't feel neatly tied up in a bow for me, but it feels like an important frame to understand.

I think where the question is even reasonably coming from and with all the caveats that we said about what's reversible, what's not reversible, et cetera, that might also give some useful language for grappling with the question. I think the toughest part about this question is I want to hear your sort of concluding and framing thoughts on this also is, I really don't want to lose any part of this discussion. I don't want to lose the sensitivity we're raising now of this couple is coming together and they really shouldn't just be thought of as individuals asking a question on their own. I also really don't want to lose the sensitivity to what it is to preserve your body and your reproductive functions and that the Torah really cares about that and we don't know what life brings us that might lead to a less satisfying directive.

But it might be the most honest representation of the Torah on this topic. One of the consequences of monogamy is you become much more codependent and co-defined by your single partner in a way that in an earlier world where people are having multiple spouses, you have a fundamental imbalance of the man may have more than one partner in a lot of those biblical stories. And there is something here that is powerful and important to note of when you move to monogamous assumptions, one of the consequences is your partner just determines more of your life and your variables than they did before.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I think that that opening distinction that you gave that you're coming back to here is so, it's so helpful even if it doesn't give me all the answers, and maybe we'll end where we started of, it is both broad and big and opening up these sort of categorical questions and also very specific and very relevant and potentially life-changing for, for an individual who hears this question and thinks, "Yep, that's, that's my situation, and I, I have to make a decision here." And so sort of want to acknowledge both of those valences and say, hopefully this is a helpful jumping-off point for discussion and for study. And we will encourage everyone to handle your own medical care decisions and also consult with your own rabbis and scholars to figure out what the right answer for a particular situation that you are in.

Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at [email protected]. Responsa Radio is a project of the Hadar Institute. Thanks to Chana Kupetz and Jeremy Tabick for producing this podcast and to David Khabinsky for recording and editing this episode.

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