רבי מנחם ברבי יוסי

Rav Menachem b’Rabbi Yosi was a tanna of the fifth generation, one of the five sons of Rabbi Yosi and a brother of Rabbi Yishmael b’Rabbi Yosi. He comes down to us only a handful of times, in baraita, and he is also called Rabbi Menachem-Vardimos. Rav Aharon Hyman held that he is the sage cited plainly as “Rabbi Menachem” in the Mishnah, and that he is brought in Yoma.

One ruling of his concerns a woman whose husband was testified to have passed away, so that she was permitted to marry again, after which other witnesses came and contradicted the first, saying the husband was alive. The tanna taught that everything turns on whether she had already married. Lechatchilah she does not marry; but where she married on the psak of a beit din that relied on the first witnesses, the court does not undo its own ruling, and she is left to continue her married life with the second husband — and this for the honor of beit din, which in borderline cases must guard its standing and rely on the first testimony, that the husband had died, so long as that testimony has not been overturned with certainty. The Gemara explains the case as one where the woman herself knows clearly that her husband had died but holds no proofs of the kind a beit din can accept, and her husband is among the witnesses who came to testify that she was free to marry — so that the two of them may rely on what they themselves know, and the court, knowing nothing clearer, does not stand in their way.