Din: The Beth Din of America Podcast 
Episode 1: Yeshiva Tuition Without a Contract: Who Pays for Shana Bet?

Episode Host: Bailey Spitz
Guests: Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann and Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig


Bailey Spitz (0:00)
Welcome to the Beth Din of America podcast series, where the 2026 interns are taking you for a deeper look into the cases and work of the Beth Din of America. To start us off, I'm Bailey Spitz. I've had the privilege of interning at the Beth Din of America. During my internship, I've been able to see firsthand the range of cases that come before the beth din and, even more importantly, the tremendous amount of thought, analysis, and deliberation that goes into every decision.

One case in particular that really captured my attention was a dispute over unpaid yeshiva tuition. At first glance, it might sound like a straightforward disagreement over money, but the case raised fundamental questions about contracts, halacha, and how a beth din approaches resolving disputes when the answer isn't immediately obvious. Our hope with this summer series, and with this conversation, is to give listeners a window into all the work of the beth din.

To do that, today we have Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig, who was a dayan on the case, and Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann, Director of the Beth Din of America. Hi, Rabbi Weissmann, Rabbi Itamar. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you could please start by introducing yourselves and your positions here at the Beth Din of America. We can start with Rabbi Weissmann.

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (1:19)
Sure, thanks. It's great to be here. My name is Shlomo Weissmann. I serve as the Menahel, or the Director, of the Beth Din of America. I've been in this position for about 18 years now. Before I did this, I worked in commercial real estate law, doing legal work for a law firm, and I enjoy this job a lot more. It's very interesting, as we'll see from this podcast. I think we'll delve into some of the issues we deal with on a regular basis and see how fascinating the work here is.

Bailey Spitz (1:53)
Amazing. Rabbi Itamar?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (1:56)
Hi, I'm a dayan here at the Beth Din of America. I've been working here for about eight years, and I am the editor of our journal, where we try to put out our cases and describe the type of work that we do.

Bailey Spitz (2:12)
Rabbi Itamar was also a dayan on the case that we're going to be discussing today. So, Rabbi Itamar, if you could start by walking us through the facts, the background, and everything important to know about this case of the yeshiva tuition.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (2:30)
This was one of the early cases that I sat on here at the beth din. The fact pattern starts with a negotiation between a father and a yeshiva about Shana Aleph in Israel. The yeshiva gives the father a contract stating that its tuition costs $24,000 for the year. They tell the father right away that they'll give him half off, for $12,000, for Shana Aleph.

Then the son goes to yeshiva for the year. He has a great time, and he wants to come back for Shana Bet. The yeshiva is very excited that he's going to come back for Shana Bet, and they start discussions with the father about how much that second year is going to cost. The yeshiva gives the father a contract that says $22,000 for the second year, but they agree to give him a scholarship for $2,000 off. So it's a lower sticker price, but a much more modest scholarship. And the father says, "There's no way I'm going to pay $20,000 for this second year. We're going to have to work out a better tuition agreement for Shana Bet."

Bailey Spitz (3:38)
Can you talk a little bit about the major questions that needed to be answered when you were given this fact pattern, and how you and the other dayanim went about deciding on the frameworks you were going to view this case through?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (3:54)
One of the critical issues here is that they never ended up coming to an agreement on what that Shana Bet amount was going to be. The yeshiva tried to get in touch with the father to get him to agree to a certain amount, but the father basically didn't pick up the phone, and they weren't able to get in touch with him. So what happened is that the kid went to yeshiva for the entire second year. He had a great time, but the father didn't pay anything toward tuition. Then, at the end of the year, the yeshiva sued the father and demanded that he pay compensation for that second year. The question we had to deal with was how much he was obligated to pay, given that there was no signed agreement for Shana Bet.

Now, what happens in a dispute sometimes is that both sides take opposite positions. The yeshiva here said, "We want not just the amount that we were willing to offer for Shana Bet. We want our sticker price, the full $22,000 for Shana Bet, without the $2,000 discount." And the father went to the exact opposite position. He said, "I never signed your tuition agreement. We never came to a meeting of the minds, so I don't owe you anything for Shana Bet." So they were at completely opposite positions in terms of what was owed.

Bailey Spitz (5:19)
Understood. So basically, the father was claiming that there was no contractual agreement whatsoever, so he doesn't owe anything, and the yeshiva was saying that there was a contractual agreement, so to speak.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (5:31)
Yes. The yeshiva seemed to be saying, "The tuition contract that we handed you said that our cost is $22,000 for Shana Bet. We offered you a $2,000 discount. You never got back to us, so now you're on the hook for the full $22,000."

Bailey Spitz (5:45)
Right, and sending the child would be what made him contractually obligated to pay that.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (5:51)
Well, that's one of the key questions in the analysis. The question before us is this: Here you have an ambiguous relationship, and we had to decide, after this full year of Shana Bet, how much the father was liable for.

Sometimes you sit in the hearing and you have one framework for thinking about how the decision is going to go. But thinking about this case over time, we realized that there were two fundamental questions we had to answer in moving it toward a resolution. The first is exactly as you put it: Was there a contractual relationship between the yeshiva and the father, even though they didn't sign on a number? Was there some type of agreement between them, yes or no? And second, if there was an agreement, what was the right amount agreed to between them?

Bailey Spitz (6:51)
Okay, so I think those are the questions we're going to get into more deeply. But before we start, I'd love to zoom out a little and understand how the dayanim on a case really approach coming to these frameworks. On an American circuit court, the judges vote among themselves, and the majority rules. How does it work at the Beth Din of America, or at a beth din in general? Rabbi Weissmann, if you could explain that to us a little bit.

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (7:25)
Sure. As Rabbi Itamar alluded to, during the course of the case the dayanim are forming opinions even as the testimony is coming in. Then what typically happens is that after the hearing, or during a break, the dayanim will confer with one another. They'll engage in deliberations and talk out the theory of the case.

I think it's probably true that most of the time the dayanim end up coalescing almost unanimously around the direction the case is going in. Sometimes there might be a little bit of disparity among the panel as to exactly which theory gets you to that conclusion, or, on the edges, exactly how much to quantify the damages or how to deal with loose ends. But just from experience, they will typically agree on the general thrust of the case, on which way the case is going.

So, for example, here I don't think any of the dayanim ever imagined that the yeshiva was owed nothing. I hope I'm not giving away the punchline, but no one really imagined that the yeshiva was owed nothing. Whatever the theory or halachic basis was going to be for the outcome, it probably wasn't true that, even though they conferred the service and provided a yeshiva education for this kid, they would end up getting paid nothing. And then, as we'll describe, there may have been a little bit of differentiation among the three of them as to exactly which theory to apply and exactly how to quantify the amount that the yeshiva was owed. But that's typical for the kinds of cases we hear. It's very rare that you get a real outlier case where the dayanim are all over the place and don't agree.

When I first got here 18 years ago, I remember one of my first cases, and it was the case where I learned the lesson of how to staff cases. Even though we like to encourage diversity among the dayanim, it's important that the dayanim at least be within the same universe in terms of the way they approach cases. This was a case early on where I didn't quite get that right, and the dayanim who were staffed on this case were, in some ways, in different universes. They were just different worlds, and they disagreed so vehemently about the case that we ended up actually having a dissent written. It was the only dissent, I think, ever written in the history of the Beth Din of America. Every other case is signed by all three dayanim.

The Shulchan Aruch actually says that when dayanim go to issue a decision, the majority rules. You decide the case based on the majority, so if two out of the three dayanim agree on an outcome, that's the outcome that carries the day. But when you actually issue the decision, all three dayanim should sign on to it. They all sign as if it's a unanimous decision, and they keep among themselves the discussions that take place in chambers that get them to the conclusion. So the one case where we actually had a dissent written was the case where the dayanim were not at all on the same page. But that's the exception that proves the rule, I would say.

Bailey Spitz (10:40)
Right. So in this case, Rabbi Itamar, how did you and the other dayanim come to the frameworks and conclusions that you did?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (10:50)
Well, one of the hardest things about deciding cases is that you're there in the hearing, you're reading the materials that the parties submitted, and you have fact patterns, and then you want to try to impose a framework of law on the facts that come before you.

Here, our initial discussions, and one dayan in particular, focused on thinking in terms of a non-contractual theory of unjust enrichment, which would say that there was no binding agreement between the father and the yeshiva. It's almost as if the yeshiva just conferred a benefit outside of any framework of an agreement, and the question is whether you can charge the father for the benefits his son received. This principle in halacha is known as yored. Imagine someone comes and clears the snow from your walk. You didn't ask them to do it; it was an unsolicited benefit. Under the halachic theory of yored, in principle, you would be obligated to reimburse the snow remover. So the question is whether that's the right framework for thinking about this case, where the son shows up in yeshiva for Shana Bet and now you want to try to impose the cost on the father outside of any contractual framework. That was one way of thinking about the case.

We went back and forth for some time, and eventually we moved away from that way of thinking. I'll give you three reasons why we moved away from it.

The first is that if you think about who received the benefit, it's really the son, who went to yeshiva and had the learning experience. For an adult, post-high-school child, it's very difficult to impose the cost of the benefit on his father, who wasn't the person who received the benefit the yeshiva provided. Even more so from the perspective of arbitration law: the arbitration agreement for the hearing was between the father and the yeshiva, and the son himself wasn't a party to it at all. So you could say the son is the beneficiary, but we couldn't impose any of the costs on him, and it would be mysterious how you would hold the father liable for the son's benefits. Imagine an adult son goes to a restaurant and doesn't pay the tab. You might say it's a stretch to hold the father responsible for a benefit that the son received.

Another challenge was within Jewish law itself. There's an interesting quirk that this rule of yored, of unjust enrichment, doesn't apply to someone who receives the benefit of Torah study. That reflects a more general idea that people should be entitled to a good Torah education without having to pay for it, at least in theory. Most of our yeshivas contract for compensation for their services, but here there's no contract, and if there's no contract, it would be hard, from a halachic perspective, to impose the cost of a Torah education on the beneficiary. So the case law itself is skeptical of applying yored to Torah study scenarios.

And the third reason is just conceptual. The law of yored really applies to someone who provides a service unsolicited. He shows up at your front door the day of the snowstorm, he clears the snow, and you look outside and it's all gone. That doesn't really capture the facts of this case, where the father and the yeshiva had extensive discussions about the son going to the yeshiva. What they didn't agree on was one term of that broader thing that they did agree on, which was that the son was going to go and attend for Shana Bet. So when you think about the different principles of law we have, ultimately the panel as a whole came to the conclusion that this fact pattern best fits the description of an agreement for the son to go to Shana Bet, but one that left off without specifying how much the father was going to pay for that experience.

Bailey Spitz (15:09)
Right. So you answered your first question, contractual versus non-contractual, within the yored discussion. But now you had to discuss among yourselves and agree upon what price should be imposed on them. How did you approach making that decision?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (15:32)
When you have an ambiguous agreement where the terms are not agreed upon explicitly, the legal system has a whole range of rules for imposing a fair price on the agreement. So the question we had to figure out at this point was whether it's plausible that they actually did agree on some price implicitly.

You pointed out earlier that you could say the yeshiva gave the father a form contract. They said $22,000 with a $2,000 discount, and then, arguably, when the father sent his son to the yeshiva, he agreed, implicitly or formally, to the last offer that the yeshiva put on the table. In fact, there's a Tosefta that thinks in exactly these terms. It imagines two people negotiating. Imagine you're selling me a car, and you say you'll sell it for $20,000, and I say I'll buy it for $15,000, and we can't agree, so we walk away from the negotiating table. If I come back and say, "You know what, let's do it," then the halacha views me as agreeing to the price that you set. Let's call that the first-mover rule, because I'm now coming back to the table at the last price you offered. So, at least in theory, you could look at this case and say the father implicitly accepted the yeshiva's offer, maybe $20,000, maybe $22,000, and we could impose that price on the agreement.

The problem with that line of reasoning, and this too took us some time to realize as we were going through the subtleties of the case, is that there's a different rule in Jewish law. It says that if you have two parties who are negotiating, so you say $15,000 and I say $10,000, but instead of walking away and one party coming back, one party says, "You know what? Let's agree to compromise on this," and after that the parties come back to the table, then we don't say that there was acceptance of the last offer. The halacha views it as an agreement to compromise. Well, what did they compromise on? We don't know. And then you have to go to a different rule for filling in unspecified terms of a contract, and there the halacha would normally say, "Look to the market custom. What's the normal going rate for this type of commodity in the marketplace?"

Bailey Spitz (18:01)
Right. In this case, you looked at it and saw that they had entered some sort of negotiation and then left the table. Which rule did you see the facts aligning with?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (18:13)
This is one of the hard parts of trying to apply a subtle fact pattern to the right framework of law. We had two legal rules within the contract approach. Could you say that the father agreed to the yeshiva's last offer, or was this more analogous to that second rule, where there was an agreement to compromise?

The way the panel understood the case was that the father had said, "There's no way I'm going to pay you $20,000 for Shana Bet. We're going to have to come to a better arrangement. You're going to have to work out a better scholarship for me." And we understood the yeshiva as having acknowledged that. So after working through the fact pattern, we felt that the best way to conceptualize this case was that the yeshiva understood that if they wanted this kid to come for Shana Bet, they were going to have to offer a much better scholarship amount. They never came to an agreement on that, but there was essentially an agreement to compromise on the price, and then the rule would send us to look to marketplace custom to fill in the amount.

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (19:20)
So whether you apply the Tosefta's rule or the other rule you mentioned turns on a very subtle factual distinction: Was there a last offer on the table, then silence, and then acceptance, so to speak? Or was the last offer on the table interrupted by some rejection of that offer, and then performance?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (19:40)
There was extensive deliberation among the dayanim on the panel, including re-listening to the testimony in the case. Did the yeshiva accept that they would have to come down, or did they just walk away when the father said, "This is unacceptable. We're going to have to compromise"? It really took a lot of working through the record to come to a consensus among the panel as to what exactly happened, and which rule those facts would trigger.

Bailey Spitz (20:11)
In this case, the father wasn't reachable when the yeshiva tried to reach back out and negotiate. He just didn't answer. You mentioned that, and it was part of the testimony. Did that factor into your reading of the case? Did it change the legal outcome or the application of halacha in any way?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (20:32)
One of the dayanim on the case felt very strongly that the father acted in bad faith by stonewalling the yeshiva: not getting in touch with them, not picking up their calls, and not answering their emails to nail down a final price. It may have factored into the ultimate decision we came to, at least for one of the dayanim.

My own personal view was that the yeshiva itself was very eager to induce the son to come back for Shana Bet. They saw him as a key personality for getting other kids to sign on for Shana Bet, so the yeshiva was very enthusiastic about securing his attendance. It's true that the father, in a way, acted inappropriately by not finalizing the amount with the yeshiva. But the yeshiva, too, seemed very eager to pull the kid in, and it seems the yeshiva was happy to accept him before it had come to a finalized agreement with the father. It would have been within the yeshiva's rights to say, "You absolutely cannot attend Shana Bet until we have a signed tuition agreement in place," and the yeshiva didn't do that. They enthusiastically embraced him.

Bailey Spitz (21:46)
Right. I'm curious, Rabbi Weissmann, about cases in general. How does the idea of people acting in bad faith factor into how you look at cases?

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (21:59)
It's not supposed to factor in, in the sense that just because you find one party more likable than the other, that shouldn't affect the case at all. And I think it doesn't. I think the dayanim are very disciplined, and they've gone through enough of these cases that it doesn't really present much of a temptation. They're focused on the parties' rights and obligations, on the contractual documents in front of them, on the law, and on the halacha, and they're able to push aside any personal like or dislike of a party.

Of course, bad faith in a transaction can have an effect on your legal standing and your legal rights, so that sometimes does play out. But by and large, the personality aspect might make a case more interesting. It might provide a little more entertainment for the dayanim as the case unfolds. You always see interesting personalities in front of you. But I think it doesn't ultimately affect the outcome of the case in any real way, unless those quirks make their way into the actual substance of what happened.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (23:07)
There's also a charitable interpretation of his conduct: that he just didn't have his act together. You don't get the sense that he had a secretary picking up the phone for him. It seems like a lot of calls may have gone unanswered at his home. You could interpret that as him intentionally stonewalling the yeshiva, but you could also look at him as someone who just doesn't have high executive function.

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (23:34)
Yes, and that dynamic, I think, plays out a lot more often than actual bad faith or malfeasance. When we talk about the colorful personalities in front of us, and the way that different parties' behavior affects the nuances of a case, it's much more often that we see someone who lacks executive functioning, or someone who's just sloppy, or someone who's unprofessional and doesn't have their act together. That's a much more common dynamic than a bad actor.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (24:03)
Yes, that was my favored reading of the case, rather than the idea that he was acting with intentional malfeasance against the yeshiva, thinking he could show up a year after Shana Bet having gotten a year of free tuition.

Bailey Spitz (24:17)
Right. And when you were trying to reconstruct this agreed-upon price, were you approaching it through the lens of trying to find a fair price, even though they may not have agreed, or were you looking at it as reconstructing the price they had agreed upon?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (24:40)
To take us back through the reasoning from the beginning of the case: we started out thinking that maybe this was an instance of non-contractual unjust enrichment. No agreement; the yeshiva provided a valuable service; and maybe there's a way to hold the father liable for the benefit his son received. We moved away from that because we thought it was the wrong way to think about the actual facts of the case. There really was an agreement. We just didn't know the price of the agreement. And we agreed that the father did not accept the yeshiva's last offer on the table. It's closer to the case where there was an agreement to compromise on price.

So then the question became: What's the right price to put into the contract? The Shulchan Aruch says you look to the custom, the minhag hamedinah. Now, a challenge in a case like this is how you would go about figuring out the customary price for this type of service. In a yeshiva where there are very standard rates for what every student pays for Shana Bet or Shana Aleph, it may not be so difficult to figure out the customary price. In this case, the yeshiva's own testimony was that there was such a wide-ranging disparity in what different parents were paying, based on financial need and where the child was coming from, that it was impossible to find a custom, at least with respect to the yeshiva and its students.

So we thought that maybe there was a way to go about it by looking to other yeshivas, figuring out what they charge, and imposing that on the contract here. We started to go down that avenue somewhat, but then in our deliberations we moved to a different rule that appears in the halacha: when two parties had a similar arrangement in the past, maybe it's more reasonable to hold them in the present to the terms of the agreement they had in the past for the comparable service, rather than to look to what other people are doing in the marketplace. So instead of asking what other yeshivas are charging for Shana Bet, you would ask, "What have this yeshiva and this father agreed to in their past dealings?"

And there's great precedent for this in the Shulchan Aruch. Someone once told me that all good precedents in halacha come from disputes between communities and chazanim. As it turns out, there's a wonderful ruling in the Shulchan Aruch based on a medieval dispute between a chazan and his community. The chazan was hired for a year, and certain benefits came along with that first hiring. Then they hired him again for a second year without specifying what the benefits would be, and the Shulchan Aruch says you carry the terms of the first contract over to the second contract. We thought that was the right paradigm for this case: you look to the past practice of the parties between themselves to figure out the right terms to govern them here. So we said that you could look to what they agreed to for Shana Aleph, which was $12,000, and hold them to that amount for the Shana Bet tuition as well.

Now, you ask whether we think that, in their minds, they were thinking $12,000 for Shana Bet. I think the answer is no. We don't know what their mental states were, and the law shouldn't want to rest on speculation about the inner states of people's minds.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (28:28)
But what we do have is a set of rules for what happens when a contract is incomplete, and those rules themselves probably consider what reasonable expectations these parties could have had going into Shana Bet. It does seem reasonable that if they agreed exactly one year earlier to a $12,000 contract for very comparable services, with the same faculty, the same facilities, the same student, the same location, and the same type of education, then even though it's a Shana Bet experience, and even though the yeshiva tried to negotiate a higher contract, the expectations are set by the prior practice, even if the parties attempted to negotiate around it. That's where our decision landed: holding the parties to the $12,000 amount for Shana Bet that they had agreed to for Shana Aleph.

Bailey Spitz (29:19)
American law, like the UCC, takes a similar approach to this question of past practice versus minhag hamedinah, or marketplace practice. Did that come up at all in your deliberations, or were you focused only on the Shulchan Aruch?

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (29:40)
Well, I'll tell you, in this discussion itself, it wasn't American law that bore on our decision. I will say that what's striking is that the language of the Shulchan Aruch does say minhag hamedinah. That's the default rule: if you have an ambiguous contract, you look to minhag hamedinah. One of the dayanim felt very strongly that you don't want to depart from the straightforward reading of the Shulchan Aruch. But then, in the deliberations, the point was that we have this other rule, which says you look to the past practice of the parties, and you have to figure out how to balance those two rulings.

To me, though, what's striking is that American law and halacha, like legal systems generally, often think in similar ways about what the reasonable expectations are for the terms of a contract. So the discussion about the chazan says to look to the parties' past practice, even though you could also look to the marketplace. I would say that in this case it wasn't the UCC that guided our decision, but our interpretation of the halacha probably stemmed from reasons similar to those that animate the UCC's conclusion that you look to the past practice of the parties over external marketplace practice.

Bailey Spitz (30:51)
Right. Rabbi Weissmann, in general, in most cases, how does American law factor into decisions?

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (30:58)
It's an important point to make that very often American law plays a very large role in decisions. The distinction I would make is that as cases become more complex and more sophisticated, and sometimes larger in terms of the dollar amounts in dispute, the dayanim's minds go more toward thinking about minhag hasocharim, the custom of the marketplace. A case like this, by contrast, was a small-potatoes kind of case. It took place within the construct of Jewish communal infrastructure.

Generally speaking, I think the question of when you apply halacha straight and when you take into account the custom of the marketplace turns on the expectations of the parties when they enter into the transaction. Are they expecting baseline halacha to apply, or are they expecting something more like American law to apply? As cases get more sophisticated, if this were, for example, a lease dispute where a lease ended, the tenant carried over into the next term, and we were trying to figure out which lease terms should govern, and this were a large commercial lease, or even a small commercial lease, or, well, let's leave it at a commercial lease, then I think there would be a much stronger argument that halacha defers to local practice and local custom in determining the outcome. Then we probably would have looked at the UCC, or at least taken it into strong consideration, as opposed to just looking at the Shulchan Aruch.

As it turns out, both systems seem to get you to the same place here. But that's an important point. As cases become more secular in nature and more complex, and the parties, for example, transacted through lawyers and hired big law firms to negotiate the contract, it's more likely that what they expected to govern their affairs was a secular legal framework rather than halacha. That's clearly not the case here. We were talking about yeshiva tuition.

Bailey Spitz (33:06)
Rabbi Itamar, could you close out the discussion of the particulars of the case? Let us know what happened.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (33:16)
Well, in this case, we ultimately ruled that...

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (33:19)
You should make them read the article. Don't tell them!

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (33:22)
We ruled that the father should pay exactly what he agreed to pay for Shana Aleph. In addition to our thinking that this was the best interpretation of the law as applied to the facts of the case, one virtue we saw in that decision was that it eliminated speculation as to the dollar amount he would have to pay. You could think about going around to different yeshivas, getting a list of how much each one charges for Shana Bet and how much people are actually paying, and hiring a statistician to find a weighted average. There's a lot of speculation that goes into reaching an amount on that basis. The nice thing here is that, in addition to being a compelling application of the halachic principles, the decision arrives at what seems to be a very equitable and objective number for the case.

Bailey Spitz (34:20)
Okay. To close out our discussion, I want to ask you both: What do you want people to take away from this case? We can start with Rabbi Itamar.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (34:33)
This is a small case, without a lot of money on the line: a dispute between a father and a yeshiva. But what I really like about this case, and about thinking it through and writing about it, is the kind of judicial deliberation and reasoning that went into figuring out which legal precedent governs the facts of the case. And appreciating how, if you went with the unjust enrichment theory of yored, that would lead you to a totally different type of conclusion. Maybe the son should be liable to reimburse the yeshiva. Maybe there's no reimbursement for the Torah education portion. And even if you go the contractual route, maybe the father accepted the yeshiva's amount, and that would take you to a $20,000 decision or a $22,000 decision. But then there's the subtle difference in interpreting the fact pattern. Maybe he didn't agree; maybe there was an agreement that they would have to come to a compromise price. That leads you to a different legal principle, and that's what got us to the $12,000 amount.

What I like about this is the deliberate judicial reasoning about how the principles get applied to the facts, reading the principles in light of the facts, and seeing how subtle differences in legal reasoning can lead to very different outcomes.

Bailey Spitz (36:00)
Rabbi Weissmann?

Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann (36:01)
My takeaway, I think, is that you could imagine a different set of dayanim sitting down, looking at this case, and saying, "Okay, well, he says zero, and $12,000 was last year's tuition, and then there's the $22,000 number, and then there's the $20,000 number. Let's mix it up and come up with something that's roughly just, like $16,000 or $18,000 or $19,000." That would be very rough justice, with an emphasis on the rough.

I think what distinguished this case from that kind of approach is the rigor of the reasoning that the dayanim brought to bear. They thought through the different possibilities, and they charted them out in the decision. They offered a reasoned decision that was a full-throated explanation of how they got to their answer, and I think that is what good beth din practice should be. There should be transparency. When parties come to a beth din, they shouldn't feel like they're getting an off-the-cuff, shoot-from-the-hip judgment from the dayanim they come before. Rather, they should feel comfortable and confident that they're getting rigorous analysis from dayanim who are taking their arguments seriously, running them through thousands of years of halachic precedent, running them through legal precedent when that's appropriate, which, as I mentioned, it often is, and coming up with a final word that's presented to the parties in a coherent, reasoned way that makes sense.

That, I think, serves both parties. Whether one party emerges victorious, so to speak, or you're on the losing end, there's something satisfying about knowing that they took your argument seriously, took the time to reason it through, and wrote it out. I think that's one of the real strengths of the Beth Din of America in particular. We pride ourselves on issuing reasoned decisions, and we have an internal appeal process that depends on appellate dayanim being able to review the record and the reasoning contained in the decision. Over the last year or two, we've been engaged in a real effort to publish cases, to bring that transparency to bear and to let people know that this is something we offer. So that's my takeaway from this case. This case offers that in a really good way. It's a good example of thinking through the options and then landing on an answer that makes sense.

Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig (38:33)
Whenever we issue a decision, I like to think back to our reasoning at the beginning. It reminds me of the beginning of Bereishis, where everything is chaos and void and you can't make sense of things. As you work through it, you slowly impose order on things and ultimately bring it to a clean decision and conclusion.

Bailey Spitz (38:53)
Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you want to learn more about this case or the work of the Beth Din of America, go to our website. You can find Rabbi Itamar's article on this case there. And stay tuned for future episodes of this series.