How to rid house of leavened products during Passover? Mormon law prof has contracts for that
A professor at the William & Mary Law School was acting as a “friendly gentile” when he helped draft contracts to purchase unused leavened foodstuffs and lease its storage locations from members of another law professor’s synagogue in suburban Philadelphia. (Image from Shutterstock)
A professor at the William & Mary Law School was acting as a “friendly gentile” when he helped draft contracts to purchase unused leavened foodstuffs and lease its storage locations from members of another law professor’s synagogue in suburban Philadelphia.
Law professor Nathan B. Oman is a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He doesn’t drink alcohol, but the legal documents gave him short-term ownership last year of congregants’ whiskey and other leavened products, along with “a lease on a very nice apartment in Jerusalem,” he wrote in January for Wayfare magazine.
Oman’s specialties include contracts and law and religion. The other law professor, Chaim Saiman, is a scholar of Jewish law at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law.
The Salt Lake Tribune caught up with Oman after he drove about six hours each way to repeat the contractual exchange with Saiman’s rabbi in advance of Passover, which began Monday evening.
Oman signed the contract, written mostly in Hebrew, paying 200 silver dollar coins and a handkerchief in exchange. He is buying not only leavened items known as chometz but also the locations within homes that have those items.
“I have leases on little cupboards and closets,” Oman told the Salt Lake Tribune on Monday, “all over suburban Philadelphia.” He has also taken short-term ownership of vacation homes.
Left unsaid is that the items that he bought would be sold back after Passover.
In his Wayfare post, Oman said his contract last year was structured as a cash sale and a bartered exchange involving the exchange of a handkerchief for the whiskey to “eliminate any difficulties under Jewish law as to my ownership.” He also signed a document for the sale of goods under Pennsylvania law.
The idea of a temporary purchase began centuries ago, when Jewish distillers had large amounts of leavened products on hand.
“Thus was the workaround of the sale to a friendly gentile born,” Oman wrote.
Oman said he enjoyed “chewing over the contract language with the rabbi,” and he wants to be kind to Saiman, a longtime friend.
“When Chaim explained to me that at Passover it was possible to avoid the need to dispose of one’s whiskey and other valuable chometz by selling it for the duration of the holiday to a gentile, I had a new ambition,” Oman wrote in Wayfare. “Legal scholars have long studied how parties use contracts to bargain around troublesome rules. I was fascinated by the idea of contracting around divine law.”
“As observant believers,” Oman wrote, he and Saiman “are both fascinated by the place of religion in the secular world and the way that adherents manage the negotiation between tradition and modernity.”
