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Deceiving Parents into Saying Amen in Vain at

a Staged Marriage Ceremony

Question: A young man and woman wanted to marry but their
parents opposed the marriage because the families were from differ-
ent communities. Unwilling to distress their parents, the boy and
girl traveled to the United States. Some time later they got married
secretly without telling their parents. Their parents ultimately with-
drew their objections and wrote to their son, telling him that they had
decided to allow them to marry and that they should return to Israel
and get married lawfully. The couple agreed to come and pretend
that they would only now be getting married. The parents invited
hundreds of guests to the fictitious wedding and the couple became
concerned that the marriage blessings would be made in vain, for they
were already married and there was no justification for repeating the
blessings. The couple decided to hire a band that would play loudly
along with the rabbi who would be conducting the ceremony and
revealed to him that he must not utter G-d’s Name when making
the blessings but should make sounds as though he was saying G-d’s
Name, taking care that the loud music should drown his voice so that
his odd pronunciation should go unnoticed. This stratagem dealt
with the problem of making blessings in vain, because the rabbi would
not be making any blessings. However, there remained the problem of
having several hundred people answering amein for no reason.

Response: A tenuous solution exists, of having someone else
make a blessing on some food, such as Shehakol nihyeh bidevaro [he
could then eat a few grains of sugar] at the same time the rabbi was
supposedly making the marriage blessings. The crowd’s amein would
then take effect in response to those blessings, rather than the ones
to which they imagined they were responding. Although according to
the Rema (Orach Chaim 124:8) it is forbidden to respond with amein
unless one knows which blessing one is responding to, the opinion of
the Shulchan Aruch is that this is permitted, even when one doesn’t

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