Caselaw

Civil Case (Be’er Sheva) 23052-01-25 Ella Padwa v. Daniel Moshe Kirschenbaum - part 45

October 13, 2026
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This is also true for our case.  Completing the contract by means of a vague criterion regarding "reasonable time" will oblige, in the circumstances of the present case, for the court to determine for the parties a contractual arrangement that they did not intend at the time of the negotiations.  As the Honorable Justice Grunis noted in the Chevra Kadisha case, in transactions for the sale of real estate there is an inherent difficulty in determining the reasonable period of time for the performance of a charge after the conclusion of the contract, especially when the consideration is paid, as is customary, in both terms.  In these circumstances, it is not practical to rely on a general practice in real estate sale transactions, since the dates and terms of payment are derived, in each transaction, from its concrete circumstances, from the constraints of the parties and from the agreements they reached.  Thus, for example, a transaction in which the seller does not require consideration at an imminent date is not similar to a transaction in which the seller is required to receive the consideration money immediately, inter alia, for the purpose of financing the purchase of an alternative apartment.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that it should not be determined categorically that in any real estate transaction, a disagreement between the parties regarding the dates of payment necessarily attests to a lack of specificity and a lack of sophistication of the contract.  Sometimes, the dispute in this matter will be marginal in relation to the other terms of the transaction, and in appropriate circumstances it will be possible to fill the gap by means of the provisions of the law.  Thus, where it emerges from the circumstances that the seller was indifferent to the payment dates, he cannot hold on to the dispute in this matter as a basis for the claim that the contract was not perfected.  Similarly, where the purchaser was willing to pay the full consideration immediately - in a manner that achieves, in fact, the fulfillment of the contract in the best format from the seller's point of view - this may suffice for the purpose of filling the gap in accordance with the default rules.  This is also the case when the court is convinced that the seller's insistence on the disagreement with respect to the payment dates is nothing more than an expression of a lack of good faith or an attempt to be clever and disavow the agreements reached by the parties earlier.  In such cases, the court will tend to resort to the mechanisms of filling the gap prescribed by law, and not allow that party to build on a dispute that remains in a marginal matter or from a motive that is inconsistent with the duty of good faith.

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