When rabbis wield the Torah as a political weapon, instead of the tool of justice it should be, the innocent suffer
By Rachel Stomel
Published in the Times of Israel Blogs
JUN 6, 2019, 2:40 PM
A war is raging in Israel, and women are the battleground.
Jerusalem’s Rabbinic High Court demonstrated a true feat of halakhic dexterity and masterful legal creativity in a recent decision it issued concerning a long-time agunah — a young woman denied a get (religious bill of divorce) for nine years by her husband, the latter having fled the country and disappeared. To make matters even more urgent, the woman was now pregnant, and her baby could be branded a mamzer — a child born from an illicit relationship, who is restricted from marrying other Jews for all future generations — if the Rabbinic Court did not act quickly.
Longstanding Jewish tradition maintains that in cases like this one, regarding potential mamzerim and agunot, a rabbinic court will do everything in its power, including constructing sophisticated leaps of halakhic logic, in order to clear a mamzer’s status and free an agunah. And indeed, the Jerusalem Rabbinic High Court went to remarkably creative halakhic lengths in our case at hand.
There is one catch, though: their efforts went in the opposite direction, devising innovative ways to keep the agunah’s dead marriage intact and making sure that her child’s status would be cemented as a mamzer.
Wait, what?
The agunah’s lawyer discovered that years ago, when the couple married, there had been a critical flaw in their wedding ceremony: one of the witnesses was a convicted, self-admitted pedophile, who had served jail time for molesting a child. According to Jewish law, someone who sins egregiously is unfit to serve as a kosher witness, and absent kosher witnesses, a marriage is halakhically null. There was no need for a religious divorce because the couple had never been married.
Instead of seizing this opportunity to declare the woman free of her marriage and her baby clear of mamzer status, however, the Rabbinic Court doubled down and presented an exhaustive litany of creative reasons why, counterintuitively, the child molester should be accepted as a kosher witness and the marriage should remain intact.
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