We need to stop publicly prying into the nitty gritty of people’s marriages and divorces in agunah cases
By Rachel Stomel
Published in the Times of Israel Blogs
MAY 22, 2018, 2:12 PM
There’s a new get refuser in town. Two weeks ago, the Haifa Rabbinic Court issued a ruling to publicly shame a man who has refused to give his wife a Jewish divorce for the past two years, and put him in cherem, a social sanction involving public and private excommunication from communal life. The court’s edict instructs the community not to speak to him, conduct business dealings with him, count him for a minyan in synagogue, call him up for the Torah, offer him food and drink, and the like.
In order to dissolve a Jewish marriage, a man must deliver a formal bill of divorcement — the “get” — to his wife, and refusing to grant one leaves her chained to the marriage indefinitely (a chained woman is colloquially known as an agunah).
In the past two weeks since this most recent shaming campaign went public, the man tried to defend his recalcitrance by countering that his wife was alienating him from their children. Since then, the religious community in Israel has been dissecting the couple’s divorce to death. Who is the real victim? Who is the real bad guy? Being reasonable people, we all want to hear “both sides of the story” before casting judgement, so we pry, gossip, and expose the intimate details of this couple’s custody battle and property disputes. There are young children in the picture.
Yesterday, Member of Knesset Yehuda Glick inexplicably invited the get refuser du jour to the Knesset (he has yet to comment on why he did this). A bunch of female MKs from across the political divide — plus a sprinkling of male MKs — walked out of the plenum, livid that a get refuser, condemned by the court to be publicly shamed for abusing his wife, was now being feted in the most prestigious forum in the land, and by a religious MK at that. A seething MK Rachel Azaria excoriated him from the Knesset podium.
Everything escalates. The woman still doesn’t have her get.
We need to stop publicly prying into the nitty gritty of people’s marriages and divorces in agunah cases. It doesn’t help, and it legitimizes get refusal.
Here is why:
Read more in the Times of Israel >