Propping up the state’s power to violate get refusers’ civil liberties perpetuates the injustice against agunot that the state itself created
By Susan Weiss
Published in the Times of Israel Blogs
MAR 4, 2020, 12:30 AM
For many years, many of us Israeli activists and lay persons grappling with the problems of marital captivity – a.k.a the problem of the agunah marked by the upcoming Fast of Esther – have assumed that the way to help our clients was to prop up the authority and jurisdiction of the state. We demanded, and still do, that state rabbinic courts punish recalcitrant husbands, even those who are not citizens of the state. We demanded, and still do: more rabbis; more courts; more creative and harsh decrees. If a recalcitrant husband won’t release his wife from marital captivity, we ask that the state: take away his right to travel; shame him; keep him in jail forever; put him in solitary; take away his canteen privileges; confiscate his mattress, tefillin and mehadrin food; refuse to bury his dead mother; call out Interpol. Whew.
More recently, we at the Center for Women’s Justice have begun to understand that all this hyper-activity – while well-intentioned – is misdirected and counter-productive. It is misdirected because it wrongfully places blame on bad husbands or irresponsive rabbis, rather than focusing on the fact that Jewish women should not be placed in marital captivity from the get go, under the huppa, the marital canopy. It is also misdirected, because it fails to place any blame on the state for adopting a regime of marital captivity that violates the civil liberties of Jewish women, in the first instance, and then exacerbates those violations against Jewish men in the attempt to sustain the regime rather than amend it.
The danger of a state violating the civil liberties of its citizens is uncannily underscored by a close look at the parallelism between the political regime of the modern State of Israel and that described in the Book of Esther.
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