A nation of enablers

Who should tell us how to get married?

By PAMELA PELED
A Jewish wedding. (photo credit: ILLUSTRATIVE PHOTO: WWW.GOISRAEL.COM)
A Jewish wedding.
(photo credit: ILLUSTRATIVE PHOTO: WWW.GOISRAEL.COM)
To “enable” is to make something possible. An unexpected inheritance, for example, enables a penniless waitress to quit her tables, enroll in university and become a lawyer. The money empowers her.
In psychological terms, however, enablers aren’t so great. Defined as “a person who encourages or enables negative or self-destructive behavior in another,” an enabler might sincerely want to help her boyfriend, say, kick his drug habit; but by not leaving him or seeking solutions, she perpetuates or exacerbates the problem. If your husband never peels a carrot nor goes to the supermarket to buy that carrot nor washes the grater or chopping board, and you still provide him with gourmet dinners every night, you are enabling his selfish behavior. Why would he change? Reading the newspaper day after day, I am starting to think that we are a nation of enablers.
Today, for example, a student who is suffering from anxiety attacks and the deep-sea exhaustion that comes from juggling work and college and lack of money and more, confided in me that her father had deserted the family when she was two. Her mother, a statuesque beauty from Europe who had never met a Jew before she visited Israel, underwent an Orthodox conversion and halachic wedding in order to marry this deadbeat dad. When he tootled off to do his thing, leaving her penniless with many children, she found herself “chained” to him forever – unable to remarry, as he did not grant her a get, or Orthodox divorce certificate.
This is not breaking news – there are reams written about similar cases, documentaries made and nominated for awards; movies, books. Yet we enable the status quo to stand. Why? Here’s another sad, sad story, related to me by someone who knew that I could relate. It’s about the daughter of a widow, who only a couple of years after her beloved father’s death, found someone she could love and marry. Her mother and siblings embraced the new man in their family and were thankful to God for bringing some longed-for joy into their lives.
But, problem. This man’s God, they soon found out, was not a kosher God.
The prospective bridegroom was born in the USSR to a mother who was not Jewish; and although the State of Israel welcomed him into the army and gave him the vote, demanded he serve in the Reserves and pay his taxes, he was not entitled to marry under a huppa.
“Run as fast as you can to the nearest ham and cheese sandwich and eat it on leil haseder,” I would have said if anyone had asked me. But nobody did.
This young man is one of 330,000 young Russians living in Israel who are not halachically Jewish. That’s 330,000 young adults all wanting to get married.
This particular couple very much wanted a Jewish wedding, so the young man went through a year-plus course of study and spent some Shabbatot not putting on lights or listening to music or doing anything to desecrate the holy day. He koshered his kitchen. He had a symbolic surgical procedure. And, glory be, an Orthodox, fully observant, revered and wonderful rabbi converted him into the august fold of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Whew, you might say. But you would be wrong.
The story is not finished yet. Another totally Orthodox, well-respected and very beloved rabbi married the pair, in accordance with all the traditions and conventions of a Jewish, halachic huppa.
The bride and groom sipped the wine.
The witnesses signed the ketuba. Sheva brachot were intoned by guests, and the food was 100 percent kosher deluxe. The new husband smashed the glass with conviction, after promising never to forget Jerusalem. “Mazal tov!” the guests all cried, and the dancing began.
But the couple weren’t really married.
Not in Israel, anyway.
You see, the Chief Rabbinate does not approve of the Orthodox, hugely respected rabbi who had converted the groom. The only conversions they accept are the ones they do themselves – and God help you with that. So the pair can either live unmarried in the Holy Land or go abroad for a quickie civil ceremony (which costs them almost half of their hard-earned capital, making it impossible for them to make a down payment on a home). If they marry in London or New York, in a ceremony that is as unJewish as unJewish can be, then they are legally married back home in Jerusalem, which, for some strange reason, they have promised to put above all their other joys, even though Jerusalem does not reciprocate the love.
Can this be real? We know this stuff; this lunacy has lasted decades. We outnumber the black-coated men with long beards and earlocks who dictate to us all the rules of our lives: whom we can marry, how we divorce and whether or not we can be buried in the land we fight to defend.
Why do we enable them to continue? Their children, in the main, do not defend the land that they pray for three times a day. We pay for them to pray for us, and we pay for our own kids to study, and we pay taxes, and we end up unable to pay for a home. And then they tell us to go and get married in Cyprus. And we moan, and we pay, and we say “Okay.”
And we enable them to perpetuate and exacerbate.
Today, it appears, one in every 10 couples marries without the Rabbinate.
Many Israelis who are mehadrin Jews just are gatvol (as we say in Afrikaans) of the craziness in the country. They make their own rules, get married abroad or by an unlicensed authority and thumb their body parts at the religious establishment.
There has to be another way; I want to find it. We have to take the narrative back and find the path home to chicken soup and kiddush and the joy of being Jewish.
It’s our country, too. We fight for it, we work for it, we deserve to be married and buried and, if need be, divorced in it. We have to open up our arms to the almost half a million hard-working, tax-paying, army-going immigrants from Russia who are contributing hugely to Israel and find a way to include them in our nation.
Michael Douglas just got millions of dollars for his inclusive, big-tent approach to Jews who have a non-Jewish mother (like him). Huh? He gets megahonored for his attitude; but when it comes to our Jews-who-aren’t-Jews, we turn our backs? Is this Israel or Cloud Cuckoo Land? C’mon. Let’s get real. We have to make a plan. I’m opening up this column for suggestions. I urge you to email them to me.
The writer lectures at Beit Berl and the IDC. peledpam@gmail.com