In what world does a country value a crumb of bread over a woman’s life? Apparently, in ours.
Our new government has rushed to introduce a new bill to prohibit patients from bringing hametz into hospitals during Passover and at the same time, a bill to expand the powers of the Rabbinical Courts to arbitrate on civil matters, as well.
To some, this expansion of Rabbinical Court powers might seem inoffensive but if the parties choose religious law, why not let them? It all begins with the assumption that the parties are truly free to choose, which is currently not the case.
In Israel's divorce courts, women are actively discriminated against
If you want to know what such a choice looks like, look no further than the divorce courts, which have had shared jurisdiction between the religious and family courts since the 1950s. In many cases, women – whose right to divorce is conditional on her husband’s approval – have been pressured by the husband and Rabbinical Courts to transfer all civil matters under their control as a precondition to adjudicating their divorce, only to find themselves further entrapped and extorted by their husbands, all under the aegis of the Rabbinical Court.
In actual cases of women represented by Mavoi Satum, the organization that I chair, the Rabbinical Court judges have overturned legal and binding agreements made freely between the parties and officially validated by the Rabbinical Court themselves, all in order to satisfy additional extortionate demands of the husband. They routinely pressure the women to pay their husband’s debts, give up on child support and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get a divorce.
This is not an isolated case of extreme and abusive husbands. Waiving child support is a common demand in many regional Rabbinical Courts. As one Rabbinical Court judge recently told a young mother of three-year-old twins and a baby under the age of one that she had to give up on all child support or he would wash his hands of her: she will make herself an aguna (a Jewish woman who is “chained” to her marriage).
Today, the Fast of Esther is also International Aguna Day dedicated to highlighting the plight of thousands of women in Israel who suffer divorce refusal, which affects an estimated one in five Jewish women who try to divorce. This is not a natural state of affairs but one created by Israel and exacerbated by the Rabbinical Courts that allow Halacha to aid and abet abusive husbands.
Concerns over free choice aside, the biggest obstacle to expanding the control of the religious courts is the fact that they simply do not view the people they judge as equal before the law, in fact, the opposite: they actively discriminate against women and frequently the non-religious.
In one case our lawyers handled, the rabbis’ handed down a judgment stating that an abusive husband’s attempt to try to strangle his wife to death is understandable because she had asked for a divorce and it would never have happened if only she had agreed to return to live with him as normal.
Earlier this year, Israel’s Rabbinical High Court handed down a ruling that a convicted pedophile who abused a boy for three years is still a trusted halachic witness because he is a Torah-observant man and should be trusted, while the testimony of the police investigator to whom he made his confession is not sufficient, nor, presumably is the testimony of the boy who made the complaint.
Even more disturbingly, they reason that even if it were true, he would still be a valid witness because serially abusing a child doesn’t really contradict the Torah explicitly (unless there were actual homosexual relations) so really, it is not a problem. And most shamefully, all of these justifications were dredged up only to avoid freeing a woman from her aguna status and ensuring her son will be labeled a mamzer.
Reflecting on these rulings, the real question we should be asking ourselves is not whether we should be expanding the Rabbinical Court’s power to other civil matters, but why we allow them to continue to apply medieval values and perpetrate these gross injustices, ruining the lives of men, women and children in this country every single day.
Ask yourselves: Would you be happy with this kind of judgment in a case that affected you and your family? If not, then it’s time to put a stop to this injustice once and for all.
The writer is the CEO and founder of Workwell and the chair of Mavoi Satum, a nonprofit that advocates for equal divorce rights.