Yesterday, the panel that selects rabbinic court judges met to choose 15 new judges. The panel, now controlled by haredim (i.e., anti-Zionists), voted 12 haredim in as judges for life. By contrast, only three National Religious (i.e., Zionist) judges were selected. The haredim selected are split between Shas and UTJ, and most all of the selections meet the standards set down by Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv. Rabbi Elyashiv is a strict constructionist, so to speak, when it comes to divorce law, and his judges rule so strictly that women are left without religious divorces, unable to remarry, often for many years. And the judges? Under qualified but well connected, as Ha'aretz notes:
Many of the judges are relatives of politicians, public figures or veteran rabbinic court judges, and only one has a background in law.
Women's rights organizations said Monday was a black day in the struggle for women's rights in the rabbinic courts. Many view the rabbinic courts as favoring men in divorce cases and as failing to do enough to minimize the problem of women whose husbands refuse to divorce them.
The irony here? As the Jerusalem Post notes:
Most of the haredi community don't use the state rabbinical courts. Their divorce rate is low and they take most of their disputes to rabbis within the community. The great majority of litigants in the state rabbinical courts are secular, but that doesn't mean the haredi rabbis are prepared to relinquish control.
That's correct. Haredim are forcing their strict version of Jewish law on Modern Orthodox and secular women.
Ha'aretz also reported on Sunday that haredi judges have been granting women conditional gets; as long as the women follow the judgment of the rabbinic court, they are divorced. If, however, years later a woman wants to change a child's education or switch synagogues from one Orthodox to another Orthodox, the get can be annulled leaving the woman still married to her first husband and her second marriage bigamous. Perhaps worse yet, any children from that second marriage would retroactively become mamzerim, bastards, unable to marry into the Jewish community.
The situation exists because a get if coerced may not be valid. The amount of coercion and the definition of coercion needed to render a get invalid has steadily changed over the years. The amount of coercion necessary to void a get has dropped to minute levels under Rabbi Elyashiv's watch, and the definition of coercion has been broadened – in other words, it has become much easier for vengeful or criminal husbands to withhold granting a religious divorce, and much harder for abused and extorted women to become free.
This situation is intolerable, and it flies in the face of what used to be (at least in the fairy tale that passes for Orthodox Jewish history) normative halakha (Jewish law), where everything possible was done to prevent women from becoming chained and freeing them if they somehow had become agunot.
Like so much else in Orthodoxy, the strictness does not bring enhanced kindness or concern for God's creations; the strictness tightens rabbinic law while it hurts human beings and does no good.
Does this mean I pine for the good old days? No, I don't. As I've noted many times before, Judaism – especially the Orthodox variants – is broken, I think beyond repair.
And I'm not alone in this thinking. Ha'aretz reports:
Last week, at a conference on agunot, Jewish women whose husbands have refused them a divorce, the audience was in for a surprise. The founder of the feminist-religious organization Kolech, Chana Kehat, dared to challenge the sanctity of halakhic marriage.
"Who needs the mythological halo of a religious marriage?" she asked, adding that the more distance women maintained from the rabbinate, "the better for the whole nation."…
The Jerusalem Post notes Kehat's remarks signal a shift in MO and NRP views toward the state's religious apparatus:
In some liberal Orthodox circles, there is a growing feeling that it isn't worth fighting any longer for the appointment of Zionist rabbinical judges. The system can't be changed in any real way. Last week, veteran religious feminist Dr. Hanna Kehat told a conference that young women, especially secular ones, should be discouraged from getting married under the auspices of the rabbinate, because it puts them at the mercy of dayanim if they have to divorce. Her statement, which caused a minor uproar, was an early signal that even many religious Israelis with a basic commitment to Halacha are becoming so disillusioned with the rabbinate that they are willing to divorce from it.
Kehat is correct. Rabbis are not problem-solvers; rabbis are problem-makers (and, all too often, abuse enablers). Knowing what I know now, I would not let my daughter (if I had one) or any of my female friends marry with a ketuba, any more than I would let a child enroll in a school where Rabbi Yehuda Kolko or other known abusers teach.
Do you want your daughter or sister to end up an agunah because of these men? If you do not, take action now. As I've said so many times, stop funding any and all haredi causes and make your displeasure known in any other ways possible. Fight the good fight and fight it now, while there's still time.