Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 21, 2024

When Adina Sash, aka Flatbush Girl, called for a sex strike to help free Malky, a 29-year-old woman who has been chained to a dead marriage for four years with no hope for a divorce in sight, the big news was the idea of the strike. Malky is locked in the marriage not only by her husband, Volvy, and his family, but by the community that does not demand her freedom, even as it allows her husband all communal rights. Full disclosure: five different rabbinic courts have given orders that Volvy be ostracized until he gives Malky a get, but that hasnt gotten in the way of his participation in the community. Within moments or so it seemed and for the next week or so, rabbis took to social media to make statements against Sashs initiative, podcasters lambasted her, and even Rabbi Herschel Schachter, preeminent rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University who usually reserves his opinions for behind the scenes, weighed in against this plan. The claim against the strike was that it could destroy marriages by using intimacy as a weapon.

Frankly, Im pained that so many rabbis in positions of leadership in the Orthodox world went public with shock and dismay at women choosing a sex strike to spotlight the plight of a woman chained in marriage when they rarely express public shock or dismay for the many women chained in Jewish marriage. It should not take sex to raise public rabbinic statements about agunot. But I am not surprised. Over the 12 years that I have worked to free agunot, this has been my experience. Many women await their divorces for years, stuck in endless cycles of negotiations (read: extortion) for their freedom. Some are dragged from court to court, or spend years waiting for court dates to which the husband does not show. In most cases, the women wait and wait and are still waiting.

Ironically, it is only when women take matters into their own hands and use their own agency that anything really shifts in the establishment.

In some cases, women decided they would not wait any longer. After years of pleading for their freedom, of begging the courts to investigate ways to void their marriages, they began to walk away. In pain and betrayal, they chose to move on with their lives, outside of the system of Jewish law that let them down, and they began dating. Lo and behold, as it became known that the women were moving on with their lives, the rabbis turned to those halachic solutions that they had previously declined to use.

Suddenly, the processes were viable. Suddenly, they did look into the marriages (often discovering a history of abuse and even deceit, which under certain criteria establishes the voiding of the marriage). And those same rabbis who had been content to let women live their lives alone managed to find halachic reasoning to free them.

I am not (yet) advocating for agunot to begin dating nor I am even advocating that they tell the rabbinic courts that they are doing so, as one woman I know did so that the court would exert pressure on her husband for a divorce (it worked). But, I am proposing something else. It is time to decide that ours will be the last generation of agunot,that our daughters will be safe. And it is up to us to make it happen because salvation isnt coming top down.

I dont want to discount the importance of rabbinic leadership in the Orthodox Jewish community and with regard to freeing agunot especially. For the most part, rabbis have dedicated their lives to their communities and believe in the sanctity of Jewish law. Turning to them to free agunot makes sense.

But I have tried. For years. I have written. I have spoken. I have begged.

And I have given up.

It was one rabbi in particular who broke my faith in the establishment coming to save us.

A number of years ago, I asked a particular rabbi (he is considered an authority by many in the Orthodox world; I cant name him, as our meeting was off-the-record) to help me and others I work with to make this the last generation of agunot. I explained how I wanted to bring dignity back to Jewish marriage and divorce.

He responded by telling me the following story:

A young woman came to him after a few weeks of marriage, saying that her husband would not consummate the marriage and was apparently homosexual. It was discovered that the young man had been gay in high school, and that he had not shared that fact with the young woman. She asked to be freed from the marriage.

(A lack of consummation over time due to undisclosed homosexuality is often treated by the rabbis as grounds not for divorce, which is not necessary, but for declaring the marriage invalid to begin with.)

Instead of relying on this halachic reasoning, the rabbi consulted with three therapists as to whether it is possible for a man to have been gay, then for him to have stopped being gay, and then for him to be gay again (interpreting the young mans homosexual journey since high school). One of the three therapists said that what the rabbi had posited was possible, and, on that basis, the rabbi decreed that the man could have been heterosexual on the day of the marriage, thus making it valid. The young woman was locked into a sexless, loveless marriage for years even bearing the young mans children (I believe through IVF). Eventually, she paid her husband $50,000 to entice him to divorce her, so she could be free of him and the sham marriage.

I asked the rabbi why he had left the young woman in this terrible situation.

He told me: We dont end Jewish marriage so quickly. Devastated, I replied: This, you call Jewish marriage?!

He was proud of what hed done. He felt hed kept a Jewish marriage together, while I felt my last hope in the rabbinic establishment shatter my heart.

In that moment, I understood: tothe establishment, womens happiness, fulfillment, and dignity are subservient to an ideal of marriage that depends on women but does not consider them.

Since then, I have encountered far too many stories that demonstrate that this rabbi is not alone in his approach.

Like the woman whose husband hit her in the yichud room (the couples seclusion after the chuppah). She left the room and went straight to her parents. She never went home with the man, and the wedding was never consummated. She never needed a get, as the marriage was not completed and he had hid his abusive nature. Three rabbinic judges supported her and wrote her the legal decision (psak din) to free her, but her community rabbis did not accept the judges decision, insisting that she needed a get. After five long years she chose to pay him off and receive a get.

How is this Jewish marriage?

Traditionally, Jewish law has pushed rabbis to be lenient when it comes to agunot. Unfortunately, that principle is too often shunted aside in our own day. But famous rabbis in history would be appalled: Rabbenu Tam (1100-1171) said: Whoever acts stringently in the matter (agunot) is nothing but a sinner. The Maharam Alashkar (1466-1542) presents the same aspersions in a more vivid way: One who fosters iggun and forbids a woman to marry and is stringent, of him the verse states: His donkey will instruct him.

Classical agunot were tied to husbands whose whereabouts were unknown, not because the husbands simply refused to grant a Get. But the rebuke at chaining a woman to an impossible marriage is the same.

People claim that prenups prevent agunot. No doubt, they do, to some large extent and in that way, they are a wonderful addition to the toolbox (everyone should sign one!). However, they are not used universally, which diminishes the protection they offer, and they are not foolproof. For anyone with enough money, hubris, and the ability to disappear, the document can be ignored and the spouse trapped.

So what do I suggest? How can the Jewish community help those who are trapped right now, unable to move on, to live as Jewish women? How can we make this the last generation of agunot?

Steps 1 4 would prevent (in my estimation) 80 percent of get-refusal. For the last 20%, Step 5 must come into play.

In the worst cases of get-refusal, after trying (and often succeeding) to achieve a freely given get, rabbis turn it and turn it, as the Hebrew idiom goes, to dig into millennia-old sources on voiding marriages until they find a solution.

They may determine that the witnesses to the wedding were invalid, deceit was employed, hidden significant defects, abuse, ownership of the ring used, etc. They then issue a psak din a halachic determination that the marriage was never a marriage, thus no divorce is needed, no get to be given. Often, due to the cancelling of the husbands leverage, this leads the man to give the get, allowing the parties to separate and go on with their lives.

Taking the lead from the establishment, the community has not always accepted these decisions. But we must. We must honor and accept these decisions given to women by honorable, seriously religious rabbis who know Jewish law.

Women who find themselves in this position need to know that we will accept them. They need to know:

We will become their community. We will dance at their weddings. We will accept their future children as full-fledged Jewish children, and not mamzerim (children born from an illicit union)! For there is nothing illicit about their relationships to the contrary, it is their previous liaison that is rejected as never-a-marriage.

If we do this, if we show the establishment that we will no longer tolerate the chaining of Jewish women that we will accept the halachic solutions they are granted, then a systemic solution that will end the agunah crisis and the mockery of Jewish marriage is just around the corner.

It is time for us to take stand.

Join me in making this generation the last that has agunot add your name here!

See the article here:

5 steps to save Jewish marriage | Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll | The Blogs - The Times of Israel

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