In 1995, after her husband’s physical abuse caused her to miscarry days before she was due to give birth, Tzviyah Gorodetsky filed for divorce. The 19-year-old Russian, who had just migrated to Israel, filed for the dissolution of her marriage under the Jewish rabbinic courts, which govern all matters of marriage and divorce. She was met with devastating news, however: under Jewish law, Tzviyah could not leave her marriage without a document demonstrating her husband’s official consent to divorce, known as a get. The rabbinic court, in accordance with its interpretation of the Talmud, could not annul Tzviyah’s marriage; instead, the court employed a series of increasingly harsh sanctions in an attempt to compel Meir Gorodetsky to grant his wife a get. After several years, the rabbinic court placed Meir in jail. His obstinance, however, did not waver, even when the court removed nearly all of his religious privileges, such as kosher food and Jewish garments. Susan Weiss, founder of the Center for Women’s Justice, the nonprofit that represented Tzviyah in the divorce proceedings, spoke about Meir’s attitude in an interview with the HPR. “Why don’t you take my underwear?” she recalled him once asking the rabbinic court judges.
The Chained Women
NGOs estimate that hundreds of Israeli women, known as agunot from the Hebrew word for “chained,” are trapped in these unwanted marriages for years and sometimes even decades. The religious courts preside over marriage and divorce law for all Israeli citizens according to their interpretation of Halacha, or Jewish law and jurisprudence. They cannot annul a marriage without both partners’ consent.
In an interview with the HPR, Diana Keplin, an Israeli divorce lawyer known for her work with agunot, said that a man’s decision to withhold a get might stem from practical or personal concerns. Husbands usually withhold the get as a bargaining tool, she explained, to negotiate shared assets, finances, and custody. Yet according to Keplin, the motivation to withhold a get can sometimes run deeper.
“It can also come from ego,” she explained, adding that this behavior can stem “from the belief that a woman is property, a woman is furniture.” This mindset is indeed rooted in Jewish law, which centers around kinyan, or the purchase of a wife, and directly clashes with national Israeli legislation upholding equality between the sexes. Keplin called “the fight between civil and religious law” one of the “most interesting and hardest” battles facing Israel today.
Since its inception, Israel has struggled to reconcile its responsibilities as a democracy with its duties as a Jewish nation, balancing the demands of a powerful Orthodox minority with the requisites for international legitimacy. During the first half of the 1950s, Israel passed a series of laws crystallizing an uneasy compromise between religious and secular leaders. This agreement, known as the “status quo,” included legislation recognizing the Sabbath as the official day of rest, affirming that only kosher food would be served in the army, and establishing the existence of a separate and autonomous system of ultra-Orthodox education. No piece of “status quo” legislation, however, has sparked as much controversy and criticism as the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953, which gave the rabbinic courts jurisdiction over the marriage and divorce of all Israeli Jews. Although Israeli citizens can use civil courts to resolve ancillary matters to marriage and divorce, such as property and custody, only the rabbinic courts have the power to officially grant divorces. While a divorce requires the consent of both spouses, the system is still lopsided: men can remarry even without a get, but women cannot move on or start new families without a formal divorce. Women are penalized heavily if they bear children with a new partner while they are still bound to a marriage: these children are labeled as mazmerim, or “bastards,” barred for 10 generations from marrying Jews. To many feminist activists in Israel, Jewish law feels immovably, irreparably misogynistic, unable to accommodate modern notions of gender equality.
“The law itself is patriarchal,” Weiss said. “It’s hard to imagine [a religious divorce system] consistent with modern notions of freedom and equality.” The very structure of the rabbinic courts, in which a lone woman must explain the most intimate details of her marriage and beg for the sympathy of three male judges, is in itself “humiliating,” according to Keplin.
And while she is not alone in viewing Jewish law and gender equality as fundamentally irreconcilable, not everyone agrees that the latter should always be prioritized. “Feminism has reached us from the United States,” Oded, an Israeli who asked to be identified only by his first name, told the HPR. Oded struggled for years in combative divorce proceedings and lost custody of his kids, leaving him disillusioned with Western notions of gender and marriage. “Here, we are Jewish.” The nature of marriage, Oded lamented, has fundamentally changed, rattled by imported Western values like individualism and romantic love. “We’ve gone totally crazy. The world has gone totally crazy,” he said. “Once a family was something that was closed from every direction. The rules were clear. No one could go in. The woman couldn’t leave the house.” Oded sighed. “People used to suffer a lot less,” he said.
Old Laws, New Values
In June 2018, the Center for Women’s Justice, the nonprofit representing Tzviyah in court, convened a private rabbinic — an unofficial, unrecognized assembly of Orthodox rabbis — to review her case. This private court, led by Rabbi Daniel Sperber, annulled Meir and Tzviyah’s marriage based on three central principles of Jewish law. The first was umdena d’mochach: The abusive conditions of the marriage were so severe that no one would have willingly entered the marriage had they known of them. The second was mekah ta’ut: The marriage contract was based on a mistake or omission, since Meir failed to disclose his mental illness. The final principle was kinyan: the idea that the marriage had not been valid under Jewish law because Tzviyah, and not her husband, had paid for the wedding ring.
“I’m not sure it’s the convergence of the unique facts of the case as much as the underlying story that carried this case to its solution,” Weiss told the HPR. “The drama of the story — 20 years of marriage, the criminal aspects — [and] the changes in socio-political climate are more determinative than actual Jewish law.”
According to Weiss, moreover, debate around divorce law in Jewish texts is remarkably diverse and at times dissonant. Centuries of rabbis have issued their own interpretations of a woman’s freedom to leave her marriage as she wills and the rabbinic court’s authority to compel a husband to “release” his wife. Contemporary rabbis, she implied, are presented with a chorus of Halachic — Jewish legal — voices which can shape their personal values. As an Orthodox rabbi who spoke at the Center for Women’s Justice after Tzviyah’s victory remarked, “the Halacha doesn’t change; we change so that we can see what is in the Halacha.” The “invention of tradition,” he claimed, is a crucial process in Jewish philosophy and law, and one that is constantly ongoing.
Avishalom Westreich, an expert on Jewish marriage and divorce law, also believes that the court’s refusal to let women obtain a divorce without their husbands’ permission is not the inevitable interpretation of relevant Jewish law. The Halacha, he explains in his brief, timely book on Halachti solutions to marital captivity, is a dynamic and multifaceted legal system, with many distinct and often contradicting traditions. In the Babylonian Talmud, Westreich writes, sages had the authority to annul marriage in special cases, such as when there was a fault in betrothal procedures. Later, the idea of mekah ta-ut, or “mistaken contract,” which posits that a marriage is void if the consent to marry was based on misleading facts, such as a husband’s fertility, greatly expanded the sages’ powers to annul marriages. Mekah ta-ut, Westreich writes, was intensely debated from the start, and opened the door to new uncertainties. For example, did the conditions that caused the marriage to be void have to exist at the time of betrothal? Some rabbis believed that they did not, introducing the notion of “conditional marriage,” or as ada’ata dehakhi, which applied in cases when, had the spouse known that certain events would or would not occur, he or she would not have entered the contract. This idea, originally discussed in the context of leprosy and other skin diseases, also paved the way for the concept of umdena d’mochach, or objectively unlivable conditions, that the judges used in Tzviyah’s case.
What the Future Holds
When asked by the HPR about the possible impact of the private rabbinic court’s ruling in Tzviyah’s case, Westreich was reserved. “The use of private courts as regards to agunot is a relatively new phenomenon, so I don’t know if we have enough data to give good answers — or, more precisely, I know that we don’t,” he said. However, the ruling, Westreich believes, serves “a public and political purpose: to promote the agunah issue.”
While Tzviyah’s private court ruling cannot serve as a legal precedent, it still spotlights the dynamic nature of Jewish law: many different interpretations of the Halacha exist, and can be understood and debated in the context of contemporary cases. Tzviyah’s case, Weiss believes, will apply the sort of social and political pressure needed to ultimately “force the rabbinic court to do similar things in the future.” Yet even a more progressive interpretation of Jewish law, Weiss admitted, will not bring about complete equality for women.
“It is difficult to imagine a system controlled by the rabbinic courts that is completely consistent with modern notions of freedom and equality,” she said. Rabbis are unlikely to ever completely abandon their conservative view of women’s rights in marriage and divorce. By reforming within a system that is unlikely to ever recognize complete equality between the genders, rulings like Tzviyah’s run the risk of obtaining short-term relief at the expense of long-term systemic changes. Using the Halacha to update Israeli marriage law, then, is far from a perfect solution; however, as Weiss confessed, women’s rights activists in Israel, who operate within a fragile, complex, and combustible social climate, must “shake up the system any way [they] can.”
Image Credit: Unsplash/Zoriana Stakhniv