Flowers, check. Dress, check. Band, check. Wait, what about your halachic prenup?? Chochmat Nashim explains why a halachic prenuptial agreement is essential — not only for every Jewish couple, but for the Jewish community at large.
*Chochmat Nashim’s podcasts are for informational purposes, not piskai halacha. Consult your local Orthodox Authority for specific psak halacha.
Zvia Gordetsky has waited 17 years to be free of the man who prefers jail to granting her a divorce. Her case is unusual because unlike what happens too often, the religious courts did nearly everything they “should” do, and still she is not free.
Normally in Israel, where the religious courts have power to punish withholders, a woman only waits for a get because the court did not order the husband to give her one. In this case, within six months of asking for a divorce, the religious court ordered Zvia’s husband to grant it. When he refused, they told him he would be put in jail. He showed up to the next hearing with a packed suitcase, ready to move into prison. Since then, he has been offered the chance to grant the divorce — and leave prison — every six months. His response is: “They won’t break me.”
That the “system” worked as it should and Zvia — who told me her story personally — is still chained, has made this case shocking to those who are used to tragic stories of get abuse. That Zvia has chosen the desperate act of a hunger strike for her freedom makes it clear that she feels everything else has failed.
Read more in the UK Jewish Chronicle
Too often, we speak of the plight of the agunah as if it were an inevitable, albeit tragic, fact of life. Like cancer or a natural disaster, we are passive in the face of this devastating misfortune. It could happen to anyone, we say.
MK Aliza Lavie
Every year, the special “Misheberach [Prayer] for the Agunah”circulates on social media as we plead God to alleviate the agunah’s suffering. Some even cite the fixture of the agunah as a testament to a community’s piety, the noble victim whose “sacrifice is a public, ongoing reaffirmation of the legitimacy and inviolability of the religious laws surrounding marriage and divorce.” A prominent halachist famously remarked that the unsolved agunah problem was his own “personal akedah,” evoking Abraham’s morally conflicted sacrifice of his son. Just yesterday, in a special Knesset meeting, one woman proposed to enshrine the status of agunah as a special legal category as a way for agunot to obtain eligibility for single mother benefits from the state.
Former MK Dov Lipman
As a community, we have settled — uncomfortably — into the reality that the agunah problem is one to be managed, not solved.
By treating it as a divine decree, however — an act of God rather than an aggression of man — we exempt ourselves from liability or claims of negligence. Our personal agency does not even factor into the equation. Such thinking leads to the types of “solutions” mentioned above — ones that express sympathy or even outrage but are always looking back, reactively, to a problem.
Read more on the Times of Israel
Rachel Stomel
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