Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State: Israel's Civil War

Prologue: Who Are We?

xv P r o l o g u e Who Are We? We both grew up in Orthodox Jewish families in New York City in the second half of the past century and attended the Yeshiva High School of Queens. Housed in a dull building in a decaying neighborhood, the school had an unspoken but foremost goal to teach us to be good Jewish girls and good Jewish mothers and to identify with the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. Obedient, attentive, and true to our calling, we got married in accordance “with the laws of Moses and Israel” — as the marriage liturgy goes — to good Jewish boys, bred nine children between us, and moved with our families to Israel in the 1980s, more or less for Zionist reasons. In Israel life went awry for both of us, in different but converging ways. I, Netty, became a reporter for the Jerusalem Report, a move that heightened my sense of feminism and community. The Report, an English-language Israeli magazine, did not relegate me to the woman’s desk but gave me free rein to follow whatever muse beckoned. Subjects I covered were as diverse as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Holocaust Restitution cover-up. In 1998 I interviewed President Bill Clinton in the White House about his ties to the Jewish community . His deputy chief of staff, Maria Escheveste, a Latina convert to Judaism who had just filed for divorce, had a question for me: could her husband, a Jew, withhold a get (a Jewish bill of divorce) from her? When I said that it was theoretically possible, she said rather plaintively, “But he wouldn’t do that, would he?” The reaction of this powerful woman, sitting in her office in the West Wing, a headset perched on her head freeing her to do several things at once, underscored just how helpless a Jewish woman feels at the mere thought that her life may be put on hold and she may become an agunah — an “anchored” woman — because of a withheld get. P r o l o g u e xvi When I started out at the Jerusalem Report, I would not have labeled myself a feminist, even after I found myself one day at the Jerusalem Rabbinic Court, accompanying a friend struggling to get a divorce, because her husband had, for all intents and purposes, dumped her and the kids in Israel and returned to his shady commercial activities back in the United States. Located then in a dilapidated old Arab building on Jaffa Road, the court seemed to me to be an alien, outdated relic that was happily far from me and my everyday world. Later, however, I found myself, to my surprise and chagrin, in a similar struggle and back in the rabbinic court, now housed on King George Street in what had been, fittingly, the first home of the Knesset, where the laws conceding sovereignty over personal status to the rabbis had been passed. I slowly began to understand that what had at first seemed to me to be a quaint and harmless nod to tradition had in fact turned into a real system of law with real legal consequences. Because I was the child of Holocaust survivors from Orthodox Jewish homes, my reluctant move to feminism was understandable. The trauma of the Second World War and its horrors were only a decade old when I was born. The huge price my parents paid for their beliefs was the biggest influence in my early life. Right or wrong, my parents, and like-minded survivors who were their friends, committed themselves to resurrect the world from which they had been sundered. Rather than discuss what might be awry in Orthodox Judaism, my parents celebrated its continuity. The State of Israel’s embrace of tradition was taken for granted. Words like “pluralism” or “equality” were disparaged as naive, “American” ideas. Instead, everything was seen through the prism of survival: the war in Vietnam (“The Vietnamese are suffering”); the landing on the moon (“Why couldn’t they spend all that money bombing Auschwitz?”); civil rights (“Too bad no one marched for us”). I knew certain gender-insensitive teachings existed in Judaism and clashed with the goals of the nascent women’s rights movement of the sixties and seventies . Each wedding, when the bride donned a veil; each brit or bar mitzvah, when the value of manhood was consecrated; each morning, when boys and men...