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148 s i x The Reluctant Agunah I had a civil marriage and I had a choice back then, so How come I have none now, when I want it all to end? How come I have no choice? It makes no sense to me! Why am I on the steps of the beit din rabbani?! I don’t care about the dayanim, ’cuz I have my haverim Who will dance and sing with me And remind me that there’s life outside the beit din rabbani Outside the beit din rabbani And who’ll dance and sing with me, On the steps of the beit din, on the steps of the beit din, rabbaniiiiiiiiiiii Vered Shavit, YouTube video What’s astonishing about Efrat’s case is that even though she didn’t marry through the rabbinate, she nonetheless became an agunah. However briefly, reluctantly, and inadvertently, she had put herself at the mercy of the rabbis by getting married — albeit in a civil ceremony — instead of just living with the man she eventually had to divorce. Efrat Ben-David and Yoav Kaplan are both kosher Israeli Jews who could have married in an Orthodox ceremony in Israel. Their Jewishness was not in question. They were not converts. Neither was a child of a mother’s extramariThe epigraph, translated roughly from Hebrew, is from a YouTube clip with Vered Shavit and her friends on the steps of the Tel Aviv Rabbinic Court, reworking the Israeli oldie, “I’ll Dance on the Steps of the Rabbinate,” by Amnon Dankner. T h e R e l u c ta n t A g u n a h 149 tal affair, a mamzer. And even if Yoav were a kohen, a member of the priestly caste, which he is not, Efrat was not a divorcee, another of the unions forbidden under halakha. But instead of standing under a chuppah and being married by an Orthodox rabbi, they chose, of their own free will and conscience, to marry in Cyprus in a civil ceremony devoid of any religious aspects or allusions and to later have a Reform wedding in Israel, just so friends and family could celebrate with them. And they didn’t even bother to register either marriage with the Ministry of the Interior. Still, when it came to ending her marriage, Efrat could not avoid finding herself , like Vered Shavit (see epigraph) on the steps of the rabbinic courts— the beit din rabbani. And, although at a certain point both she and Yoav asked the court to dissolve their marriage with a judicial pronouncement rather than require them to undergo a get ceremony, the court refused. The rabbis ruled that the rite was required under halakha and that halakha is the law of the land when it comes to divorce in the State of Israel. And when Yoav balked, they showed him very clearly who is in control. While she was going through the mandatory motions of the divorce, Efrat related to the process as if she had been caught up in some medieval play, rather than as a serious, contemporary, legal event. Today, with the episode behind her and thinking back to her university political science classes, she has grasped the implications of the act in which she was forced to take part. Beyond the gross infringement on her personal freedom of conscience, what happened to her and Yoav is an example of how a state, guided by the word of God (as interpreted by the rabbis) can use its almost unlimited power to invade the private lives of its citizens and force them to perform religious acts for the purpose of the routine regulation of their private lives; what is more, it appropriates public funds to pay judges, police, and petty bureaucrats to that end. “I can’t believe this is happening in modern Israel,” says Efrat. “I’m horrified.” Born in Tel Aviv, Efrat, a gregarious, dark-haired amateur pastry chef who collects gourmet cookbooks, grew up in a dusty small town in the heart of the Negev Desert. Her parents ran a llama farm, where vacationers on the way to the Red Sea resort of Eilat were encouraged to stop and watch the “curious and amazing life habits” of the llamas. But besides the llamas, Efrat tells us, nothing much happened. Eventually, her parents would separate. “My father was active outside the marriage,” she explains. Her mother moved with Efrat and [3.149.26.176] Project MUSE (2024...

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