Weekly Torah portion: B’Midbar
When a family is rife with injustice, inequality and discrimination, how can children be expected to grow up to lead lives premised upon equality?
Hosea’s description remains relevant even today. On the one hand, we see a change in attitudes that is reflected in several internationals human rights treaties (to which Israel is a signatory). For example, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women guarantees that women and men will enjoy “the same rights and responsibilities during marriage and at its dissolution.” On the other hand, in Israel we remain legally subject to the jurisdiction of the Orthodox rabbinical courts, before which men and women do not enjoy equal status.
The husband is the party that grants the divorce, and it is he must do so of his own free will. As opposed to this, a wife cannot divorce her husband. Thus, a woman seeking to free herself from a marriage finds herself wholly dependant upon her husband’s will. The result is that there are currently thousands of Jewish women who are not free to remarry because their husbands refuse to grant them a divorce. Such women are called “agunot” or “mesuravot get.”
Dr. Ruth Halperin Kadari has argued that “the severe discrimination against women in divorce (in Israel), and the blatant disparity of power in regards to the get, affects the entire relationship between the parties, even if it does not end in divorce. Recognition of the legal disadvantage influences a woman’s sense of self, and the interrelationship between her and her spouse. Women internalize their disadvantage in the marital relationship, and that internalization seeps into their economic self-awareness. We have here a process that imposes weakness and silence.”
These conceptions filter down into the entire framework of the family relationship, and proceed to affect the relationships of the next generation. The family is a principle element in the structuring of society, and when it is rife with injustice, inequality and discrimination, how can children be expected to grow up to lead lives premised upon equality?
Feminist philosopher Professor Susan Moller Okin wrote that equality in the conditions of marriage and divorce is necessary in order to put an end to discrimination against women. If women and men are not equal in marriage, they cannot be equal in any other sphere of life. Rabbi Dr. Einat Ramon has described the halakhic view of men enjoying greater rights than women as a contradiction of the values of modern humanism and its demand for the equality of all human beings.
From the above it is clear that in order to achieve real progress in establishing the equality of women in Israeli society, we must change the underlying basis of marriage and divorce from a one-sided proprietary relationship to a relationship based upon equality and mutuality. This change must be expressed both in the marriage ceremony and in the legal approach to divorce.
As Conservative rabbis trying to integrate Judaism and modernity in our daily lives, I believe that we have an important role in achieving such change, and it is our duty to work towards attaining it. As long as we do not have the political power to change the laws of the State of Israel, we can help couples seeking to establish a relationship based upon equality by performing egalitarian wedding ceremonies, and by encouraging them to sign prenuptial agreements.
As Rabbi Diana Villa and Rabbi Monique Susskind Goldberg have written, such agreements “prevent one party to the marriage from harming the other by denying to grant or accept a divorce. Such agreements are also intended to rectify, to some extent, the inequality between husbands and wives in divorce proceedings, which is a situation that inflicts great suffering upon women.”
Let us pray that the days of redemption will soon be upon us, and that they will bring, first and foremost, equality: “And in that day – declares the Lord – You will call (Me) Ishi, and no more will you call Me Baali.”
