Why we all need to care about Jewish divorce law

by Esther Macner

I am often asked: “Why are you so preoccupied with the problem of get refusal. Have you ever been an agunah?”

The term agunah broadly refers to a Jewish woman who is “chained” or “anchored” to a dead marriage, rendering her unable to remarry, because her husband refuses to give her a Jewish bill of divorce, or get. According to Jewish and Israeli law, a man must voluntarily issue a get, and a woman must voluntarily accept a get, in order to sever a marriage. Orthodox, Conservative and Traditional Jews, as opposed to Reform, do not recognize civil divorce as overriding the requirement of the get.

No, thank God, I have never been a victim of the abuse of get refusal. I have represented such women, heard their stories, observed their anguish and cannot quell the passion, fury and yearning to redress this scourge, which continues to plague our people and to sully Orthodox Judaism, which is my identity and which I love. I have seen it — up close and personal — in my years as a senior trial attorney in the Domestic Violence Bureau in Kings County, Brooklyn, N.Y., and thereafter as a divorce attorney practicing in various beit din (rabbinic courts) in New York. I have witnessed how personal greed, and/or the need for power and control when coupled with religious justifications, have given birth to a perversion of Jewish law, and I have felt ashamed to be a practicing Jew.

I am ashamed that we still have rabbis who accept that extortion for the giving of a get is the norm, as if it is simply the cost of doing business: “I will give you your get if your daddy forks over half a million.” I am ashamed when rabbinic courts are manipulated to act as agents of the recalcitrant husband by putting pressure on the estranged wife, mother and caretaker of his children to accept successive outrageous conditions in order to get her get. I am proud when rabbinic courts overturn every stone, to put pressure on the husband to fulfill the mitzvah, or God’s command, that he give a get once he is no longer living with his wife and there is no realistic hope of reconciliation. I am ashamed when a Jewish man, who has agreed to abide by the terms of an arbitrator to give a get on a date certain, tries to hoodwink a judge into believing that he has complied by sending a “get by e-mail,” without scribes or witnesses. Such levels of absurd deception are a mockery of all that I hold dear in Jewish practice.

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