The tawdry spectacle of “get” refusal and extortion in Jewish divorce has made the rounds in both Jewish and secular media for decades. But the Jewish community now faces an historic opportunity. We have within our hands the data on which to base a plan of action to alleviate the plight of “agunot” and a tool to drastically cut the future risk of chained women.
A 2011 survey of agunot in the U.S. and Canada, co-sponsored by the Orthodox Union (OU), Organization for the Resolution of Agunot (ORA), Jewish Women International (JWI) and Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), revealed 462 cases of agunot between 2005 and 2010. While the survey understates the problem due to some right-wing organizations’ refusal to respond, the results clearly outline the case for a clarion call to action.
Most agunot are under 40 years old. They have children yet little money, and are unaware of even the limited resources available to them. During the survey period, religious courts considered just half of reported cases, and contempt of court citations were infrequently issued against recalcitrant husbands. When a case did go to rabbinical court, some agunot were required to forgo financial payments or custody of their children in exchange for a get.
I’ve always wanted to know what goes on during a kallah class, in which observant Jewish brides learn about niddah, the laws of ritual purity, as well as issues of sexuality. I would have gone so far as to borrow an engagement ring to do so, but fortunately, I got to talk to Rori Picker Neiss instead.
Neiss teaches private classes to brides and couples and is a student at Yeshivat Maharat, a pioneering institution training Orthodox Jewish women to be spiritual leaders and halakhic authorities. In addition to founding and running an independent minyan in Brooklyn, she serves as the Rabbinic Intern at the Beit Chaverim Synagogue of Westport/Norwalk and the Hillels at NYU and CUNY’s Hunter College.
I’ve always wanted to know what goes on during a kallah class, in which observant Jewish brides learn about niddah, the laws of ritual purity, as well as issues of sexuality. I would have gone so far as to borrow an engagement ring to do so, but fortunately, I got to talk to Rori Picker Neiss instead.
Neiss teaches private classes to brides and couples and is a student at Yeshivat Maharat, a pioneering institution training Orthodox Jewish women to be spiritual leaders and halakhic authorities. In addition to founding and running an independent minyan in Brooklyn, she serves as the Rabbinic Intern at the Beit Chaverim Synagogue of Westport/Norwalk and the Hillels at NYU and CUNY’s Hunter College.
Being single can be disheartening, but probably not for the reasons coupled people think. It’s less about doing every little task by yourself or living in fear of dying alone and unloved. It’s more about absorbing society’s sneaky, sometimes blatant reminders that, as a single person, you don’t fully exist. You are a faded black and white photo while married people, or people on the marriage track, live in full glossy color.
Last week, this reminder came courtesy of an article on New York Magazine’s The Cut blog about the newest trend in bragging: “the stand-alone engagement ring photo op.”
Learning how to write a check, buying hanging shelves for my first apartment (a task that’s taken me four months and counting), and trying out the new churro place near my apartment are all more pressing concerns in my 23-year-old life than deciding when to become a mother.
However, as I wrote in my last post on Judith Shulevitz’s New Republic article on aging parents and its ensuing response, motherhood has been dancing around my head a little more these days. As a child of the 1990s and 2000s, I have been raised to put my career first; I’d be crazy to think about motherhood at my very young age, right? And while neither Shulevitz nor any other medical professional would say my clock is ticking any time soon, I began to wonder about my own mother’s decision about when to have kids (me at age 30, and her last at age 38).
Last week, my mother and I sat together on my bed, a spot we’ve sat together many times before discussing school, work, friendship and family. As she did with all of these topics, my mother, Sharon Shire, a former attorney and mother of three, had her own highly articulate and deeply thoughtful way of discussing motherhood. The fact that we were discussing motherhood and my serious life choices as a woman was both novel and rewarding. Many of my mother’s stories and pieces of advice were neither new nor surprising to me. However, I suddenly found myself understanding the professional, financial and personal considerations at stake. Above all, she taught me there is no magic formula for deciding when to have children and compromise and sacrifice were always going to be involved, regardless of the age.
According to Jane Eisner’s recent editorial, “For 2013, A Marriage Agenda,” I am a failure. So are the hordes of other young, unattached Jews who have committed significant time, effort and resources to enriching the communal life of the Jewish people. Our fatal sin: being single and childless. And yet without us, the Jewish world would be a bleaker, more boring, place.
Let me offer some examples.
There’s my friend the immigration policy expert, who volunteers for an organization that aids Jewish immigrants, helping them find homes, teaching English and connecting them to potential employers. He attends a Friday minyan, where another unmarried friend of mine also davens. She’s a journalist who reports on politics and Israel. When we lived in the same city, she was often my conduit to events, concerts and gallery openings put on by various constituencies within the Jewish community.
These are not Jews floundering at the fringes of Jewish communal life, but the very people supporting it.
This post is the ninth in “Feminist, Orthodox and Engaged,” a series by Simi Lampert on love, sex and betrothal in the life of a Modern Orthodox woman.
The number one lesson I’ve learned from planning my wedding is: This is not my wedding. Sure, I get to wear the ivory gown and the invitations have my name on it, but the wedding is only a fraction about me and what I want. I’m not even sure how the Bridezilla creature was invented; whatever bride actually forced the wedding party to bend to her own personal will must surely only exist in the fantasies of frustrated brides everywhere.
It’s common to read (and receive, from well-intentioned or simply thoughtless friends) articles on why and how weddings should be limited in both expense and size. Every few months, it seems, newspapers regurgitate the topic with a selection of new words and ingenious ideas for cutting costs. But I don’t see the average cost of weddings — not to mention Jewish weddings, outsized only by Indian fares — getting glower, in spite of the plethora of brilliant suggestions published by every news-source ever. As a bride, I get it.
I spent half of my wedding-planning months scheming how my fiancé and I could elope. Not only would it be easier, we argued, but it would be so much cheaper. A quick trip to Atlantic City, a cute hotel on a beach, no fuss. When we presented the idea to our parents, half (but only half) jokingly, they played along. Sure, they said, why not? You’ll save us money and headaches! Inevitably one of the siblings would jump in: “But you’ll bring us along, too, of course.” They couldn’t imagine not being present at our wedding. And if they had to come, then our closest friends had to come, and if we were inviting our friends, then relatives would be hurt … and so it was just a case of giving a mouse a cookie — they’ll want milk and, eventually, a wedding invitation.
This post is the eighth in “Feminist, Orthodox and Engaged,” a series by Simi Lampert on love, sex and betrothal in the life of a Modern Orthodox woman.
I got a text the other day from a friend: “Try not to become one of those mundane married people like everyone else.” He and I had been talking about marriage, vaguely, so it wasn’t necessarily out of the blue, but it really hit home.
I wasn’t so much offended by the implications of the message as I was worried about the potential accuracy of the prediction. Will I become one of those boring married people? The type of woman who never leaves the house and whose only Facebook posts consist of pictures of the food she made that night for her husband? I have too many Facebook friends blocked from my newsfeed for doing just that to think it’s just a stereotype. This happens. And I’m dangerously close to becoming That Woman.
I could already see it happening, and I wanted to take future married Simi and shake her by the shoulders and shout, “Go out! See your friends! Do something immature and stupid that you’ll regret in the morning, and for God’s sake don’t come home before midnight!”
Many of my friends are college students, and from their perspective even the most boring night includes visiting friends all over the dorm, so married life probably seems the height of dullness. Where was the adventure, the carpe diem that couples had before they got married? Why do married people all talk about cooking and new dishes and work? How could they be satisfied just curling up at the end of the day and watching TV when there was so much to do outside? (And then, eventually, the horror of becoming the couples who only talk about their kids!)
Not all married couples are like this, and even when they are, who’s to say they’re boring and not happy with the simple pleasures in life?
When it’s approaching 1:00 a.m. and I’m simultaneously going through OkCupid profiles, receiving texts from someone entered in my phone as “Jason LES?” and wondering at what age I should consider freezing my eggs, I yearn for the days when matchmakers were the norm. My mind drifts back to the Eastern European shtetls. “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” from Fiddler on the Roof, begins to play in my head. Then, before I even get to the verse about being potentially betrothed to a drunken wife-beater, I see Patti Stanger flash across my TV and realize that a modern matchmaker won’t necessarily solve my dating woes.
Unlike the many reality television stars that fill my viewing hours, I have a complex, emotionally-charged love-hate relationship with Stanger, a Jewish New Jersey native who has her own Bravo reality TV show, “Millionaire Matchmaker.” Each episode features millionaires who generally all want the same thing: a hot chick of various hair color and breast size with the IQ of a grapefruit who will mother them and provide round-the-clock sexual favors. My friends and I watch the series not to ogle millionaires, but to see Stanger execute her romantic proscriptions as decisively and meanly as the Soup Nazi doles out cheddar broccoli chowder.
Entertaining as she may be, spend a little time with Ms. Stanger and you’ll realize there are more intelligent reasons to dislike her than there are cocktails thrown in a single season of “Real Housewives.” In one talk-show appearance, Stanger said that single women in New York were too brainy and intimidated men of marriage material; gay men had unmanageable libidos that made them ill fit for monogamy, and Jewish men lie. Most recently, her attempt to explain the Will Arnett-Amy Poehler divorce not only demeaned both parties, but also offended anyone who liked good comedy and/or feminism. Arnett’s primal instincts, Stanger argued, prevented him from accepting his wife’s greater success; moreover, since Poehler had achieved so much professionally, she probably wasn’t paying enough attention to the old hubby, anyways. Stanger’s analysis includes at least a dozen points that are either ludicrous or based in really bad pop science.
The number one point of conflict in most marriages is money, so much so that six out of 10 people who get divorced and enter a new relationship choose not to combine finances the second time around. And a new study by a leading coupon code Web site reveals what might be a contributing factor to this trend: women who hide purchases from significant others.
CouponCodes4u conducted an online survey of over 2,000 American women to determine their shopping habits. The most unexpected finding was that 63% of women hide “fashion purchases” from their partners — and 88% of those women did it in order to avoid a fight.
If these results reflect accurately on the wider population, more than half of women in this country feel the need to lie to their spouses about the clothing they buy, just to avoid an argument. There are definite problems to mention in the survey — men weren’t questioned, leaving any potential secretive shopping on their part unmentioned. (And let’s be real; if a gaming or tech site were to conduct a survey, I’m sure more than a few secrets would be dug up.) Still, the data this survey provides is rather disheartening.
How effective is this method of avoidance? Spouses have to be rather oblivious to new outfits — unless the wife plans on sneaking it out of the house in her purse like a rebellious teenager hiding clothing her parents wouldn’t approve of. And the women have to be certain their spouses won’t check the bills or credit card statements. Whether it works or not, the approach can’t be healthy at all.
I think it’s important, before going any further, to level with you about what I did last weekend. I watched “Bridezillas.” A lot. If you’re not familiar with this show (and if you’re not, I don’t suggest rushing about trying to remedy that), it’s marketed as a program about spoiled, bitchy, selfish, insane women who make the lives of their fiancés and other loved ones miserable in the name of having the so-called perfect day. In actuality, it’s a show about how the wedding industrial complex — and all the toxicity it’s fed women for our entire lives — makes us crazy. (Okay, it’s possible that these women may have had a touch of the crazy to begin with, but buying into the myth that a wedding and a husband will fix all of your problems is not helping anything.)
In this particular episode, there was a scene in which two women get into a fight over the bouquet. And when I say fight, I mean scratching and hitting and hair pulling. Why? Because as every single or unmarried woman knows, the person who catches the bouquet will be the next one to get married. And according to this “reality” television show, this ritual is enough to send women — not just any women, but those who are friends and relatives — into a public, physical altercation. Since “Bridezillas” belongs to the sorority of “reality” shows about women, sex and marriage, I’m sure this scene was encouraged, if not outright staged. Regardless, it’s a stereotypical portrayal of women’s relationships as being predicated on achieving a man.
Female friendships live a curious life in the sexist imagination. For a while, they’re allowed to be fierce and tight, a source of deep strength. But at a certain point, this bond is supposed to be replaced by a boyfriend, and then by a husband. Female friendships are seen as a holding pattern (like roommates) until the real deal (marriage) happens, and then … what?
This post is the fifth in “Feminist, Orthodox and Engaged,” a series by Simi Lampert on love, sex and betrothal in the life of a Modern Orthodox woman.
Soon after my fiancé Jeremy and I got engaged, he spent three weeks backpacking through the Amazon and Machu Picchu in Peru to celebrate graduating from college, and another three weeks in charge of a special-needs program at a summer camp in Pennsylvania. Some of my friends were horrified. “Doesn’t he know you’re engaged?” they asked. “How could you let him go for so long?” (Not surprisingly, Jeremy didn’t take too kindly to the phrase “let him.”) Other friends, especially those who had experienced long-distance relationships across states and countries, were less stunned. But all of them were sympathetic, texting me to see how I was holding up, and coming over to hang out (and keep me from homicidal loneliness). I understood and supported Jeremy’s decision to travel and work, but I dreaded the time we’d be apart.
As an Orthodox couple, living together before our wedding is not an option. If Jeremy and I want to see each other every day, we take turns staying at our parents’ houses and traveling to each others’ schools for evening dates. Waking up together and coming home to each other — that has to wait until November, when we’re (finally!) married. Spending nights apart was something we understood; weeks apart was more difficult to get used to.
Jeremy and I had been away from each other before. I traveled to Israel and Italy in January while he went to Israel for Pesach, but this six-week period was certainly our longest. But he was the perfect fiancé, calling and texting and even cutting his Peru trip down from five weeks to three. He talked with me on the phone for hours as I blubbered over missing him, and he reciprocated the feelings (with marginally less blubbering). Still, nothing could make up for his absence in my daily life.
This post is the fourth in “Feminist, Orthodox and Engaged,” a series by Simi Lampert on love, sex and betrothal in the life of a Modern Orthodox woman.
In a world where getting married is an item on most girls’ to-do lists, being engaged feels a bit like showing off.
When my friend at Stern College for Women got engaged, she referred to her fiancé as her boyfriend. “He’s your fiancé now,” I corrected her. “I know,” she replied, “but it feels weird to say that. I don’t want to make people feel bad.” At the time, her answer made no sense to me; now that I’m engaged, I understand completely.
Saying “fiancé” is like bragging. Like being in middle school again and telling all of my friends I got an A+ on a test they’re still taking. It’s a weird feeling, and one that I’m not fully used to.
M. is someone I once loved hysterically, and now more rationally. We’ve been friends for 14 years and at one point, we used to make out in cars. It took me a while to process the dictate that says men and women can’t be friends, that they are only capable of relating to one another sexually. A month ago, M. married a sassy, fiercely smart feminist, in a thoughtful, conscientious ceremony, during which I cried. (A little.)
It is hard for me to go to weddings, and not just when they involve people I used to make out with. It’s because I find myself analyzing every wedding, and every relationship between married people (read: women) that I come into contact with, and asking the question “Why?” Why get married? The older I get, the more women I see turning their romantic relationships into a marriage, as though it were an inevitability, mandatory, as if there were no other way to have a relationship without a wedding, a certificate, or a ring. What did marriage mean to married women? Why did they think it was so important? What did women think it was going to be? What was it actually?
The Marriage Project is my search for these answers. I started in August 2011, emailing all the heterosexual women I knew who were married to heterosexual men. I asked them seven questions: Why did you decide to get married? What did you think marriage would be like? Where do you think you got your ideas/concept/narrative about marriage? How do you feel about the word “wife”? Why did you make the decision you made about your name? Do you think your relationship with your partner has changed since you got married? What have you learned about yourself since you’ve been married? (You can email me if you want to take a stab at these questions.)
It became clear pretty quickly that women really wanted to talk about marriage and being married. I offered total anonymity to everyone who responded, with the hope that it would create a space in which honesty was not only possible but probable. I also decided that I’d take this opportunity to talk to women who, like me, were not interested in getting or being married, thus embarking on a search for community.
What have I learned so far?
Before I came to Yeshiva University’s Stern College, for Women, my mother told me about what the college was like back when she was an undergraduate there. One thing that stood out as something truly mockable was the marriage stats she gave me about her graduating class: “One third of the class was engaged and another third was married when we graduated. And that was more or less the same for every class at Stern when I was there.” Two-thirds engaged or married? While still in college? In my independence-loving, feminism-embracing mind, that was flat-out nuts — and certainly impractical.
The Orthodox Jewish community seems to encourage early marriage — with 18 being an acceptable age for weddings, 26 being considered old and 30, quite frankly, over the hill. Never mind that in the secular world, 30 is when many people start considering marriage as an option. (Inidentally, Israel is now weighing whether or not its citizens should be allowed to marry if they are under 18.)
For a long time, I thought the secular world got it right. I have never been against marriage, per se. It just felt like something to be done once I’d traveled the world and gotten a job that would actually lead to a career. Once I’d gone skydiving and snorkeling. Once I’d tried pot. Not until I used my 20s to my fullest would I be ready to settle down and have a family. Or so I thought.
And then I fell in love. At the unripe age of 22, I met the man I knew I wanted to spend my life with, and it only took me a few months into our relationship for me to realize that.
The public acceptance of gay marriage by the President of the United States — a position that most Jews support — is hardly the end of the struggle for full equality for LGBTQ citizens, who continue to lack many of the same enshrined rights and protections as other minority groups. Similarly, Barack Obama’s historic announcement of what many of us long suspected lay in his heart already will have almost zero impact on policy, and likely little impact on the election, since the issue ranks far below economic ones with most voters at the moment.
Instead, it represents a benchmark. Because his choice of words does show that both feminism and the gay rights community have made inroads where it matters most: our definition of relationships. Obama’s evolution echoed ours.
After all when Obama spoke about the “committed, monogamous” relationships of his gay friends, he was positing marriage as a simple, straightforward commitment between two equal people, not as a patriarchal social construct with the man as the head of the household, literally receiving his wife from her father. That very different vision, after all, is what marriage used to be (after, of course, it evolved from Biblical-era polygamy). Marriage once was a transaction between a bread-earner and a child-bearer. And yet when Obama spoke of marriage, he said:
As I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
His words reflect nothing of these old visions of marriage. Instead these images conjure up love, commitment, raising kids as partners (not one person raising kids), and even an unspoken freedom from “constraints.”
I had wondered whether Yitta Halberstam’s “Plea to Mothers of Girls in Shudduchim” [the process of dating for marriage], published recently in the Jewish Press, was really a Purim spoof, even if it did come out well after the holiday. Alas, no. Her suggestion that Orthodox women of marrying age should take any and all measures, including undergoing plastic surgery, to improve their appearance, is apparently one given in earnest.
As an Orthodox woman myself, that notion is beyond troubling. I have written here about the Jewish concept of modesty, which I believe is all about dignity. But raising our daughters with the message that they are more than their bodies — and then, teaching them that those bodies are all that matter when it comes to finding a mate — is the height of hypocrisy. What follows is my rejoinder to some of Halberstam’s most outrageous statements:
Halberstam writes: “Yes, spiritual beauty makes a woman’s eyes glow and casts a luminous sheen over her face; there is no beauty like a pure soul. Make-up, however, goes a long way in both correcting facial flaws and accentuating one’s assets.”
In her Sisterhood post “On Agunah Issue, Pressure Rabbis, Not Rep,” Dvora Meyers takes on a grassroots campaign to pressure Michigan Rep. Dave Camp to condemn what we consider to be abusive behavior by his staffer, Aharon Friedman. In the past, Camp has called Friedman’s refusal to grant his wife a Jewish divorce decree, or a get, “gossip.” It is time for Camp to recognize this error and do what is right.
The facts of this case are not under dispute. Friedman married Tamar Epstein in April 2006. The marriage failed, and Friedman and Epstein were civilly divorced in 2010, after being separated for two years. For Epstein, an Orthodox Jew, civil divorce is insufficient. Jewish law mandates a religious divorce decree, or get, which must be consented to by both parties. But Friedman has refused thus far to give Epstein a get, and that shows a basic disregard for human decency. He’s been banned from his synagogue, and a prominent rabbinical court has issued a public declaration condemning his intransigence.
In effect, Epstein is an agunah, or a “chained woman.” She cannot remarry in a religious ceremony. And because Epstein is an Orthodox Jew, that effectively means that Friedman (also Orthodox) is deliberately preventing her from remarrying.
Is marriage a legitimate prerequisite for a university course?
That is what some female students are asking at Bar-Ilan University.
The controversy surrounds a course in “marital communications,” which we told you about here. It requires those who enroll be married for at least one year. The course is intended for those who want to become “bridal counselors,” the women who explain ritual Jewish law related to marriage to Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The course is offered under the umbrella of the university’s “Midrasha” — an advanced Torah study program for women, one of several Bar-Ilan programs that merge academic and religious study.
The university justifies requirement by saying that since the course is meant for the women training to be bridal counselors, it makes sense that experience in marriage is necessary. The problem with that answer is that the class is also open to female Bar-Ilan students who are not in the bridal counseling program, but who wish to receive credit for it toward the university’s Jewish study requirements.
Over the last couple of months there has been a lot of attention paid to the unfortunate case of Tamar Epstein, an Orthodox woman who has been trying to get a Jewish divorce decree, or a get for more than four years from her husband Aharon Friedman. Though he’s already her ex-husband in all matters civil and fiscal, he is still her spouse in the eyes of her faith, and this leaves Epstein unable to remarry in the Jewish tradition, and move on with her life.
“He is thus inflicting great emotional abuse upon her,” wrote Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the spiritual leader of Ohev Shalom — The National Synagogue, in Washington D.C., on the Huffington Post. He and other Jewish leaders have been calling on Friedman’s boss, Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, to reprimand or fire him since other efforts at communal coercion, including blacklisting, picketing and shunning, have failed. (See this recent Sisterhood post on the subject.)
However, if withholding a get constitutes abuse, if the husband is indeed brandishing a psychological weapon and threatening his wife with it, then the question that should be asked: How did the gun get into his hand?
The answer is clear: It was put there by Jewish law, the rabbis who formulated it, and the rabbis who refuse to amend it.
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