The link below goes to a news story about a group of Orthodox Jewish men (including two Rabbis) who’ve been indicted for kidnapping and torturing parishoners (?) in order to obtain consent for divorce.
I’m making a couple of broad assumptions about the Rabbis in particular but I don’t think they’re too much of a stretch. I assume that these men weren’t simply inclined to be thugs from the get-go. Rabbinical school seems like an unlikely place to draw someone who’s basically vicious. It seems reasonable that they were screened and found to be suitable for not only their religious education but to teach as well. With me so far?
If you grant that they weren’t just thugs then they must have started this out at some milder level and with relatively pure motivation; browbeating to help a woman instead of baseball bat beatings for cash. My question is this: how could they have progressed to the point of collecting $50,000 a pop to kidnap and torture people without at some point realizing that they’d completely lost the message?
I’m familiar with Milgram’s shock experiments and Zimbardo’s prison experiments at Stanford and they don’t seem to explain this. There doesn’t seem to have been the same type of strong social pressure in this case. Am I missing something here?
Here’s some background to divorce in Judaism. Orthodox Judaism require that the husband grant a divorce “of his own free will”, but rabbinical courts can apply various methods of pressure on him if they rule his refusal is unjustified. The worst they can do in the US is ostracise him, but in Israel (where rabbinical courts have the power of the state behind them) sanctions can include everything from fines, to suspension of driving & professional licences or passports, all the way up to solitary confinement in prison. Conservative Judaism allows the court to annul the marriage, and Reform Judaism (most American Jews are Reform) simply accepts a civil divorce as valid.
You know, I really like this place. I pose a head-scratcher and in two posts, I’ve not only got the answer, not only got a link to what looks to be an hysterical read but I’ve got a new author to track down.
Alphaboi
Thank you. I guess it isn’t as off-the-map crazy as it seemed. It’s still awful that they did that but at least there’s some cultural and legal framework for doing something like they did.
Zeldar
Great quote! I like it much better than the old joke about why Baptists don’t have sex standing up. Thanks also for putting me on to Supervert. I just pulled down The Necrophile Variations from the site.
This is true, and most Jews do believe that Orthodox husbands who deny their wives a divorce should be regarded as scumbags and ostracized from the community. But based on the news reports the guys in this case seem to have been motivated solely by huge sums of money, not some sort of misguided altruistic desire to help women who are being refused a divorce.
It’s the word of G-d and nothing less (according to we Orthodox Jews). Just because it modern Western society has come up with different standards doesn’t change our belief in the divinity of the Torah.
So, it is however OK with effectively forcing an unwilling woman to the bed of a man she no longer loves … yay rape. Because if she doesn’t put out, there is a problem and the man can divorce her without making the payment specified in the contract. [and yes I kow that the woman is also entitled to receive sex regularly so the man also has to put out.]
If I was married to an unwilling woman, I would worry about the woman getting a tube of cyanoacrylate glue and going to town on Mr Happy and making my live quite miserable for a fair amount of time. Not to mention all the little ways I could think of making some man’s life hell on wheels with a few common household items. He has got to sleep sometime.
There’s no evidence yet. So far, all they have is what the rabbi’s say. It could all just be BS to get money from the woman or woman’s family. I’m surprised they didn’t mention evidence.
I think you’re a bit confused. The problem is mainly that the woman can’t get remarried because her husband refuses to sign the religious divorce document. In all of the cases that I’ve heard of, the couple has long since separated and are usually divorced according to civil law. No one is talking about forcing people to keep living with each other.
That’s not the entirety of Jewish marital law. Halacha absolutely does NOT permit a husband to force his unwilling wife into sex. That said, there are certainly are expectations going into a marriage, and neither the wife nor the husband has the right to just up and decide unilaterally without penalty that they’re no longer willing to meet those expectations. The marital bond includes both rights and responsibilities.
Nothing except her religious belief. Except in Israel, when you get a civil divorce you are free to remarry (or not). She is trapped by being religious.
If they have sex, they’d be committing adultery, and any children born of the union would have the religious status of “mamzer” and forbidden by Torah law to marry other Jews. Even if they themselves decide to abandon the religion, if their children decide to return to the fold of Torah observance, they’d find themselves in a very uncomfortable position.
And if they live in Israel it would be impossible for them to marry a non-mamzer without going abroad (yet at the same time they’d still be forbidden to marry a non-Jew). Even secular or apostate Jews cannot escape the (Orthodox) Rabbinate’s authority in Israel. Incidentally only offspring resulting from the wife’s adultery are mamzerim; any children the husband has with his mistress (assuming she isn’t married) aren’t mamzerim since the Halakha allows for polygyny (even if it’s no longer practiced in the modern era).
One of the many reasons I continue to find Orthodox Judaism highly distasteful. The god you believe in is cruel and unlikeable at best. Your stated moral beliefs are sexist. Why should a man have more legal power in a marriage merely because he has a penis and his wife does not? Do you think you should have more rights in your marriage than your wife does?
Well, what does religion mean to you? Does it mean finding some sort of like-minded group that shares the morals (and sense of fairness) that one comes up with in one’s own mind? Or is it the belief in some sort of greater world-truth that one, having accepted the underlying premise, feels obligated to follow, even if the details are something he finds hard to understand or even distasteful upon first hearing it? That’s not to say that I can’t answer to your question about legal power in marriage in a reasonable manner and have to resort to “G-d’s mysterious ways” - I certainly could. But I think that that’s also irrelevant, if the only thing arguing against it is a sense of likeability or personal sense of fairness.
Why don’t you just admit that your fairy tales are morally repugnant and have no place in modern society, and that the only reason you continue to observe them is because having coercive power over women gives you a boner?