Judaism views marriage as a sacred partnership. As such, two individuals who can no longer live in a sacred way with one another may divorce. Judaism has always recognized this sad reality, although, according to the Talmud, when a man divorces his first wife, even the altar in the
The practice of Jewish divorce, like marriage, is a deeply sexist one. Only a man can divorce a woman, not the other way around, and in the traditional divorce ceremony, the husband hands his wife a get (a writ of divorce) which she passively accepts. As Debra Orenstein writes in Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones, vol. 1, "…a Jewish man who divorces may be in pain, but he remains in power; a Jewish woman who gets divorced is disempowered by the very structure of divorce law, even if her husband cooperates fully.”
The traditional divorce ceremony is the reverse of the wedding, minus the frills and tulle. At a wedding, a man hands his wife a ring in front of two witnesses and declares, “Haray at m’kudeshet li…,” “Behold, you are betrothed to me.” In an eerie echo of this moment, a divorcing husband hands his wife a get and declares, “Haray at m’gerushet li…”, “Behold, you are divorced from me…” The ketubah, the marriage contract, is torn.
Confronted with this harsh reality, the creators of ritual on our site have gone in two different directions. Some feel obliged to accept the traditional ceremony, however sexist, as the dictate of Jewish law. They have devised ceremonies to follow a traditional get ceremony for a woman to hold with her women friends. These ceremonies seek to restore the woman’s power and to help her move from mourning back into life. One such ceremony was even created by a man who felt he needed more than the traditional get ceremony to move on with his life. Others have dispensed with the traditional get ceremony and have, instead, created an egalitarian divorce ceremony.
While the divorce ceremony itself is problematic, the fact that it can be exercised only by a man engenders even more havoc. A man can refuse to give his wife a get in which case she become an aguna, an anchored woman. She is not free to remarry and should she do so without a get, any future union would be regarded as adulterous and children from this union would be regarded as mamzerim (lit. bastards, a legal category, who can only marry one another). Men have extorted huge sums of money from their ex-wives in exchange for a get, and many have simply left them stranded, neither married nor divorced, but in some kind of halachic netherworld.
Every denomination has attempted to deal with the agunah situation in different ways. Orthodox and Conservative rabbinical organizations urge couples to sign pre-nuptial agreements which effectively obviate the possibility of an agunah situation. Some Orthodox and Conservative authorities are willing to dissolve a marriage in the case of a recalcitrant husband. Reform and Reconstructionist authorities permit more mutual divorces.
back to top
