I was watching an ex-CIA officer on Facebook talking about how radicalism is always precipitated by an injustice. In other words, most people don’t want to get involved in a cause. Most people will not go to an extreme unless and until something very major happens that they feel is morally wrong and it really bothers them.
That’s when they get motivated. I say this because the current crisis, known as the Get Crisis or the Agunah Crisis in the Jewish community, has significant repercussions not just for marriage, but for the spiritual state of the community. Let me explain.
The Agunah Crisis is basically the situation where women who seek a Jewish divorce cannot get one because it is the husband’s unilateral right to give or deny the get. Now, unfortunately, what’s happening is that even women who call themselves religious, or believe themselves to be religious, or who practice religiously and are deeply embedded in the Orthodox Jewish community, have become extremely angry, even radicalized, because of the repeated and systemic abuses of this process over time. They are rejecting the faith because of it. So this is an undermining of the Torah from within.
It is not because these women are bad. It is not only because of one activist who blatantly encourages them to do that. It is because they see the hypocrisy of a system that claims to uphold the Torah but systemically puts women down.
The community has got to address this crisis. There are definitely ways to do it. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is that Jewish women either won’t get married, or they’ll marry non-religious men and not follow the commandments and be kind of lost, or they’ll marry non-Jewish men, or they’ll just live with their partners and not be married. This will degrade the community significantly.
It’s a crisis w
Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal 