With the passing of Rabbi Rackman, zatzal, the world has lost a man of great moral courage; the Jewish people, a fierce defender; the denominations, a promoter of internal unity; the Orthodox community, a model of Torah, derekh eretz and ethical standards; and Jewish women, a singular rabbinic champion of their causes. And my family lost a dear friend, for Rabbi Rackman and my father, zatzal, were close friends since college days and daily havruta for 32 years.
Rabbi Rackman was a great friend of JOFA. He was a presenter at the opening plenary of the first international conference in 1997 and he continued to attend JOFA conferences for as long as his health permitted. He did not come late to Jewish women’s issues. Long before JOFA, before agunah activists, and even before the fledgling Jewish feminist movement of the 60’s, he spoke and wrote about the problem of the abandoned wife. He saw the situation as one of injustice, and it deeply pained him that his beloved Judaism could be complicit. Not satisfied with hand wringing in the face of injustice, he called for halakhic transformation and repair.
After several decades of speaking out for agunot and seeing no response to his plea for a global halakhic solution, Rabbi Rackman, together with several other rabbis, created the Beit Din L’Inyanei Agunot. The sole function of this special court was to release women held in marriage against their wills by recalcitrant and oftentimes blackmailing husbands. The methodologies the dayanim used were not standard ones; but they had been used by earlier halakhists and were thus available as precedents. Particularly, the beit din relied on the broad Talmudic principle of mekah ta’ut, a mistaken transaction. If a transaction was found later to be based on false information, it became retroactively void and the purchase price had to be returned. As had others before him, Rabbi Rackman loosely applied this principle to certain marital transactions. If a marriage was based on false pretense, such as man hiding the fact that he was gay, impotent, prone to violence or had a criminal record, the marital bond was considered invalid ab initio. There was no need for a get and the agunah could be released.
Rabbi Rackman searched for other precedents as well. I recall a phone conversation with him in the 1990’s in which I heard a distinct thrill in his voice. He had come upon a teshuva, by Rabbi Moshe Rozin, a 20th century posek [Sheilat Moshe] that pointed to a new support to release an agunah. It was the umdenah, the rabbinic estimate of what would have been in the mind of a particular person in a time past had that person known certain facts. The particulars of this teshuva were that a man and a woman had married and almost immediately, he committed suicide by drinking poison. His brother, the levirate husband who could release her through the halitzah ritual, was nowhere to be found. For seven years she remained an agunah. Rabbi Rozin posited an umdenah on both counts: – had she known the husband had no intention of marrying for life and had she known that the brother would not be available to release her, the rabbis assume that she would not have entered into marriage and thus the ceremony of seven years earlier was considered invalid.
Rabbi Rackman saw in these methodologies a halakhic way to secure justice for agunot. In his eyes, a single case of iggun in the community was intolerable. He came under censure from certain Orthodox colleagues for taking alternative, minority decisions and acting upon them, but he was committed to halakha as a living, ethical system and could do no less. When several colleagues tried to challenge his authority by asking to see his case work, he objected, saying ‘No other beit din is required to publish its cases, and the principle exists that one beit din should respect the work of another. They are asking me to publish in order to invalidate my releases and I won’t let that happen.’ He was not naïve. He had political savvy but no rancor, no pettiness. His politics were about the cause, not about personalities.
On the larger canvas of his life, too, his actions and words were all about justice, about a principle of equality for the disenfranchised, about mutual respect, about care for the downtrodden, about the beauty and ethics of Judaism, about the capacity of a living halakha to carry us with righteousness and dignity on our walks through life.
In the internet exchanges after his death, Rosalind Preston, feminist and leader of English Jewry mused for all of us: “Will we ever see the likes of him again?
Yehi zikhro barukh