On March 23, 2006, I atypically left my husband, son and daughters at home, on a weeknight, to attend a screening of Mekudeshet.
I watched this documentary portrait of three agunot, women ‘chained’ to husbands unwilling to give them a Jewish divorce, with my blood beating unnaturally and a growing physical revulsion. To force myself to stay until the movie’s end, I had to remember that all I was being asked to do was watch—for a single evening—what these women and so many others have been enduring for years or even decades.
As an observant Jew in love with Judaism, whose children are third-generation students in Orthodox day schools, I was raised with what I have called elsewhere a patrician pity for those Jews who did not understand the beauty of this path. After seeing Mekudeshet, and for the only time in my half century of life, I felt a sentiment I had read about but never experienced: an unbearable shame on behalf of every Jew who loves halakha.
I thought I knew, but I did not know.
Anat Zuria’s camera took me inside the rabbinic court and compelled me to watch and to listen to what is done in the name of halakha, a uniquely pernicious hillul hashem—not one that contradicts the most essential principles, as murder does, but one that uses the instrument of halakha itself to commit spiritual murder and make a mockery of our oft-uttered claims on behalf of Jewish marriage, sexuality, and the privileging of family life.
Why are we who love halakha able to tolerate the intolerable travesty of agunot? Why are helpless apologetics by rabbis for the technical difficulties—which no one is deemed learned enough to understand or resolve—acceptable to a people and its leaders who can give eloquent speeches about how the word tzedek, justice, is repeated in the commandment that we pursue justice because tzedek is the foundation of Jewish law and life?
If we learned about another religion that placed the constraints of its legal system above the worst kind of injustice imposed on its adherents, wouldn’t we feel a secret triumphalism about how much more enlightened our own tradition is? This tragedy is our disgrace.
Every rabbi, and every person who is contemplating becoming a rabbi, must watch Mekudeshet. Because if it is up to the rabbis to resolve this betrayal of justice at the heart of halakha, then each rabbi should understand that the title and honor are bound to an august responsibility: Every day that you are a rabbi and are not fighting with all your powers to redress this wrong is a day that you have no right to stand at a pulpit, beneath a huppah, or at the head of a table in a beit midrash to proclaim the righteousness of the Jewish way.
As for those of us who are not rabbis, it is our responsibility to be unrelenting in our revulsion and unyielding in declaring our Creator both infinitely just and infinitely merciful. The cry to heaven of even one agunah is unbearable to such a Creator and a desecration of the Name.
More pertinently, as people who believe in na’aseh ve-nishma, as people who must live justly, we should not give a penny of tzedaka to any rabbi or organization that has not made this link between tzedek and tzedaka explicit and active. Every one of us can pursue this policy and teach it to our children until no one can find a living agunah and the issue is a footnote in scholarly histories.
Agunot are not a feminist problem or a woman’s problem. They are a Jewish problem, one that mocks our piety and scorns our virtuous proclamations about the nobility of Jewish life.
Many centuries ago, our rabbis found halakhic solutions to what had been economically unbearable although inscribed in the Torah itself, amending the law that forgave debt whose consequence had been, prior to rabbinic intervention, the inability of the poor to borrow. Do we want to say of ourselves that when money was at stake, we found halakhic paths that were acceptable to everyone, but when women’s and children’s lives were at stake, we found only impotence and “we’re so sorry”?
And when the issue of agunot is resolved, future generations of Jews will rightfully judge every Orthodox rabbi in our day for his tolerating this defiling of kedusha. The One to whom we are so devoted, Judge of all, is judging rabbis at this moment, declaring what a righteous, merciful Lord must declare: “Face to face with this desecration of my Name, you did not act.”
If you cannot get to a screening of Mekudeshet, you can buy a copy to watch and then circulate it privately, as I am. It is available from Women Make Movies, Inc. at www.wmm.com or 212-925-0606.