Indictment

Back in 2024, I went to a rally near the UN for the Israeli hostages. BH, there was a good crowd and almost all the speeches/presentations were poignant and beautiful and appropriate. But even as I was thinking of the hostages (and crying a little over them), there was something else that bothered me. Here we were screaming over our hostages and the abuses they’re going through and complaining that the rest of the world doesn’t want to take the issue seriously. But meanwhile, we, as a Jewish community, are allowing thousands of women to be held hostage in their marriages by abusive husbands. 

Yes, ABUSIVE. You read that correctly. Because gett refusal is abuse. Period. No excuses and no justifications. Ever. 

Not long after this rally we were hearing the call for a mikvah strike or mitzvah strike regarding the case of an Agunah named Malky. It referred to married women not going to the mikvah and giving their husbands more of a sense of urgency to help the Agunah. While it got some support, it was also questioned not just by naysayers but by those who support efforts to help Agunot. And I was one of the people who questioned it because there were too many problems to really make it work. However, the very call for such a drastic measure is, to me, a sad symptom of how our Jewish society has gone wrong. A mikvah strike is a drastic measure and we shouldn’t be needing to resort to drastic measures to help Agunot go free. NONE of us, men or women, should be tolerating gett-refusal. 

In recent days, we’ve been hearing about a new campaign on social media in an effort to help an Agunah named Adeena. In this campaign, women are encouraged to take pictures of their “erva”- their uncovered elbows, arms, thighs, etc- and post them on social media. The idea is to highlight the hypocrisy- our communities get outraged over a girl or woman showing some unseen skin but they aren’t getting even more outraged over abusive husbands holding their wives hostage. 

Just like with the mikvah strike, I don’t agree with this campaign and I’m not participating in it. First, there’s a bit of hypocrisy there. Our communities are supposed to be working within halacha and we’re supposed to be doing the same and not going outside of that. “When there’s a will, there’s a halachic way.” Second, there’s another bit of hypocrisy from a safety point of view. We’re constantly telling our children NOT to put out suggestive images of themselves for safety reasons. And now we’re being asked to do exactly that?!

Having said all of that, I think that these extreme measures are an indictment against our communities. Again, it’s a sad symptom of how our Jewish society has gone wrong. The fact that our communities are not doing nearly enough to help Agunot is a huge problem. 

We shouldn’t be needing campaigns like these. 

We should be providing safe spaces for abuse survivors. We should have every community and every rabbi and every dayan actively supporting the Agunot and not making excuses for the Gett-refusers. The fact that we don’t is a huge Chillul Hashem. And we need everyone to understand that the Gett-refuser doesn’t have a side of his own. As long as he’s withholding the Gett, he’s holding his wife hostage and that makes him WRONG. No excuses. Only when he gives his wife her Gett does he gain or regain his side. Only then will I hear his side of it. 

Even before all of this, we should be teaching our children how to see each other as real human beings created B’Tzelem Elokim and how to treat each other with dignity and mentschlichkeit. We should be getting rid of the excuse of “boys will be boys” and instead insisting that “boys will be whatever we teach them to be.” We should be teaching our teenagers how to recognize signs of abuse and control while dating and we should be teaching them that it’s OK to pull away if needed. We should be teaching our young adults that they mustn’t allow themselves to be pressured into a marriage that might be unhealthy and that it’s OK to keep dating and looking for their basherts. We should be insisting on the halachic pre-nuptial agreement for every couple and if someone doesn’t want to sign one, we should recognize that as a red flag. 

It shouldn’t take a call for a mikvah/mitzvah strike or for using our erva to get our communities to talk about Gett-refusal and to stop making excuses and look for ways to combat it.  

I’m very thankful to Hashem for allowing so many of our hostages to come back to their families safely and I’m still grieving for the hostages who were murdered. But I’m also davening for the women who are still being held hostage by their abusive husbands. I will attend rallies, speak, and write about it and help in any healthy way that I can. And I’m hoping that our communities will wake up and do what needs doing so that we don’t need these kinds of extreme measures.