LOOKING AROUND: Back to the agenda

By Barbara Sofer
May. 23, 2002

A young friend, call her Liora, recently asked me to stop by the marriage bureau of the Jerusalem rabbinate and affirm her status as Jewish and single. Delighted with such an auspicious errand, I arrived early in the morning. I knew her parents and even both her grandparents back in the United States, and was looking forward to contributing to what is ultimately a record of the Jewish people.

The clerk in charge of such matters stared at me with horror. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. "Why, you can't sign! You're a woman!"

My mood switched from elated to snappish. Stinging retorts came quickly to mind, but I kept them behind pursed lips. After all, I'd come to help my friend sign up, not to jeopardize her nuptial plans. So I took the rather spineless and obvious way out: I phoned my husband. I prevailed on him to change his schedule and get down to Hahavatzelet Street.

You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to provide the right information for the rabbis. Trouble is, my husband is a nuclear physicist, better on gamma waves than surnames. He needed tutoring.

Nonetheless, his signature was far more valuable than mine.

Shouldn't I have known up front that women were outcasts in such matters? Of course, I had long been familiar with the ruling that women - despite their ability to be lawyers and judges - are grouped together with tots and alcoholics in matters of giving testimony. But I'd believed that such restrictions were now reserved for a severely limited number of documents. Besides, even decades ago, when I had to prove my Jewishness to the Israeli rabbinate prior to my own wedding, my mother's Connecticut-born childhood girlfriend was conveniently living in Tel Aviv and convinced the rabbis there that my Yiddish-speaking maternal grandparents, Moshe and Esther Lubchansky, were indeed Jewish.

I realized afterwards that I'd stumbled unprepared into the rabbinate because women's issues like this one (admittedly not the top priority in the question of women's status) hadn't been on my mind for a while. Such matters have faded almost to the point of vanishing from our national agenda over the past 20 months. One of the many prices to be paid for more than a year and a half of violence and terror is that arguing about social and religious issues feels frivolous. As a friend of mine - a lawyer and leading activist - confirmed: "I feel sheepish raging about the injustices done to agunot (women whose husbands refuse to divorce them) when just about everyone is worried about getting killed." Likewise, when a colleague from abroad made his annual visit to Israel last week, all I could think of to discuss with him was connected to bombings and the like.

THE VERBAL slap in the face at the marriage bureau was a timely reminder. Women's issues are the first to slip to the proverbial back burner, whatever the crisis. Issues of marriage and divorce, or even conversion - the vast majority of candidates for which are women - continue to afflict lives, even when security crises dominate our concerns. Spousal abuse is the equivalent of living with a terrorist in the family, after all, and too often the results are fatal.

The problems haven't gone away with the intifada. Solutions won't come about in a vacuum, but as a result of pressure by activists. Last week, two dozen women, many of them observant, dressed in black and sat outside the offices of the rabbinical court to emphasize the fate of a woman who had waited eight years to get a divorce. (She finally got it.) They weren't waiting for the national crisis to subside before intervening on behalf of a woman with a personal crisis. More power to them.

Children's concerns always accompany those of women on a list of neglected matters.
Psychologist Debbie Gross, who runs the Crisis Center for Religious Women (02-655 5744), reports a plague-level increase in the sexual abuse of children. She doesn't relate this to the security crisis. The problem is a society in which perpetrators go untreated. A single pedophile can assault literally hundreds of victims. Many of those victims will later display deviant behavior as a result. Atrocious crimes are going on in our communities and we're too preoccupied to protect our children from the enemies stalking our neighborhoods.

Unhappily, our current conflict isn't disappearing. Military experts are predicting tougher times. Just holding the line - standing firm against terror as we have been for the past 20 months - is a hardship. But we have to go back to our abundant social and religious agendas and work on solutions, without waiting for the security situation to right itself.

Liora, properly accredited, stood with her groom under a sacred silken canopy, the symbol of their mutual home, in Israel this week. Both she and her husband have made more than the average contribution to the nation's security efforts. All of us have to make efforts so that the Israel in which they build their future is safe within as well as without.

We don't have time to do one thing at a time. Nor will we ever.