books showsmedialinkscontact
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts

Sunday, May 31, 2009

G-dcast: How to Tell if Your Girlfriend Is Cheating

Inbal Freund is one of the most incredible human beings I know. She's the former director of Mavoi Satum, an organization that stops men from refusing their wives divorces in Israel. She scripted (with Chari Pere) a (masterful, brilliant) short comic about the agunah situation called Unmasked, which explains her life work in more vivid emotion than I can hit you with. (Ouch. Sorry. Bad use of the colloquial...)

And this week, she takes on the Torah.








Inbal is fiercely Orthodox, and fiercely feminist, and she's also just plain fierce. This was probably the single parsha that we were most nervous to do. Even now, when I watch it, I get a feeling at certain points like I was punched in the gut -- it's pretty intense. No one comes off 100% pure: not the wife, not the husband, not the priest, not even G*d.

It's things like this that remind me that I'm Orthodox, and that keep me Orthodox. If Judaism was simple, and I agreed with every little bit of it, I could just say "amen" and keep moving, comfortable with the role of religion in my life. If I was secular, or not Orthodox, I could just resign this to one of those parts of Judaism that I don't agree with -- or that's old or outdated or misogynistic or just straight-up lame -- and move on to something cool, like strawberry cheesecake or listening to Y-Love.

But I'm not. Even after watching Naso, I'm perturbed -- so, what, this dude thought his wife was cheating on her and sold her out to the rest of the tribe? He threw her in front of a priest, who uncovered her hair (which, to a married Orthodox woman, is like ripping off all her clothes in public)? How is that just on anyone's behalf?

Relationships are passionate. (Unless they are boring, and you're comfortable and uninspired by each other, in which case a break-up is probably looming in the distance.) Some couples fight like hell, and some couples love each other with every bit as much passion. A dude has to be a real self-centered douche to accuse his wife publicly of one of the most heinous private sins...and a woman has to be the most forgiving person in the world to stick with him after that. It's true -- whether you're in a relationship or you aren't -- people never understand how other people's relationships work. Compared to this procedure, getting divorced is probably the easiest thing in the world. But if a couple really wants to get this thing resolved, I suppose the message of the parsha is that there's always a way...except that the best way, like marriage itself, it isn't always the easiest way.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Jewish Divorce: What You Need to Know

Among the religious community, there's a huge problem of agunot -- that is, women who want a divorce from their husbands, frequently because of abuse or other severe problems, and whose husbands refuse to grant the divorce. Because a Jewish legal stipulation puts divorce solely in the husband's court -- a safeguard from when husbands were required to provide food, money and shelter for their wives, whether or not they were still "together" -- it's become a huge problem in recent times, when to be spiteful, malicious, or merely because of indifference, some men will divorce their wives, sometimes even dating or remarrying, without granting their wife a get.

agunot


Among the religious community, there are also a number of insanely heroic people who have made it their life's work to stop these miserable excuses for people. At the forefront of this battle is Mavoi Satum, whose former president, Inbal Freund, is also a gifted writer and performance poet.

She and artist Chari Pere (whose work, btw, you'll be seeing on MJL pretty soon) went to visit one of Mavoi Satum's clients, spent two hours interviewing her and listening to her story, and developed this three-page comic. Pass it around. Spread it everywhere. And let people know that prenuptial agreements aren't just for Donald Trump and his prospective ex-wives -- they're for anyone who wants to avoid years and possibly decades of heartache, legal battles, and trauma for kids that you haven't even conceived of yet.

agunot, or mevaseret get



Go here to read the comic, or here to download a printable PDF.

Blog Archive