Anne Etra"The bill of divorce in Jewish Law – the GET - was never my cause.
But when my friend Rose told me she was going to get her GET on the day before Rosh Hashanah (beautifully symbolic!) I applauded the move and suggested we have a ‘pre-get ritual: go out on the town, write a poem, do a dance. When I got off the telephone though, it was a GET rap that flowed out of me.
The GET however, is my cousin Diana's cause: she is a Conservative Rabbi in Israel who has been fighting the GET for some ten years now, under the auspices of the Schecter Institute of Jewish Studies, a seminary of the Conservative Movement. The center carries out research intended to find solutions for agunot (“chained women”) who wait years to receive the GET from their husbands. Their goal is to find solutions for releasing the agunot and to shed light on directions for new rulings.
Diana will tell you stories of women in Israel who are in homes for battered woman - many of whom are Persian or Russian immigrants – whose spiteful husbands won’t set them free. My sister went to a New York yeshiva with a woman whose husband wouldn’t grant her a GET for 15 years. You read that correctly: 15 years. An Orthodox Jewish Alcatraz.
As it happens, all three of us are granddaughters of Rabbi Leo Jung, champion of 20th Century Modern Orthodoxy, intellectual warrior and firm believer that you could combine ‘torah-true’ Judaism with modern times. We were fortunate to be raised in loving Jewish homes with the richness of ritual serving most of all to remind us to be good people.
Which leads me back to my GET rap: an ‘in-your-face’ battle cry against the contradictions of those who purport to be ‘holy’ and conduct ‘mitzvoth’ on a daily basis, observing the ‘laws’, but are in fact abusive to their wives, many of whom are victims of adultery, some beaten, and all treated with indignity by not being allowed to leave a hellish marriage.
And the rabbis who allow this to continue are no better. (And if this is the law, well then I don't wanna know; if this is Kedushah, it ain't got the flow..)
So now the GET issue has my attention. My GET rap takes some of the aspects of Judaism that I consider holy and turns them on their head when they become empty theology and do not translate into right action."
Anne Etra
