Comments on: Leap Blogging

By: Buckets

Buckets — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:32:05 +0000

As I understand it, under (conservative) Jewish law, only husbands can divorce their wives. In this case, the couple divorced in civil court, but the husband out of spite never gave his wife a religious divorce. Her respect for her own religion meant that she was not free to marry, since her religion said she was still married to her first husband until he gave the divorce.

An analogy would be something like this. Let’s imagine that in some parallel universe Catholics were required to take communion every Sunday and without it they’d be damned. A priest for no good reason keeps his parishioners in the pews all day Sunday before giving them the communion. A cow of one of the parishioners dies because of the neglect.

The question is: if the legal system allowed that parishioner to sue the priest for the results of not giving him communion, is that system protecting religion or persecuting it? Depends on whose ox is gored.

By: Bene Diction

Bene Diction — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:27:53 +0000

That is a good point. In Jewish law is it the responsibility of the husband to ‘protect’ the religious freedom of the wife?

His decision prevented her from re-marrying into her faith.
Is it forbidden for a devout man to marry a divorcee (female, since only the husband can grant the relgious divorce).

It appears the husband free to take another wife. Is this correct?

By: Buckets

Buckets — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:24:45 +0000

The legal decision is an interesting one, but also one that I suspect is easy to mischaracterize. As I understand it, the court allows a religious-woman (a conservative Jew) to sue for damages because her ex-husband (also a conservative Jew refused to give her a religious divorce, thus preventing her from remarrying. Does the decision infringe on his religion? I think not. It does not require him to do something his religion forbids; nor does it forbid him him to do something that his religion requires. His religion allows him to grant the divorce or not. He chose not to. That resulted in the damages that the woman is suing for.

On the other hand, the entire notion that the woman suffered damages is predicated on the notion that she could not remarry without the religious divorce — that is, that she had no choice but to respect her own religion. It also is assumes that because of that, her husband’s actions ‘boxed her in’ in a way that did demonstrable harm.

The argument could be made, then, that the decision does not no much infringe on his religious freedom as protect hers.