IDF rabbinate opposes asking troops to sign form ‘unchaining’ wives in case of disaster
While conditional divorces can free women in case of a husband’s disappearance or loss of mental faculties in battle, rabbis say pushing such a document on soldiers may hurt morale
Mati Wagner is The Times of Israel's religions reporter.
Fearful it will hurt soldiers’ morale, a high-ranking IDF rabbi expressed his opposition Tuesday to offering soldiers a document to sign that would allow their wives to remarry if they go missing in battle or return from combat mentally incapacitated.
“We don’t proactively ask soldiers to sign the document,” said Lt. Col. Avihud Schwartz, head of the IDF rabbinate’s department of Jewish law, during a meeting of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women.
“The decision not to actively offer soldiers the option is out of concern that doing so will negatively impact soldiers’ motivation to fight,” added Schwartz, referring to how signing the document might focus soldiers’ attention on their mortality.
Schwartz said that any soldier who requested the document could receive it.
According to Jewish law, a married woman is permitted to remarry after being widowed or after receiving a writ of divorce, or get, from her husband.
But if a wife is unable to verify her husband’s death, for instance because he is missing in action, she might be prevented by Jewish law from remarrying out of concern that her husband might still be alive.
If a married woman bears the child of another man, the child is considered a mamzer and is forbidden by Jewish law from marrying most other Jews.
The Babylonian Talmud in the tractate of Ketubot records a tradition that in King David’s time, soldiers wrote conditional divorce papers to their wives before they went to war to allow their wives to remarry if they went missing.
The document provided by the IDF upon a soldier’s request is based on this tradition.
Another, more complicated, situation from a halachic perspective is a case in which a husband becomes mentally incapacitated, for instance as a result of a head injury.
Schwartz said that the IDF rabbinate was close to finding a solution to such a situation, according to a press release provided by the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women.
“Throughout the war, we realized that existing documents did not provide an answer to a situation in which the husband becomes mentally incapacitated,” Schwartz said. “I said that we would go to work in the IDF rabbinate’s [department of Jewish law] and that’s what happened.”
“In my opinion, we managed to overcome the halachic difficulties so that the document would provide a solution in cases of mental incapacity. We did this by adding three sentences. We are in the final stages of completion,” said Schwartz.
According to Jewish law, a husband who is mentally incapacitated is unable to carry out the divorce procedure. As a result, his wife would be unable to remarry.
But the husband can sign a document while healthy that gives his consent to carry out divorce proceedings should he become mentally incapacitated.
A woman unable to enjoy a normal marital relationship and unable to extricate herself through divorce or proof of death is referred to in halachic literature as an agunah, or “chained” woman.
“The most common form of agunah today is not when a husband goes missing in battle, it’s when he loses mental capacity,” Sharon Brick-Deshen, CEO of Kolech-Ne’emanei Torah v’Avodah, told The Times of Israel. “So the statements made by Rabbi Schwartz about a solution in the offing for women married to men who lost their mental functions is a major development. Unfortunately, many women don’t feel comfortable asking for a solution when their husband is not functioning.”
Brick-Deshen, who was present at the Knesset meeting, rejected Schwartz’s claim that it hurt combat motivation to offer soldiers the option of providing for their wives should they be injured or go missing.
She said that soldiers were requested to sign all sorts of documents as part of the induction process, including dental records and DNA samples that help identify their body if killed in action.
“Nobody claims that lowers morale,” said Brick-Deshen. “If you frame it as an act of love, instead of an act of pessimism about the future, then you transform the whole situation. Signing the document is a declaration of care and love for your beloved.”
Rabbi Seth Farber, the head of ITIM, an organization that helps Israelis navigate the country’s religious bureaucracy, says the issue of writing some form of conditional divorce agreement or a document to permit the writing of one if the husband disappears or is injured has been debated for decades.
“The rabbinate is very scared of anything that threatens what they perceive to be the sanctity of the marital institution,” said Farber. “When they weigh this concern against the agunah issue, they don’t really see the suffering of the women in an equal way. And because of that, they don’t have an interest in finding a solution.”
Farber said that another factor is a reluctance to make a transition from a Judaism that developed in exile in ghettos to the modern reality of the State of Israel, which has an army.
“Rabbis still have not developed a sensitivity for the need to take on national responsibilities and make decisions on a national level to do something that protects everyone,” Farber said.
