11/17/2015 How to solve Agunah in Judaism, like a Scotsman...

How to solve Agunah in Judaism.

Agunah is a state in which a man who has a civil divorce from his wife refuses to issue her a religious divorce, which prevents her from remarrying.

However, if she had been married to a non-Jew, she would need no religious divorce. So, the simple solution to agunah is to excommunicate her former husband so that he is no longer considered a Jew.

INTERLUDE -- some lessons from Christianity

This is a foreign concept in Judaism because of the idea, "Once a Jew, always a Jew." Coming from a Calvinistic Baptist background I'd like to share with Jews a subtle little trick that Baptists have invented in light of the idea of "Once saved, always saved."

If a Methodist sees a formerly professing Christian suddenly doing things no Christian would do, or even denouncing the faith, they are able in their theology to conclude that this person has lost his salvation. Baptist theology doesn't allow a person to lose his salvation, so they are left with a conundrum. Is this Bible burning adulterous blaspheming murderer (or whatever) a saved person? Didn't be profess Christ ten years ago? Is God walking him through some mysterious path to show the power of redemption? It's a serious problem!

So Baptists merely step back in time and conclude that this person was never saved to begin with. He may have professed the faith, but he was never truly a Christian.

No matter the THEORY, then, if in PRACTICE the person isn't a Christian NOW, then we can work within the theory to validate the present reality of the person's behavior.

NOW BACK TO JUDAISM

Jews don't have some kind of nebulous "salvation" experience to wish away. If a man is born to a Jewish mother, he's a Jew. If he gets circumcised, he's a member of the tribe. Don't believe his birth certificate? Ask him to drop his drawers and he'll prove his credentials on the spot.

One reason Jews rely on matrilineal descent is that a person can always deny his father (and a statistically significant number would be right). But it's a lot harder to deny one's mother.

No matter. Theories are merely frameworks for explaining reality. Gravity is a theory that explains the reality of a skinned knee. Agunah is worse than a skinned knee and deserves a solution.

So the solution is to embrace the "No true Scotsman" fallacy with all the fervor of a Southern Baptist in a liquor store.

The no true Scotsman fallacy works like this in the Agunah situation.

"No Jew would refuse to divorce his divorced wife!"

But what about THAT Jew over there who refuses to give a Get (a religious divorce) to his (civilly divorced) ex-wife?

"No TRUE Jew would refuse to divorce his divorced wife!"

Simple. Make the refusal to give a Get rock solid PROOF that this man isn't a Jew at all, but an imposter!

Here's the legal way to make that work:

Under the 24 listed mechanisms for excommunication, there are several that apply:

3 calling an Israelite a slave (he is essentially enslaving his former wife).

5 dealing lightly with any rabbinic or Mosaic precepts (in this case the refusal to give a divorce)

6 refusing to abide by the decision of the court (the Beit Din could order him to issue a certificate of divorce and if he does not do so within a specified time, then he is in violation)

So then, to solve agunah, a Beit Din could order him to issue a certificate of divorce. If he refuses, then he is excommunicated.

Being excommunicated, his former wife is no longer married to a Jew, so she doesn't NEED a certificate of divorce. He would remain a non-Jew until he decided to convert to Judaism, which would involve a ceremonial circumcision -- somewhat appropriate to the context at hand.

Since children are Jewish according to the mother, the ONLY liability would be to children of a Levite or Cohen, who would lose their status if their father weren't Jewish.

Comments?

11/17/2015 Reading the Bible in terms of things we "know"

When Joshua was fighting in battle he prayed for the sun to stand still to allow them to have more daylight to win.

The sun stayed still, giving them more daylight.

There are several ways to take this:

1) The sun halting in its rotation around the earth....
2) The sun SEEMING to halt in its rotation around the earth, although in reality it was the earth’s rotation that stopped.
3) The victory speeded up so that they accomplished a day’s worth of victory in an hour.

A thousand years ago we might have argued for the first choice.

A few hundred years ago we might have argued for the second choice.

I think that today we would likely find a lot of folks arguing for the third option, but feeling uncomfortable about it.

The second option (that the earth stopped spinning for a while) would be an astonishing miracle given the momentum of all the mass of the planet. Simply stopping the planet without stopping everything on it would cause the oceans to flood the continents while all people would suddenly be airborne to crash miles away in a dead heap. But, still, God could have done it – simply stop the planet rotating and everything on it and cancelled inertia at the same time to keep us from launching halfway into orbit. I’m perfectly comfortable with that.

I prefer the third option, but the second option is certainly doable.

What is NOT doable is the first option. God cannot stop something that isn’t happening in the first place. If the sun isn’t rotating around the earth then God can’t stop it because it’s ALREADY stopped.

Now let’s think about that for a moment. How many of us have even considered the first option? Very few indeed. We already know that the earth rotates around the sun, so when we read that passage about the sun standing still in the sky we intuitively understand it to mean that the sun SEEMED to stop. Either they got all they needed accomplished quickly or the earth stopped, but we know that the sun didn’t stop. And even when we read that the sun stopped we don’t try to erase everything we already know about physics and the solar system. We just harmonize that passage with what we already know and don’t even worry about it.

I would suggest that a hundred years from now folks will be doing the same when they read Genesis 1. They’ll see that God created man from the dust of the earth and think in the back of their heads about all of the miraculous process that science teaches now, harmonize it in their heads, and not worry about it one bit.

In other words, a lot of the arguments that we have, we don’t need to have. We don’t have to believe that the sun rotates around the earth to appreciate the miracle of Joshua’s victory. And we don’t have to believe that the universe is 6000 years old to appreciate the miracle of life.

09/30/2014 Thinking Thoughts of God

“Theology” is thoughts of God.

“Meta-Theology” is thoughts of thoughts of God.

This is one step removed from theology.

So then, if Christians say that God is “three” and Jews say that God is “one,” this blog will ask what that means.

In simplest terms, I intend to take a doctrine at face value and ask what that doctrine means to those who believe it. 

In a number of cases there will be no practical difference between a set of beliefs.  Jews and Christians both agree that a person “works” because he is “saved” (i.e. in a covenant relationship with God).  When Christians ask “what would Jesus do?” Jews will ask “What does the Torah say?” Or rather, when Christians ask “Who is the Word of God?” they find Jesus and when Jews say “What is the Word of God” they find the Torah. For each, these are equivalent parts of their religious guidance.

In some cases there will be profound differences, such as the belief that the Tribulation is the Tribulation of the Saints in contrast to the belief that it is the Wrath of God. The first is more common in the third world and the second is more common in western democracies.

But before we begin, what is “God” to you? How do your beliefs change your daily life? If they don’t have any effect on your daily life, then what eternal meaning could they possibly have? It’s okay to question what beliefs mean. That’s how we learn to use them.

So here’s my first thought:

The purpose of religion is to make us better for the world.

That is, the purpose of our God is to make us better for other people.

If that is not so, what on earth is your religion for?

Tim