OzTorah

Isolation wards derive from the rule regarding the leper, “He shall dwell alone: outside the camp shall his habitation be” (Lev. 13:15).

To isolate the leper was necessary in order to protect the community. Precautions had to be taken to reduce the possibility of contagion.

But the subject of isolation does not begin or end with the leper. There are other kinds of isolation which are essential.

• Abraham isolated himself from the corrupting, idolatrous environment; he was Avraham Ha-Ivri, concerning which our tradition says that he stood on one ever – one side of the world – and his contemporaries on the other.

• Moses isolated himself when he ascended Mount Sinai; to commune with God he needed to separate himself from the pressures and problems of leadership.

• Bilam isolated himself; vayelech shefi, “he went to be alone” when he had a great decision to think through.

• Elijah isolated himself: when Ahab was after him and he needed to find serenity of spirit he went into the wilderness where there was no noise but only kol demamah dakkah, “the sound of thin silence”.

As community-minded people, we believe in being with others. We do not believe in monk-like withdrawal from life. But you can have too much of the noise, the bustle, the pressure and the demands of always being surrounded by others. There are times to be alone.

A Chassidic teacher says, “A person who does not have an hour to him or herself every day is not a person”.

Q. Was it Greece or Israel that pioneered democracy?

A. The conventional answer is Greece. But the so-called democratic way of Athens relied on a huge population of slaves without human rights.

Israel had a different principle. The Torah declares, “This is the book of the generations of man” (Gen. 5:1), every man, all men. Every human being was created in the Divine image.

God is the Father of us all. Equality, dignity and freedom are the right of every human. Even the supposed slave was a person of dignity whose freedom was assured in the seventh year. Not even the “stranger within the gates” was denied rights. No-one was a nobody.

That surely makes Israel the pioneer of democratic theory and practice!

Q. The media have widely covered the recent* arrests by the FBI of a group of orthodox Jews in New York who arranged for the kidnapping and torture of men who refused to give their wives a gett. Is there any justification whatsoever for such behaviour in Judaism, given the limited options available to solve the plight of agunot (“chained” women)?

“The Gett”, 1907 painting by Yehuda Pen

A. Women who can’t achieve a religious divorce from their ex-husbands are called in Hebrew agunot, literally “chained” women. They are chained to a man they don’t want and a marriage they wish to be over.

It works the other way too, that sometimes it is the man who wants the gett and the woman who refuses to co-operate, though the statistics are that more men are recalcitrant than women.

In theory there should be no problem: divorce in Jewish law is a matter of consent, and when two decent people have tried marriage and found it did not work they should both do the moral thing and break the chains. But for a range of reasons one party can be and sometimes is recalcitrant.

The Beth Din cannot impose a divorce without their consent, so the Jewish court system cannot be blamed.

Attempts have been made to recruit the secular legal system to achieve the gett indirectly, by placing a sanction on a recalcitrant party that will, for instance, deny them a civil divorce decree or affect their financial situation, and in some jurisdictions these endeavours have begun to bring results.

Some Jewish communities impose their own sanctions – for instance, refusing synagogue honours to a husband who denies his ex-wife a gett, picketing his place of business, or shaming him in other ways.

The best method of moral suasion is trying to convince him to co-operate and secure his agreement through quiet diplomacy, and this generally succeeds.

Now comes the issue of sending the message by means of (literal) strong-arm tactics – giving him a black eye, breaking his arm or leg or threatening to, and doing other things that sometimes achieve the gett but bring great opprobrium upon the rabbis or others who are responsible.

There are at least three problems with this type of pressure:

• It contradicts the Jewish ethic of not causing deliberate pain, damage or injury.

• It harms the reputation of Judaism amongst both Jews and non-Jews.

• It brings into question the voluntary nature of the gett.

In regard to the third issue, a gett given under compulsion raises a host of questions.

Maimonides has a shrewd answer, that it is not the beating that brings about the husband’s agreement, but it shocks him and brings out his inner human feeling for the right thing. Maimonides thinks that doing the right thing is a Jew’s real nature, and all this drama ensures that this characteristic of conscience will re-assert itself.

Does this mean that black eyes and broken legs are an acceptable moral tactic?

It doesn’t sound good, and from the moral point of view it isn’t… even though the woman in the case might end up finding the freedom she wants and is entitled to.

The best way is to employ non-physical methods such as diplomacy, communal sanctions and the help of the civil law system. Even better is to educate couples in marriage before they ever enter the chuppah and show that prevention is better than cure.

* October 2013.

There is a large vav in this portion, in the word gachon (Lev. 11:42).

According to the sages (Kidd. 30a) this is the middle letter of the Torah.

There are just over 600,000 letters all told, more or less the same as the number of males who came out of Egypt, indicating that everyone is indispensable to the people of Israel; a Torah which lacks even one letter is not kosher, and neither is the Jewish people complete if any of its members is missing.

This is a well-known idea which remains valuable even though it is hundreds of years old.

Another idea which derives from the vav of gachon is that the time to assess a human being is not merely at birth when the baby is full of promise, or at the end of life when one’s earthly chapter has come to an end, but in the middle.

It is at this time when the question a person should be asking is, “Now that I am halfway through my task, how am I doing?”

Naturally we are unable to judge when we will die, so how can we pinpoint any particular stage and call it halfway?

The answer is to divide life into three segments, youth, adulthood and old age, and regarding oneself as statistically likely to reach the 70s or 80s or more, use the stage of life beginning with one’s late 30s as the time for the middle-of-life assessment.

The portion is called Sh’mini, “eighth”, since it describes events that happened after the seven-day dedication of the tabernacle in the wilderness.

In Judaism eight represents a new beginning. After the first seven days of a boy’s life, the b’rit takes place on the eighth day. After the seven days of Sukkot, Sh’mini Atzeret is the culminating chag of the festival month.

In the messianic age the Temple service will be accompanied by a harp of eight strings whereas until then the harp will have seven strings.

Each example is of a new beginning. The first seven of anything lays the foundation: thereafter we move into a new era.

Is there any connection with the saying, “the seven-year itch”?

In terms of marriage some people possibly think that after the first seven years either or both of the couple are itching for a new partner, a new attraction. This notion bodes ill for the marriage. The better approach is to use the eighth year not to get out of the marriage but to get more deeply into it.