Withholding of a get can be abusive power play by an ex

SHIRA DRUION

“I struggled to get my get for eight years,” says Caron Friedman.* “It was a severely traumatic experience for me and my children. At first the Beth Din did not realise how serious the situation was and I don’t think they took me seriously.

“But, then they quickly realised and assisted me. This, however, did not prevent the enormous losses I incurred emotionally and financially. My former husband also prevented me from moving on with my life, which was so deeply painful.

“My advice to women in the situation is to get proactive. Take the necessary steps yourself; don’t rely on other people, because it is your life and years of your life at stake.”

“While there is most certainly a place for divorce in mainstream Jewish thought and more specifically a get which releases two parties from a union that has become untenable, the psychological warfare that often ensues is considerable,” says clinical psychologist Serenne Kaplan who has helped many women struggling to obtain their get.

“When the joy and respect that underpins a marriage gives way to the pain, blame, hurt, disappointment, betrayal and shame often ushered by divorce, the stage is set for bitter recrimination and a vindictive acting out of a husband’s power in the withholding of a get.

“The high psychological price of divorce on the spouses and particularly the children, is widely documented. But when the process takes on a highly acrimonious, combative or high conflict flavour, the collateral damage is extensive.”

Kaplan explains how the power dynamic manifests: “The recalcitrant husband ostensibly has the power to sentence his wife to a paralysing grey area, a non-life of stasis, with her being unable to move on to a place of recovery and healing.

This unilateral withholding of a get becomes a potent form of domestic abuse replete with emotional assaults, psychological manipulation and is often a tool of financial control. It is often not a single new act of abuse, but may be the culmination of a long-standing entrenched pattern of controlling behaviour, Kaplan says.

“It often plays out in the economic arena, where a husband uses extortion, refusing to grant the get unless large sums of money are paid in order to gain the upper hand in a settlement, or to insist that child maintenance obligations are dropped.”

Dayan Boruch Rapoport of the Johannesburg Beth Din explains that in the time of the Sanhedrin, a Beth Din, or Jewish court, had the power to force a man to give his wife a get where necessary. But, he says, today we no longer live in a day and age where that is the case.

“When a woman comes to us to seek assistance, we try our best to support her with her situation, he says. “However, it is very difficult for us when a man refuses, because the halacha insists that a get needs to have two willing parties.

“In situations where we have ascertained that the man is proving to be inflexible, we take more serious measures which may be shaming him in shul, preventing him from being called up to the Torah or of being part of a minyan.

 “But when a man does not show much care for that, it becomes very challenging, because it leaves us with no bargaining power.”

Dayan Rapoport explains that there are some Batei Din in Israel which have the same power as civil courts and in those situations it is much easier to insist that a man give his wife a get.

Therefore, when a man is noncompliant, he faces a civil charge of being in contempt of court.

Dayan Rapoport adds: “However, this is not the case in the South African Beth Din because the civil courts and Beth Din function as two entirely separate entities. This handicaps the Beth Din from “inflicting serious punishment” on the guilty party.

Kaplan says: “While the Talmud teaches that a man must be forced to give a get until he declares himself willing, there is often a wide girth within the parameters of the law for the distribution of power to play itself out differently.”

She explains how progressive rabbinic thought has been vociferous in pioneering a zero-tolerance attitude towards the punitive withholding of a get (the late Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris being one such voice) but she is emphatic in advising that the entire community needs to be educated and speak with one voice to condemn the husband who effectively becomes his wife’s jailor.

She says: “There are various ways to pressurise a man. This includes naming and shaming across personal, professional, business and religious domains.”

She says experts in the field are advocating the “intelligent divorce” which aims to minimise the scope of emotional devastation as a sequel to the dissolution of a marriage with all the attendant loss it brings.

This involves preserving the dignity of the parties involved, in an effort to curtail damage. “In civil divorce, mediation has become a viable way to limit the potential pain of complex litigation and perhaps this is the direction the obtaining of a get should go too, with influential rabbonim being key players in the scenario.”

*Name has been changed.