Jewish Federation of Cincinnati

Israeli Chronicles — Connecting Israel & Cincinnati

I am excited to share my heart’s work with you. It has been two exciting days in Cincinnati. It is like a pearl of Judaism here I didn’t expect to find. Especially the pluralism, it makes me feel a little bit envious that we haven’t had these things in Israel.

I am an officiant of Havaya Life Ceremonies, an Israeli organization that helps secular Jews in Israel have personally meaningful life rituals such as birth, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and burial ceremonies.

I am a secular Jew. In Israel secular does not mean being non-observant because we live in Israel. Our children go to Jewish schools; our calendar is the Jewish calendar. When we say secular we don’t mean unaffiliated and we don’t mean non-observant. Being secular in Israel is not being religious as in going to synagogue, or keeping mitzvot… although I do pick my own mitzvot that I want to practice. So I think being secular is just being an Israeli, non-religious, Jewish person.

As an activist I strive to create a legal and cultural alternative to marriage and divorce in Israel. I promote civil marriage. My main task is encouraging awareness among young couples about the legal consequences of spousal relationships and I’m dedicated to empowering young women to take act as active brides in an equal wedding ceremony.

I am a lawyer. Very soon on this front I found myself very frustrated. Because family law in Israel is a crazy system. When I got married I knew enough to pass my bar exams, but I didn’t know anything of what we were doing under the chuppah. I knew so little of what I call now the monster of family law in Israel. Most of the young Israeli couples are exactly like we were 15 years ago – we do not understand much about the ceremony or its legal aspects.

In the process of getting my master’s in law … I realized that to prevent the severe injustices in divorce—inequality between woman and men, the extortion that accompanies divorce proceedings, the aggressive adversary legal process—we must find a way to fence our lives away from the family legal system.

So how do you avoid this messy marriage and even worse divorce situation?

One way to do it is not to get married [laughter]… but this is not my favorite answer. Marriage is the essence of human realization, it is a fundamental right, it is a covenant that sustains family life.

So eight years ago I became part of this brand new avant-garde organization. Havaya’s objective is to address secular people in Israel, when they find themselves in front of religious events: birth, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and deaths. We want to open the door to secular people during those periods of times in their lives.

In the past 7 years I’ve been privileged to conduct over 50 wedding ceremonies in Israel, which is a lot. I deal with marriage, and divorce, all the time, and, surprisingly, I am still an optimist. [laughter]

My goal tonight is to introduce to you the interesting subject of marriage and divorce (god forbid) in Israel I will try to sketch for you the very complex structure of our family law.

Its faults and failures, the legal bypasses, and the happy solution we offer couples–women and men–and the Israeli society.

In my talk I will relate to a variety of issues—human rights, ethics, religion and law, gender, culture, history, sociology. Issues that underlie the lack of freedom of choice in marriage in Israel.

This subject is very controversial and above all it’s highly emotional -because it affects us in the most personal and private essence of life

Weddings are in the heart of our tradition. It ensures the continuity of Judaism throughout history….

The Israeli Jewish wedding is different from the American Jewish wedding, isn’t it? My first one was 12 years ago, my brother’s wedding in Atlanta. The setting was different, the language was different, everything was different. The bride and groom both signed the ketuba, the bride spoke during the ceremony, I was amazed! I’ve never been to a mutual Jewish wedding! I remember thinking to myself: “Is this a Jewish wedding?” And that was only 12 years ago—I tell you this to tell you how little we Israelis know about Jewish pluralism, and how little we still know now. Because what I am doing in Israel is still quite new.

Israel is the only western democracy that legally sanctions a religious monopoly over marriage and divorce.

In Israel, there is no freedom of choice in marriage. There are many different ways that you cannot get married in Israel:

• Religiously disqualified
• Not Jewish by Orthodox rules; this is the question of who is a Jew
• No same-sex marriages
• No religious diversity & pluralism: if you are Reform or Conservative you must still tie the knot before an Orthodox rabbi. And a wedding through the Orthodox rabbinate gives us fundamental inequality between women and men. Changing this legal norm is a social, moral, legal, religious, and cultural necessity. Although the majority of Israeli Jews are secular—we are enforced to marry in an orthodox ceremony.

This is driving the Israeli secular public away from Judaism. Since we are used to the conception that Judaism is Orthodox—with that world view, we find ourselves saying, ok, we don’t want that, we don’t hold the same beliefs—so we distance ourselves from the establishment and, sadly, from Judaism.

That is what we at Havaya are trying to change.

So, in Israel there are about a half million citizens who cannot get married. One million cannot get married because they can’t marry that other half; out of 6 million Jews in Israel, that is a lot. It is a basic human right—in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and it is legally and continuously violated in Israel.

In Israel there are about a half million citizens who cannot get married. One million cannot get married because they can’t marry that other half; out of 6 million Jews in Israel, that is a lot. It is a basic human right—in Israel’s declaration of independence, and in article 16 of the universal declaration of human rights. —and it is legally and continuously violated in Israel.

If we look at Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the basis is that it is a Jewish democracy. It says:

• We here declare the establishment of a Jewish state, the state of Israel.
• The Jewish state will be open for immigration and it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace … it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.

However, the Declaration is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document. This is not a constitution, only a Declaration, and the courts have decided this is not binding in any way. These are only “guiding principles.”

By law, in marriage, we go to the chief rabbinate, in divorce we go to the rabbinate, or the civil courts. So we have two legal systems that live together—that is not a law, that is just strange, and we don’t know how to fix this thing.

The Israeli legislator fails time and again in the field of family law. In the meantime, the solution is found in the young couples’ natural ability to choose by using the legal bypasses in a cultural way.

We encourage and enable couples to hold a wedding ceremony detached from the chief rabbinate of Israel, an Israeli ceremony which incorporates tradition—Jewish, Hebrew and Zionist—with innovation, in the spirit of universal values of dignity, equality and human rights.

Secular couples want to detach themselves from the domination of the rabbinical-halachic-haredi legal system upon their lives. But rather than moving away from Judaism and abandoning the ceremony altogether, we advise them to have a ceremony that brings them closer to Jewish culture—from a comfortable and respecting position, which fits in with their liberal-secular worldview.

What was clear to their parents is no longer obvious to them.

We encourage couples to have a private wedding, I think it is very similar to what you have here in the States, in the Reform tradition. We design our own ceremony based on Jewish tradition. We empower women to take a stand and speak under their chuppah. At Havaya, our activities are both personal and political.

Couples are marrying in the land of Israel, joining their lives together in a civil manner and laying out the contractual framework for their relationship. This way, they are creating their own explicit law that the state is unable to provide them. Above all, the ceremony is an expression of the couple standing under the chuppah. It’s not god’s ceremony, it’s not the rabbi’s ceremony, it is a sovereign autonomous ceremony, a private ceremony, isolated from the problematic legal system.

Havaya ceremonies merge ancient Jewish heritage and tradition with contemporary Israeli culture. I see every ritual and ceremony as a small revolution, bit by bit, reality in Israel is changing