As my children, like many others, have been pointing out for weeks now, "CHANUKAH IS COMING!!!" Although Chanukah is a "post-Biblical" holiday, dating to a point in history after the codification of the Tanach, it is much celebrated as a time for rededication. Instead, because this is the week when my drash comes due, I will use this week before Chanukah as an opportunity for confession: just a few years ago, for our 15 th anniversary, I offered my wife a divorce.
Now, you may be wondering several things. "Who’d have believed it -- they seem to have such a strong marriage." "Why did he move all the way from New York to Los Angeles if he wanted a divorce?" "Why do we need to hear about this?" And, most significantly: "What does this possibly have to do with this week’s parasha, Va’Yeishev?
By the way, while I’m confessing, I’ll also confess that Gail didn’t edit this drash (in fact, she didn’t even know my topic), and so, even more than usually, its shortcomings are solely my own.
Even though I’m sure my attention-grabbing opening has you scrolling to the edge of your screen, before I get back to that, I want to talk about the Torah reading of this week.
In Va'Yeishev, we read of Judah and Tamar (Chapter 38). This text highlights a problematic aspect of our tradition: levirate marriage, or yibum. Er, the first son of Judah, dies before fathering a child with Tamar. Thus, under the traditions of the time, it was the obligation of Onan, the next son, to father a child with his brother’s wife. The entire story of the interaction between father-in-law and daughter-in-law starts from the presumption of yibum. As Rabbi Artson notes in "The Evolution of a Mitzvah", taken from The Bedside Torah, levirate marriage appears to pre-date Torah, and asserts the ownership of the woman – first by her husband, and then, upon his death, by his family.
In time, levirate marriage has fallen from our tradition. Devarim Chapter 25 devotes several verses to describing the ritual, and the ritual (chalitzah) of public humiliation that a man must undergo for refusing to play his part in yibum. And yet, by 1950, the ritual of yibum had fallen so out of use that the Israeli Rabbinical courts (then, as today, not known for being ahead of the curve in matters of equality for women) issued a decree, a takanah, prohibiting yibum and making chalitzah obligatory.
But how could we have this ritual? What is it about Jewish marriage that creates the structure by which it could be argued that a dead man’s brother had any presumption of a sexual relationship with his widowed sister-in-law, let alone an obligation to do so? After all, while Gail may like my brother, bearing a child he fathered was not at all on the agenda when Gail and I got engaged!
In the Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin begins:
"Ha’Ishah ni-k'nayt b’shalosh d’rachim, v’konah et atzmah b’shtai d’rachim."
A woman is acquired in three ways, and acquires herself in two ways.
The three ways in which a woman is acquired, the mishnah teaches, are by money, by document, and by sexual intercourse; the two ways in which a woman acquires herself are by a get (a divorce document) and by the death of the husband.
To try to sum up years of Gail’s work in a few words, she argues that the language of the Rabbis of the Talmud relies heavily on metaphors of acquisition and ownership, and these metaphors have shaped Rabbinic law in a wide range of areas, not least of which is marriage.
Most Jewish marriages today are created by a document – a ketubah – that most of us (myself included) can’t read or understand. And yet, even with the document, the rituals of the traditional Jewish wedding are incredibly beautiful, powerful and moving. Looking back on nearly 18 years of marriage, there are few days that compete with our wedding day for the sheer emotional power the memories hold – the births of our children, of course, and the wrenching pain of 9/11 are the only ones that come close. Yet, when I listen to Gail talk of her work, she makes a compelling argument that one of the best days of our lives was the day on which I acquired her, bought her, as surely as if she was property or chattel.
The widespread perception of marriage as "holy" is, no doubt, tied to the linguistic similarity between the "kodesh" root in Hebrew that we see so often (Kiddush, Kaddish, Kedushah, etc.) with the kiddushin ritual that is the first part of the Jewish wedding ceremony. Many – here and elsewhere – disagree with Gail’s interpretation of marriage. In our short time at Temple Beth Am, Gail has engaged in several heated debates with Rabbi Netter on the topic (all l’shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven (as it says in Pirke Avot), however), that have only resulted in each of them remaining convinced of the position with which they began their discussions. Still others in our community, most notably Rachel Adler, are responsible for some of the trailblazing ideas on this topic, such as the proposal in her work Engendering Judaism for the ritual of B’rit Ahuvim – a "lovers’ covenant", using rabbinic models of business partnership as the basis for a new halachic ritual of personal partnership.
As we in the Conservative Movement continue to adapt to the meaning of egalitarianism and its impact on our synagogues and our services, and as we face the challenges of determining the path that we will follow to recognize the equality of those in our community who are not heterosexual, we also need to reserve some of our efforts and thoughts for what it means to leave marriage with the underpinnings it has today. By rededicating ourselves to change, and to preserving what is best in our tradition while finding new ways to expand it, we rededicate ourselves to a vibrant, strong and open Judaism.
And now, 1,000 words into this 500 word piece, I return to where I started: offering Gail a divorce. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to want not to be married to her any more. What I offered was a halachic divorce – a get – but without a civil divorce; instead, we would mark our 15 th anniversary, and our departure from New York to Los Angeles, by a ceremony marking a new start to our relationship on new, equal terms.
She turned me down. (Nothing surprising there – she turned me down the first two times that I asked her out in college, also. But that’s another story…) The 1988 ketubah still hangs on our living room wall today, acquisition metaphors and all. But since then, every year, when we read Va’Yeishev, I think about getting married all over again.
Shabbat shalom. Chanukah sameach.