When Less-Kosher Food Is Worth a Divorce

When it comes to observing religious law, few areas are more of a minefield than the dietary rules. For Jews who keep kosher, not mixing milk with meat seems straightforward enough, but there are so many more levels to the thing—who certified the food as kosher, the history of the plate it's served on—that even a seemingly simple meal quickly gets far more complicated. In Israel, home to around six million Jews, there are even different levels of kosher: regular, "stringent," and "very scrupulous." And a new amendment to rabbinical laws proposed in that country is betting on the fact that, for some people, access to that high-level kosher food is of the utmost importance: important enough, even, to grant a divorce over.

Last Wednesday, the proposal passed an initial review at the Knesset, Israel's legislative branch. Submitted by Dov Lipman, a young-ish member of the newly created, center-liberal Yesh Atid political party, it aims to levy harsher punishments on observant men who refuse to grant their wives a religious divorce, called a "get." Under Jewish law, only the man can issue the get and the woman accept it. But if a woman wants to get a divorce and is refused by her husband—an exceedingly common circumstance—the woman can sue for divorce in a rabbinical court. In Israel, the court can decide to punish a man in various ways: confiscating his driver's license or his pension, or even sentencing him to jail.

That's where the proposed amendment would come in. It seeks to bring additional misery to these incarcerated men by housing them in the jail's non-religious wing, and also by serving them food which is not considered to be high-level kosher. The aim of the amendment? To further pressure the men into granting their wives divorce.

"This amendment is aimed at men who style themselves as more pious than other people," said Marc Shapiro, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Scranton. "They want to be eating food that's approved by their personal rabbis. But if they don't have the basic human dignity to grant their wives divorce, then why should they be entitled to such food? That's a privilege, not a right," he said.

Divorce recalcitrance, as it's called, is a huge issue in Israel; unlike in the US, a Jewish woman in Israel can't get a divorce at a civil court but must deal with a religious court. According to a 2013 article in the LA Times, about one in five women who seek divorce—or about 34,000 women per year—are refused. And husbands often leverage the situation to control their wives' actions, dangling the promise of a divorce down the line.

"Men are in a position to extort all kinds of things from women," said Judith Hauptman, a professor of rabbinic culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary. "Unfortunately, this is one example of Judaism retaining its patriarchal roots."

Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, the executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, agreed.

"Organizations like ours have been calling for change for a long, long time," she said.

The question is whether the proposal's two penalties—non-religious jail accommodations and less-kosher, but still kosher, food—would truly be damaging enough to get such men to give in to their wives' wishes for divorce.

"I think it's a very interesting way of asserting pressure," Weiss-Greenberg said. "No one would say that this is anything but a positive step in the right direction."

The proposal's terms would effectively cut religious men off from their daily lives, she said, which is more or less like being excommunicated.

"This is saying, 'If you're not gonna follow the basic tenets of Judaism, we're gonna kick you out,'" she said.

But Hauptman, of the Theological Seminary, thinks the measure is pretty flimsy.

"Denying 'high-level' kosher food? I mean, that's laughable," she said. "This is not enough. It's nice, but it's weak."

"If you ask me, these are minor adjustments," she continued. "They would not change the inequality of the situation. If you want to help women, then be a little bit more bold."