Posts Tagged ‘Beth Din’
Blackmail and Divorce
In the last few months I have heard some appalling histories of get refusal. A recurring theme is of women being told by the Beth Din that there are “minor matters outstanding”, generally the payment of money or the relinquishment of a financial claim, before the get can be arranged.
Unless an extraordinary number of women are telling remarkably consistent lies, a number of Botei Din appear to regard this as part of diplomatic negotiation.
The criminal law of the United Kingdom has a different word for it: blackmail.
Demanding money (whether under the pretence of a debt or not) with the threat of withholding a get unless it is paid is a simple case of blackmail. And a dayan or Beth Din registrar who facilitates a demand of this kind may be committing the inchoate offence of encouraging or assisting an offence believing it will be committed, contrary to section 45 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.
Another relevant offence, section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship), has recently been extended to former relationships by section 68 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. From the way in which the Federation Beth Din and the London Beth Din have reacted to the responses to their original statements about this development, it seems that they may have begun to realise that there are potential personal criminal consequences of continuing to connive at or collaborate in the use of the get as a tool of mental cruelty and extortion.
But they still assert that halachah ties their hands. It does not. They need to understand that prosecution for criminal blackmail or for coercive behaviour is not something a woman “does” to coerce her husband into giving the get: it is simply a consequence of his refusal to do the right thing. It is the State that prosecutes, not the victim. It is of course true that halachic coercion can only be applied by halachic authorities; but that does not permit those authorities to shelter people from the criminal consequences of their actions.
And applying halachah so as to deter a victim of crime from reporting an offence for the State to prosecute is likely to amount to an additional criminal offence of perverting the course of justice.
The community must seize the moment and make clear to dayonim and rabbis that this is not going to go away, and that they are likely to find themselves imprisoned if they continue to facilitate blackmail and coercion as part of their “negotiating strategy” over divorces. If we fail to do this, we as a community will remain complicit in the abuse that women, and some men, are suffering in this respect every single day.
North Hendon Adath Yisroel – Time to Leave the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations
- Tomorrow morning iy’h the North Hendon Adath Yisroel Synagogue will hold an Extraordinary General Meeting to decide whether or not to leave the UOHC.
- I hope and pray that we do leave, if only for the selfish reason that then I will be able to return and daven in my local shul to which I have belonged for about 20 years. For the last two weeks I have felt unable to set foot inside the building, and this post explains why.
- Abuse of the vulnerable is a natural human temptation, and it is therefore inevitable that in any community someone will sooner or later be abused by someone else.
- The test of a community is not whether it can prevent abuse, but how it handles abuse when it happens or is alleged.
- Indian society today is having to take a long and painful look at itself to work out how it has allowed attitudes to women to deteriorate to such a degree that abusive and violent treatment of women had become so commonplace that the atrocity that occurred a few days ago was simply waiting to happen (or had already happened further from the public, and international, eye).
- Catholic society around the world has been having to take a long and painful look at itself for some time to work out how child abuse had become in effect tolerated and condoned by a religious institution.
- Until very recently, many orthodox Jews may have had our fears that perhaps abuse – which must inevitably occasionally happen in our community since we are as susceptible to human failings as any other community – may not have been being handled properly. But I for one have not felt it necessary to confront these fears openly and investigate them – perhaps I should have done, but to look the other way is another strong human temptation.
- In the words of one of the most powerful activism songs of all time, “How many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry? … How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn’t see?”.
- The crying is now too loud to pretend not to hear it; and to turn ones head in today’s situation makes one morally complicit in what is happening.
- The Torah law of sexual offences makes an important distinction. Where a woman has an adulterous relationship in a populated area, she is unable in effect to plead that she was forced because the Torah asks why she did not cry out; in the countryside, however, the Torah plaintively notes “maybe she did cry out and there was nobody to hear”, and expands that maybe she did not cry out only because she knew there was nobody there.
- The women of India had almost given up crying out at the degrading treatment to which many of them are treated every day, because they feared that in one of the most densely populated areas of the world there was still nobody who cared to hear them: they have just found new voice, and one hopes and prays that the ears of all Indian society will listen.
- The vulnerable of the London orthodox Jewish community have apparently just cried out. A number of specific allegations of abuse have been made against one of the most powerful and respected Rabbis of the community. I am not required or able to pass judgment on whether these allegations are true or false: but as a member of the community I am morally obliged to satisfy myself that the cries of the vulnerable are listened to in an appropriate way.
- There is only one appropriate way to listen to allegations of abuse in our community. Our botei din have no criminal jurisdiction; so in any matter of law that is not confined to a dispute between individuals about property matters that can be arbitrated under the Arbitration Act 1996, we are obliged both as a matter of halachah and as a matter of secular law to present evidence of any alleged crime to the police, and evidence of any other kind of abuse of the vulnerable to appropriate civil authorities (such as the social services).
- If we believe that perhaps an allegation of abuse may not amount to an allegation of a criminal offence, whether because the acts complained of may have been consensual or for any other reason, we need to leave it to the police and the prosecuting authorities to look at the evidence and make a decision. It is not for us to decide, for example, whether apparent consent is vitiated by having been obtained through undue influence or through fraudulent misrepresentations as to the halachic position; those are matters on which we could only speculate but the prosecuting authorities first, and possibly later the courts, are equipped and obliged to decide.
- If we are to be a God-fearing community, our self-regulation must be efficient and effective, and it must know its limitations and engage with those outside people and authorities who are available to take over where self-regulation is no longer available.
- The only proper response to anyone who comes to a rabbi with an allegation of having been abused is “get in my car and I will take you to the police station, I will stay with you while you make a statement to the police, and I will support to my last breath your right and duty to have your allegation investigated by the authorities of the State, so that wrong-doers can be punished and deterred, and other vulnerable people can be protected”.
- Members of our self-absorbed and insular community will of course be very reluctant to go to the police. It is never easy or pleasant for someone to make a complaint about a sexual offence. But many women, children and men have found the courage to go through the traumas of the court procedures, at horrendous personal emotional cost, in order to make sense of what has happened to them by using it to prevent the same from happening to others. Members of our community may have additional fears for themselves and their families: but outspoken support from the rabbis acting together can allay those fears, and if they do not provide that support then they do not deserve to be our rabbis.
- The fear of washing dirty linen in public is something I have never been able to understand. Dirty linen smells: to pretend there is no dirty linen in the cupboard deceives nobody. And why go through the charade of a pointless pretence anyway? It is no disgrace for ones linen to get dirty: but it is a disgrace not to take it to the wash in the same way as everybody else.
- To encourage people not to take criminal allegations to the criminal authorities, or to encourage them to use alternative, necessarily ineffective methods of “resolving” potentially criminal matters, rests on a failure to understand the halachic implictions of the law of mesirah as it applies in the context of the political and legal structures of the United Kingdom today. The Torah forbids recourse to the secular courts in matters where a Beis Din is competent; and it forbids recourse even in other matters to an arbitrary, unjust and inherently anti-semitic system. There are no Cossacks in the UK today; and although the police and courts are not perfect, and miscarriages of justice will occur, there are mechanisms for righting even those; and they are not as inevitable to begin with as the injustice that is bound to occur when criminal allegations are dealt with in an informal manner by people who are neither trained nor appointed to assess them, nor have effective remedies to deal with them.
- “Leave the rabbis to sort this out – we can make the place too hot to hold any perpetrators”, as well as resting on this halachic misconception, can result only either in perverts being shunted from place to place to reoffend once people’s short memories have become confused with the passage of time, or in innocent people being driven from their homes and their livelihoods based on insufficiently tested evidence. This behaviour is not only wilfully ineffective, but may, depending on the precise circumstances, amount to the criminal offence of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
- As for behaviour which after full analysis of the available evidence, and full cooperation from the community, the police or the Crown Prosecution Service decide is not criminal, or is not sufficiently evidenced to make a conviction likely, at that point the question of self-regulation arises again. The rabbis need to have, as do the medical and other professions, a process for dealing with allegations of professional impropriety not involving (or not necessarily involving) criminality. That procedure needs to be transparent and efficient, following due process in an accountable and public way (subject to such privacy as is justified in individual cases for publicly recorded reasons); and it needs to engage effective and proportionate remedies.
- I can happily belong to a community in which I am not the only imperfect human being; I cannot belong to a community in which my silence is part of the collective cowardice and institutional inertia that allows the cries of the vulnerable to go unheard.
- North Hendon has always been a remarkable community. If nothing demogs like demography, in the same way few things geog like geography: as a result of being set a little apart physically from the rest of the orthodox Jewish community, we have always had a degree of objectivity. Now is a time to put that objectivity, and its consequent clarity of vision, to good purpose, and to show the rest of the community the way: leaving the Union may be only a small gesture, and it may only be a start, but it is at least a start to putting our community back on the sound moral basis which is its only justification for existing in the first place.
Time for Action – Kosher Meat and Kosher Behaviour
1. There is a lovely family kosher butcher’s shop on Brent Street called Nissim. They are fine upstanding people, who serve good quality food at reasonable prices, and whose behaviour is as kosher as the meat that they serve.
2. And they are likely to be put out of business any month now.
3. A chain of kosher butchers who already have branches in Golders Green and elsewhere are about to open up a new shop within a few yards of Nissims. They have economy of scale advantages, and will doubtless dent or destroy the Nissim’s business.
4. The Rabbis should prevent this, and could. The Biblical precept of not disturbing your neighbours’ boundaries is given extensive ramifications in Jewish business ethics, and no Beth Din ought to grant a licence to a shop that is about to destroy someone else’s business, unless it is clearly shown that the existing business is exploiting its monopoly.
5. But the Rabbis won’t act. Years ago a Rabbinic representative of the London Beth Din told me that they do not consider it practicable to apply or enforce the din of hasogas gvul (your neighbour’s borders), primarily because they are not the only Beth Din in London. So people can always get licensed somewhere else.
6. If the Rabbis are in disarray and unable to give practical expression to the values of the Torah, we must take matters into our own hands. Let us see a customer boycott of any shop opening within a few yards of an existing business, and let’s all shop at Nissims harder than ever.
Sharia law in the United Kingdom
1. The Archbishop of Canterbury said today that it might be helpful in a number of ways to permit the application of Sharia law in the United Kingdom: “There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law”.
2. Jewish thought and practice has always believed that religious law can and must work alongside that of our host nations.
3. On the one hand, we have a concept of dina d’malchusso dina hi – the law of the land has status in Jewish law. The rule of secular law is vital for the wellbeing of all those who live in secular societies, since the religious communal institutions are (except in a country wholly governed by and in accordance with those institutions) unable both theoretically and practically to provide effective control over most aspects of human behaviour. The establishment of a just and fair system of secular law is one of the Noachide laws, an obligation on all non-Jewish states, and one which we who live in those states are therefore bound to support by compliance and respect.
4. On the other hand, there are some matters of communal law that can be enforced effectively only within the communal religious institutions. English secular law has long granted autonomy to the Jewish community in matters of kashrus and marriage, and with occasional forays into the secular legal institutions for the resolution of disputes the system appears to work to the satisfaction of all.
5. Between these two areas lies a wide range of civil matters where the secular institutions may well be able to handle them, but where there may be significant advantages in having them addressed by people who are able to empathise with the social, cultural and religious aspirations and values of the parties involved. One takes it that this is one of the areas to which the Archbishop is referring. Certainly Jewish law strongly supports the idea that a dispute between Jews should be handled by the Jewish courts wherever possible (Shemos 21:1 ; Gittin 88b). And in the United Kingdom for some years we have managed to put this into practice through the mechanism of the Arbitration Acts: Jews with a dispute on any commercial matter can go the Beis Din and sign an arbitration agreement, following which the matter proceeds as an arbitration and the Beis Din’s decision may be enforced if necessary through the secular courts, and can be challenged there only on limited, mostly procedural, grounds.
6. An important point about the latter process is that it does not involve imposing Jewish law on anyone who chooses not to be bound by it; it makes it possible for those who wish to have disputes determined in accordance with religious values that they share to go to their religious judges and have the matter treated accordingly (although, as I say above, that will often involve the importation of principles of local secular law, as a matter of dina d’malchusso dina hi).
The Sceptic Blog 