Shalom Bayis Beth Din and Frogs without
Legs
By Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn
Contents
“Frogs without Legs”
Years ago, men would come to my house and
complain bitterly about their suffering from wives. I would listen until they
finished and then say one simple sentence. “You are a frog without legs.” They
were astonished and amazed and did not understand why they were frogs without
legs. So I explained it to them. “A frog can swim and can jump and can croak. You
are without legs, meaning, you have no group of backers, but as an individual
husband want to attack your wife, who is part of a large organized group of
ladies who have tremendous financial backing. You are without the money,
without the organization, but alone, come to me, one individual, and complain
bitterly about your wife. What can I do for you when you, being a “he man,”
refuses to organize with other men?”
But the ladies, years ago when the above
stories took place, and the women were just learning to organize and destroy
husbands, continued to grow stronger and stronger, so that today the major
rabbis in America are afraid of them. Probably you, and most people, don’t
realize this, but I do. The reason is that very few people even prominent
rabbis are experts in the laws of divorce. I on the other hand have studied
heavily and received semicha from the greatest rabbis of the past generation.
The Gaon Rav Moshe Feinstein spent much time answering my questions. I only
asked him questions that I knew I would never figure out on my own. He wrote an
approbation for me in one of my books, “I know Rav Eidensohn for many years as
one who delves deeply into complex halacha.” That is the ultimate semicha and
very few people have it.
When Russian communism collapsed and many
Jews stopped being Bolsheviks and became religious Jews, some of us in Monsey
worked under the Gaon Rav Elyashev zt”l to make Gittin for them. There was not
a single Rov in Russia in those times, only one Jew who was religious and would
guide the rabbis how to proceed and who to make as a religious Jew. I then went
to Rav Elyashev and we had an intense session of laws of Gittin. I then asked
him for semicha to have my own Beth Din for Gittin, with his name, and he
immediately agreed. At the age of seventeen I came to Lakewood to learn under
the Gaon Rav Aharon Kotler and spoke to him constantly, although in the
beginning, he told me the truth about my efforts to say Torah. Eventually he
hinted to me that I was on the right path and he no longer criticized me.
I
once told the Gaon Rav Shmuel HaLevi Wosner of Bnei Braq a pesak I heard from
the Gaon Rav Moshe Feinstein that a person who wants to die because he lives in
great pain may be allowed to die without doing anything to cause that to
happen. But other rabbis including one in Israel who ran a hospital forced all
dying people to stay alive no matter their pain, not like Reb Moshe. I told Rav
Wosner that I had two open gemoras exactly as Reb Moshe ruled: Gittin 70a and
Avoda Zoro 12b[1].
Rav Wosner then said, surprisingly, “Poshut azoy” not “I agree.” Then I
realized that “I agree” is wrong because Reb Moshe is gadol hador and he needs
nobody to agree with him because “poshut” what he says is right and that is the
privilege of the Gadol HaDor to say his opinion without anyone needed to
support him.
Shalom Bayis
Beth Din
When I realized the terrible problems of
family today I wanted to found a Shalom Bayis Beth Din. Although it took a
while to get things moving, eventually there were some people with such hideous
family and marital problems that they started calling me for help. One of the
great problems today is the imbalance of men and women. As mentioned earlier,
for the past years women are very strongly organized with great funding, but
the men are not.
Men recently realized this and some have
tried to organize, but the old male attitudes of being he-men and not joining
with others has not disappeared. Today husbands tell me that they are terrified
of going to a Beth Din which today feels it must satisfy the ladies. Very
recently two ladies said that men can murder their wives and are evil. When
such ladies come to a Beth Din with their great organizations and financial
backing the Beth Din that lives to a large degree on their funding is very careful
to please them.
But Shalom Bayis Beth Din is not just
about making peace in the family among the spouses and the children. Today
there are much worse problems than that, as if it could be. Of course, we know
that Derech Erets comes before the Torah[2]. And
surely shalom bayis is important for husband wife and children to get along
with Derech Erets. But there are other problems which make even Derech Erets
pale as we will explain. I am talking about the new problems of rabbis helping
women leave their husbands and in the process creating mamzerim. A mamzer may
not marry a Jew but may marry another mamzer who is a mamzeres a female mamzer.
But a mamzer or mamzeres may not marry a regular Jew. And the children of a
mamzer or mamzeres for all generations may not marry a Jew. There is a way to
avoid this in the Shulchan Aruch but this is a difficult process and we won’t
go into it now. At any rate, as I mentioned, and as we will show, it looks as
if the ladies are ready, together with many rabbis, to bend the Torah and
permit the creation of mamzerim, as we will explain. Let us begin with the
Rambam.
Rambam in the beginning of the laws of
Gittin tells us that there are various Torah laws that are required to make a
kosher GET. Some laws are based on the Torah and some based on the rabbis. A
GET that does not follow the rules of the Torah laws of Gittin is invalid by
the Torah and completely worthless. A GET that follows the Torah rules but does
not follow the rabbinic rules is a lesser failure but is still invalid. A woman
may not remarry with an invalid GET.
Rambam writes[3] “There
are ten major rules of the Torah how to make a GET. And who do we know that
these ten things are from the Torah? As it is said, ‘And it will be if his wife
is not pleasing to him and he will write her a writ of divorce.’”[4]
Thus, the first of the ten Torah laws of
how to write a GET is that no divorce can be given by the husband unless it is
done willingly. He really wants the GET. He does not want such a wife for
whatever reason. Thus, if he wants his wife, but people pressure him to divorce
her, the GET is a violation of the Torah. If the wife remarries with a GET that
is invalid and has a child, that child is a mamzer. If the GET is invalid by the Torah, and
the wife of the first husband left him with that invalid GET, and then has a
new child from the new husband, that child is a mamzer diorayso, from the
Torah. If the GET is invalid only dirabonon, by rabbinical rules, the child is
a mamzer dirabonon.
Today women are almost always married
with Kiddushin. A woman married with Kiddushin may not leave her husband unless
he gives her willingly a GET or dies. But often there are children and they
won’t want their parents to divorce. Sometimes the husband wants his wife and
the children don’t want divorced parents. Sometimes in a family there are
children who are ready to marry but did not find their shidduch yet. If their
parents divorce much fewer people will want to marry them. Thus, divorce is
often a problem for the husband and for the children. But when the wife has
Kiddushin she must wait until the husband wants to divorce her and she may not
force him.
But although this is clearly, as the
Rambam states, the law in the Torah, that a GET must be given willingly, the
rabbis today, many of them, even some prominent ones, are trying to please
women by ignoring the Torah and telling them to force their husband to give
them a GET. Children born from such an invalid Get are mamzerim. Increasingly,
it seems, America, and other countries will have mamzerim. They will come to
marital age and ask why nobody wants to marry them. And somehow here or there,
they will have to be told that they are mamzerim, because some rabbi told their
mothers to remarry without a valid GET. The rabbi wanted to please the lady,
but the children suffers as nobody can imagine. This is the future of our
community. Some suffering mamzerim, and the mothers who had them, will have to
deal with this, and the rabbis who encouraged the mamzerim, well, you know how
busy rabbis are.
The suffering of the mamzerim and their
mothers we cannot imagine. But the rabbis? What do they say? They are not saying. They are too busy making
more mamzerim because they want to make the ladies happy.
There is a major rabbi who advertises publicly
that everyone should send money to the major organization devoted to force
husbands to give their wives a GET. It pressures the husbands and their old
parents until the husbands divorce their wives. This major rabbi has made many
mamzerim.
Going to
Secular Court instead of a Torah Court
One who goes to a gentile court to
adjudicate his issues with another Jew is a great sinner. See gemora Gittin
88b, and Shulchan Aruch Even Hoezer 134:8 which says, “If gentiles force a Jew
to divorce, then if the Jew is obligated to divorce his wife by Torah law the
GET is invalid by rabbinical statutes not Torah ruling. But if he was not
obligated by Jewish law to divorce his wife, then the slightest hint of a GET
does not exist. (The GET is completely worthless.) And even if the husband was
paid to divorce his wife we don’t assume that this creates a true desire to
divorce his wife.”
See Beis Shmuel there #13 who writes, “I
have already stated that if Jews ruled that a man must divorce his wife in
violation of the Torah law and if the gentiles ruled that a Jew must divorce
his wife even if the Torah law requires the husband to divorce his wife, in
both cases the rule is that the GET is invalid by standards of the Torah
(entirely worthless.)”
Thus there is a major argument if a
secular court rules that a husband must divorce his wife even if the Torah
requires the husband to divorce his wife, the Shulchan Aruch rules that the GET
is invalid only by rabbinical standards, but the Beis Shmuel rules that it is
invalid by Torah standards.
Note that the Maharsham rules that “It is
known that the house of Shmuel (the Beis Shmuel) is accepted is accepted and
the halacha as he rules in every place.” (Teshuvas MaHarsham volume IV:siman
73)
As I mentioned earlier I learned under
the greatest rabbis of Europe, Reb Aharon Kotler, Reb Moshe Feinstein, Rav Yosef
Shalom Elyashev and others zt”l. But today rabbis in general never saw these
rabbis and in general do not know the basics of Shulchan Aruch with Gittin and
family law. This has led many rabbis to make rulings with no fear that anybody
other than me and my brother will contradict them.
As time went on the women pick up the
spirit of the times to do what you want to make the Torah easier on women, and
they do it. Now there are women who are doing terrible things to force their
husbands to divorce them, turning the children against the father, and
torturing the husband so that he must eventually give her a GET and suffer the
things she wants him to suffer with.
The only advice I have is to imitate the
women, to organize, and when organized, to find the funding to fight back and
establish men as people who believe in the Torah and not the inventions of the
modern rabbis and their female followers.
The Orach Chaim HaKodesh says that we
find in the beginning of the Torah portion of Aikev in Devorim “and behold if
you will harken to Me I will bless you.” The Orach Chaim HaKodesh wonders why
the word AIKEV is used here. AIKEV is really a “heel” of the foot which has no
place in the passage about obeying HaShem. He explains that everyone has a head
and a foot meaning the head is the seat of thoughts and decisions and the feet take
the person where he decides to go. Sometimes he knows in his mind that he may
not speak loshon hora but his feet take him to sometimes speak loshon hora.
Sometimes he knows that he should not be dishonest, but sometimes, his feet
take him there. These are common sins, unfortunately, by many people, as Rambam
says. But a few very righteous people are careful that their head and their
feet go together, in the same direction.
Today, those who obey the Torah and not
the rabble of men, women and rabbis who invent a new easier Torah, are beloved
by HaShem, and He watches over them. The Gaon Rav Aharon Kotler came from Europe
to America based upon the Goral HaGro that he should go to “Moses” or Reb Moshe
Feinstein and rebuild America into a place of true Torah, unlike what is was in
those days. He also knew that Reb Chaim Vollozhner probably in the name of the
Gro said that America would be the final resting place before Moshiach comes to
Israel. Reb Aharon was determined to make America worthy of that by creating
Vollozhen in America, and he succeeded.
HaShem is watching us and He is watching
the inventors who make mamzerim. Some of us will go to heaven and some of us
will go somewhere else. The world is judged by HaShem who knows exactly what
all of us is doing all of the time. It is time for us to realize this and not
invent a new Torah.
[1] One
who swallows a poisonous reptile will not live but die, but if given a certain
food will live long enough to arrange his will with his children. We see that
he is not forced to live longer than that unlike the Rov in Israel who forced
all living people to live with their incredible agony even if they had to be
revived with electric shocks and return to their agony. In that case the
children begged the Rov to allow their screaming father to die but he refused.
That is wrong as the two gemoras I quoted say exactly as Reb Moshe taught that
it is permitted to allow a suffering person with hopeless pain to avoid prolonging his agony
without actually killing him.
[2] Tono
Divei Eliyohu beginning of book
[3]
Ishuse Gerushin I:1
[4]
Devorim 24:1
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