Jewish Law
Episode 2
'How can anyone live like this?' jokingly asks Risa Klyne, an ultra-orthodox Jewish businesswoman of her own way of life. It's easy to see what she means. On the Sabbath, very orthodox Jews do not drive cars or turn on lights. And for two weeks every month, husbands and wives may not touch each other at all.
The second programme in Channel 4's three-part series, Jewish Law, introduces us to key rituals in the cycle of Jewish life as they are observed by the most orthodox elements in the community. Circumcision is justified purely as obedience to divine law: ‘We do it because God commands us.’ Less religious Jews may say they believe there are health benefits but if there are, for the ultra-orthodox this is just a bonus; a side effect of obeying God's commandments.
We are introduced to the detailed rules of the kosher kitchen in which milk and meat are kept absolutely separate. The dietary laws may seem obsessive to those who have never lived by them but the rules governing which foods it is permitted to eat and how they are prepared, like the laws on kosher wine, originated in biblical times as a way of avoiding contamination by ancient pagan rituals.
The Middle Eastern religions from which Judaism emerged included a fertility cult centred on eating a calf seethed in its mother’s milk. The pagan rituals have long since disappeared but, as Rabbi Brodie reminds us, the strict regime of separating milk from meat remains as a link to the past long after its rationale has disappeared.
While the men police the rituals, it is the women who maintain these complex and time-consuming rules on a day-to-day basis. Their role in extremely orthodox Jewish groups like the one portrayed in Jewish Law is explicitly traditional, for all that we are introduced to it partly through the eyes of Risa Klyne, a feisty and successful career woman, who cheerfully concedes that many of the rituals she practises must seem ‘bonkers’ to outsiders.
Another modern-looking mother of eight explains that she intends to find a husband for her last remaining unmarried daughter. Initially she will make inquiries among other members of the community to try and find a ‘suitable’ partner. We are assured, though, that once they have been introduced, the prospective couple will check each other out and have the opportunity to take the final decision themselves.
The pattern of life and status of women in this community is governed by the elaborate laws governing the relationships between the sexes. The rules on the 'impurity' of menstruating women mean that husbands and wives may not even touch each other for at least two weeks each month. The law on divorce, while liberal compared with some other religions, still hands ultimate power to the man. The formal preparation of a bill of divorcement – a ‘get’ – only takes effect if a husband grants it to a wife and not the other way round. Beyond the boundaries of the programme, a debate rages in the wider Jewish community about the implications of the rules on divorce since an ‘agunah’ – a separated wife whose husband perversely refuses to deliver the bill of divorcement into her hand – may never remarry and any children she has subsequently will be outcast.
On this issue there is dissension within the ranks of the orthodox themselves and, in particular, a growing movement among orthodox women to challenge this and other aspects of the traditional interpretation of religious laws as they apply to women.
Though the official line is that women and men are ‘separate but equal’, one wife says that the man sets the religious tone within the house as well as outside. 'I just do it the way he wants,' she says, and admits: 'Left to myself I don’t know what I’d do’.
