Yesterday I found myself doing a deep dive into the laws of Jewish divorce after seeing online posts about a woman named Adeena who has reportedly been trying to obtain a get, a Jewish bill of divorce, from her ex-husband for more than five years.

As a Jewish man with rabbinic ordination who initiated divorce myself in 2016, I believe I have a somewhat unusual vantage point on this issue. I understand how emotionally and financially destructive divorce can become, especially when children are involved. I understand why some couples try to synchronize the civil and religious divorce processes. And I understand that family courts, custody disputes, and post-marital conflict can leave both men and women feeling angry, wounded, and defensive.

At the same time, I am also aware that there are men who exploit the structure of the get system for leverage, revenge, control, or emotional punishment.

While I strongly support fathers navigating difficult divorces and custody battles, I cannot understand the justification for withholding a get for more than five years after a marriage has already functionally ended. In the early stages of divorce emotions run high, legal disputes are unresolved, and both sides are still adjusting to a collapsing family structure. But after half a decade, the continued refusal to release a former spouse from the marriage begins to look less like legal caution and more like coercion.

And that is the uncomfortable reality at the center of this issue.

Long-term get refusal is not merely a religious technicality or an unfortunate procedural dispute. In many cases it becomes a mechanism of prolonged control, trapping a woman in a marriage that has already ended in every practical sense. Whatever the motivation, whether revenge, emotional leverage, resentment, insecurity, or punishment, the result is the same: another person’s life remains frozen indefinitely.

That is abusive. And the fact that these cases continue to emerge generation after generation suggests that this is not merely a problem of individual behavior, but a structural problem that deserves far more serious communal attention and reform.

At the same time, many people discussing these cases online do not fully understand the origins or legal structure of Jewish marriage and divorce. To understand why this problem persists, it is necessary to understand how the get functions within halacha itself.

For most couples, the end of a marriage is painful but legally straightforward. Modern legal systems are designed to allow two people to separate, divide obligations, and move forward with their lives.

In Jewish law, however, divorce depends on a specific legal act: the giving and receiving of a get. This reflects the structure of Jewish marriage, where betrothal (kiddushin) is initiated through a formal legal act by the husband that establishes the marital status under halachic law.

And within that structure lies one of the most painful and persistently unresolved problems in contemporary Jewish life.

Every few years, another high-profile case emerges in which a husband refuses to grant a get, effectively chaining a woman to a dead marriage for years. Sometimes the refusal is used to extract money, custody concessions, or emotional control. Sometimes it becomes an act of punishment or abuse long after the relationship itself has collapsed.

These are not merely technical legal disputes. They are situations that many rabbis, scholars, and advocates have described as forms of coercion and ongoing domestic abuse carried out through legal structure.

The fact that such cases continue to recur, despite communal outrage, despite rabbinic concern, and despite decades of attempted solutions, raises difficult questions about whether existing mechanisms are sufficient and whether deeper reform........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)