Home Shalom promotes healthy relationships and facilitates the creation of judgement free, safe spaces in the Jewish community. Home Shalom is a program of The Advot Project.
Please contact us if you are interested in a workshop and presentation about healthy relationships, self-worth or communication tools.
The famous French saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” comes to mind whenever we address the challenges of domestic and intimate person abuse. Rabbi Shimon b. Tzemach from North Africa (1361-1440 CE), author of the spiritual work Tashbetz, in response to a question about a long-suffering wife whose husband was a difficult person whom she could not stand, wrote, “You can write that he should divorce her and give her the Ketubah…for she was given for life, not for sorrow…and does not have to live in close quarters with a snake.” Later in his response, he goes so far as to write that “Any rabbinic judge who forces a woman who rebelled to go back to her abusive husband is following the law of the Ishmaelites (rather than the compassion he perceived in Jewish law) and should be excommunicated!”
Even earlier, Rabbi Simhah b. Samuel of Speyer (who died in 1230 CE) wrote that a man has to honor his wife more than himself and that is why his wife and not his fellow man should be his greater concern. Rabbi Simhah argued that, like Eve, “the mother of all living,” a wife is given to a man for living, not for suffering. Since she is supposed to trust him, it is therefore worse if he hits her than if he hits a stranger. This was echoed by Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (1215-1293 CE) who writes, “A Jew must honor his wife more than he honors himself. If one strikes one’s wife, he should be punished more severely than for striking another person, for one is enjoined to honor one’s wife and if he persists he should be excommunicated, lashed, and suffer the severest punishments.”
Here we are nearly a thousand years later and domestic abuse remains the number one cause of injury to women in America. Especially in these extraordinary times under stay-at-home orders, women and those most vulnerable in our society are at greater risk of physical and emotional harm than ever before. May we all aspire to emulate the Talmudic sage (Megillah 28a) who when asked to what he attributed his long life replied, “I never said a cross word in my home.”
Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, Home Shalom and Naomi Ackerman, The Advot Project
