While we were busy dodging rockets and sitting in safe rooms, the Israeli government took advantage of our distraction to alter the place of religion in our government. The Knesset passed a law this week significantly expanding the authority of the state’s rabbinic and Sharia court systems. The law, sponsored by the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism and Shas parties – whose parties follow halakha and ban women from running for office, among other things – gives the religious courts power to rule on civil disputes which until now were the purview of the secular court system and hence the law of the land. Now, halakha will decide.

“The expansion of the rabbinical courts’ authority is a law that will fundamentally change the rules of the game in the legal system,” says Israel Women’s Network CEO Tal Hochman.

Indeed, the rabbinical courts, where women are not allowed to be judges, base their decisions on halakha, or Jewish law, which holds some ancient patriarchal ideas about women. As we all know, the halakhic system limits women’s powers in marriage and divorce, controls how women dress and speak, does not allow women to testify, inherit, or count in a quorum, and views women’s primary roles in society as quiet, behind-the-scenes modest wives and mothers.

Rabbinic courts routinely favor men in their rulings and have a history of punishing women deemed insufficiently modest or religious. In fact, the gender bias of the rabbinical courts has birthed the infamous “race to the courts” for divorcing couples, where women run to the secular courts and men run to the rabbinic courts, because whoever files for divorce first gets the system of their........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)