Is religion a boon or a bane?

Please note, when I say 'religion' I mean organized religion and not personal faith. One can be devout without ascribing to the concept of organized religion.

How much does your canon lawyer charge per hour when you need an indulgence dispensation?

Here's a story about organized religion making life more complicated than it ever needed to be.

Several years ago, a Jewish community in the U.S.A. started a petition to pressure a Congressman to tell one of his staffers to grant his wife a get (Jewish divorce).

Under American law, the woman was free because the civil divorce had been finalized. However, under Jewish law, the husband had the absolute right to keep or discard his wife, and a rabbinical court (beis din) had ruled that no one could compel him to divorce her.

The husband may have been using the get as a bargaining chip because he was dissatisfied that the wife was obstructing his court-ordered visitation with their child every weekend. By moving to another state, the wife made it impossible for him to reach their child on Friday afternoons without driving after sunset, which he could not do because driving is work, and the holy day of rest, the Sabbath, begins at sunset before Saturday.

The petition noted that the woman not only could not remarry without the get, she could not even show her hair to attract a man, because married Jewish women must cover their hair to show modesty.

Not to appear ridiculously old-fashioned by wearing a head-scarf, the woman wore a wig. Leaders of the religion had ruled that it is no sin for a married woman to use fake hair that might attract a man.

Of course, it is illegal for a boss to tell his employee what to do in his personal life, such as divorce and the practice of religion. Moreover, the Congressman was Catholic. His religion frowned upon divorce. Nonsense, the petitioners retorted, it is a great mitzvah (commandment of their religion, not his) to free agunot.

Was the woman really an agunah (chained woman, singular form of agunot)?

The word agunot originally referred to women whose widowhood could not be proved. If a man didn't come back from battle and no one who survived had seen his dead body, what was to be done with his wife? The religion needed women to bear children, so widows had an obligation to marry their husbands' male next-of-kin. However, if the woman's husband was alive, remarriage would be adultery.

To solve the problem, leaders of the religion broke three of its laws: (1) two witnesses are required to establish any fact; (2) testimony in one's own interest is inadmissible; (3) a woman's testimony is always inadmissible. They declared that if an agunah says she knows her husband is dead, her word is sufficient without any evidence; she may remarry.

Over the centuries, as it became a rarity for a woman not to know when her husband died, the term agunot began to be used for women who wanted divorce and couldn't convince their husbands. To allow women the same rights as men would have been too radical, but the religion evolved to recognize that these women had a problem. If petitioning a Congressman didn't work, what was the solution?

Eventually, the woman convinced another rabbinical court, where her uncle had influence, to claim jurisdiction of her case. The court declared that the marriage was invalid because the husband was insane. Proof of his insanity? The fact that he refused to give his wife a get as any reasonable man would. If the wife had known that he was unreasonable = insane, she wouldn't have married him. So the marriage didn't count.

The woman promptly remarried. The moral is that you don't have to leave your religion if you can redefine its rules for your convenience. An expensive wig can be as attractive as real hair. Maybe someday the man will be able to redefine work after sunset too. In Marathi, we say, hā sūrya āṇi hā Jayadratha!