Q&A: Prenuptial Agreement
Prenuptial Agreement
Question
Hello
What do you think about the marriage agreement ("authorization to give a bill of divorce") of the Center for Women's Justice for couples who are already married? Can this document actually solve, from a halakhic standpoint, the problem of women being unable to remarry because they cannot receive a bill of divorce (not get-refusal)? Especially given that one also has to take into account that the religious courts in Israel generally would not relate to this at all when needed.
In addition, do couples who are already married have any halakhic way to create a situation that would prevent future get-refusal, or is that possible only through a condition made before the kiddushin?
Answer
I haven’t examined the details, but in principle it seems to me to be a valid approach. It is true that in practice religious courts probably would not make use of it, although in difficult cases they do sometimes use unconventional methods, so I would not rule out that possibility.
For couples who are already married, I hadn’t thought about this until now, but offhand it seems to me that they could give a conditional bill of divorce. On the face of it, this seems to me even easier and simpler than making a condition in the kiddushin. There are of course various details that would need to be checked out (for example, that it not be a perpetual condition and the like). But the principle itself certainly seems possible to me at first glance.
Discussion on Answer
As I wrote, I just raised this offhand. I haven’t given it enough thought to determine anything definite and lay out the solution in full. In general, arranging a bill of divorce is not a simple matter, and it has to be done through a religious court. The couple alone cannot do it. Admittedly, a rabbinical court of the Rabbinate, in my estimation, would not agree to do this.
Could you please expand a bit more on the solution of a conditional bill of divorce? And is this something that would be enough to do just in the presence of the couple themselves?