Q&A: Civil and Religious Marriage
Civil and Religious Marriage
Question
Hello Rabbi,
On the day when there are civil marriages (by which I mean that everyone will marry in whatever way they want, and will be required to register their status as a married couple), I assume you would agree that the Rabbinate could then provide marriage services according to Jewish law alongside all the others, who would be considered married legally but not halakhically.
The question is whether the Rabbinate alone would be able to give a stamp of kosher marriage, or whether, as in your kashrut model, there would be several halakhic marriage bodies and the Rabbinate, as regulator, would only prevent misleading the public by those who conduct halakhic marriages.
If the Rabbinate acts as a regulator, then in effect there will be several sub-definitions of halakhic marriage, with many practical implications between halakhic approaches (even if they are minor, this will greatly complicate matters for certain people), and a major complication for the law-observant public—for example, between one organization that is lenient in the laws of mamzer status and another that is not, while both perform marriages according to Jewish law. After a few generations, the situation could become even more severe.
Answer
As far as I'm concerned, everything needs to be transparent, and that's it. Beyond that, let everyone do what they want. And if there are people for whom this is complicated, let them solve their problem without doing so at others' expense. Throughout all of history, community rabbis married people, converted them, ruled who was a mamzer and who was not, and nobody peeped. There wasn't even transparency. Every rabbi of some little village could do whatever he wanted in his community, and everyone else relied on presumptions of validity, and at most applied the laws of doubt.
The regulator should not determine what is valid and what is not, but only make sure that everything being done is transparent.
By the way, the current situation is much worse, because due to the Rabbinate everyone really does whatever they want, and it isn't transparent and isn't recorded. That creates far more problems. The Rabbinate does not pretend to solve any problem; it only seeks to accumulate power. Nothing more.
Discussion on Answer
A strange claim. And today there are no disputes? You brought one case over roughly a thousand years of exile (after the dispersal from Babylonia). Suppose there were another ten. So what?
But that's exactly it: when someone moves from one shtetl to another in Eastern Europe, you can rely on a presumption of validity. But when everything is known to everyone, there are no longer doubts; there are disputes with practical implications.
In fact, when the details did become known, there really were enormous disputes, like in the Cleves get case.