A government doomed for divorce - or annulment - Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

 

​ by Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

Even Israeli coalitions over the years that should have lasted did not last. How does this one last?

 

As a rabbi of so many years, I know a woman who was in a marriage she did not want. As soon as she got out and divorced, she was determined to move on and remarry rapidly, just to show her former husband — to stick it into his face — to prove how much she hated him, how readily she could remarry, how promptly she could do so much better, how desirable she was.

So she raced to find a new husband, and she married a fellow whom everyone perceived was a wrong match. The new couple had little in common. But she had had her revenge on her former husband. She had shown him. Poor him.

As a rav of 40 years, I have seen this sociological phenomenon play out many times — both ways. “I’ll show you!” And so they do. Divorced men who rush to flaunt the new attachment in their former wives’ faces. Divorced women, as described above.

Guess what?

They always end up getting divorced again. Always. Not “usually.” Not “most of the time.”

Always.

So line up the political divorce bet din, and have a scribe ready to pen a twelve-line gett (bill of divorce) because this new political intermarriage of Yair Lapid with Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked with Mansour Abbas, Gideon Sa’ar with Nitzan Horowitz, Zev Elkin with the Muslim Brotherhood, Meretz and Labour with Tikvah Chadashah (New Hope) and Yamina (Right Wing) is doomed to failure before it begins.

Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett want to parade their revenge in Netanyahu’s face? To show how quickly and easily they can remarry? How much better they can do? How desirable they are as coalition partners? So they marry Meretz and the Muslim Brotherhood?

See you in divorce court.

Even Israeli coalitions over the years that should have lasted did not last. How does this one last?

Maybe Nir Orbach stands firm with Amichai Chikli of Yamina, and they both vote in the Knesset next Wednesday to torpedo the new deal before it begins. Or maybe some other strays in Yamina and New Hope get sober, wake up, and realize what they have done now that their prior marriage ended. Instead of depressing the former husband, the hung-over divorcee merely has taken the one step needed to relieve him of having to pay any more alimony.

Or maybe Hamas or Hezbollah provokes something in the South or the North that drives Meretz and Ra’am out of the deal as soon as Defense Minister Gantz makes good on his vow to strike back hard at the first sign of a rocket or an incendiary balloon. Or maybe he lied and does not strike back as life returns to normal daily terrorism in the Gaza periphery that includes Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod, so Bennett and Elkin have to walk.

Or maybe riots erupt with our beloved “cousins” in Akko and Lod and Yafo and Ramle. Sababa.

Or maybe America pressures Israel to stop building in Judea and Samaria and to start freezing construction in Jerusalem. Or Transportation Minister Michaeli turns buses loose all over the country on Shabbat, while Finance Minister Liberman turns funding upside-down.

Or maybe Ms. Michaeli and her Labor contingent go ballistic as some conservative judges get named to replace left wing Supreme Court judges, so that the Supreme Court actually becomes a court and not a branch of left-wing government. Or maybe Meretz becomes disenchanted.

Or maybe Ra’am pulls out the first time that Tamar Zandberg of Meretz pushes her LGBTQ agenda. Or when the Defense apparatus starts bombing in Gaza and accidentally kills some children hidden by Hamas in a rocket launcher.

Once these mismatched, mishmoshed marriage partners all have their celebration over ousting Bibi, they have to look at and live with each other the next morning like two drunk all-night casino gamers in Las Vegas who go to sleep in the hotel, wake up the next morning with a hangover and see someone lying next to them in the hotel bed, realize they somehow got married in the middle of the night with an Elvis impersonator presiding, and now race for an annulment.

Such a mess.

H.L. Mencken once wrote that democracy is the philosophy of government that says “The people know what they want, and they deserve to get it — good and hard.”

Mazal Tov on the forthcoming annulment.

P.S. Unless one side reneges on its basic principles and joins the other side, taking off its ideological mask in order to continue to be in power because that is its main objective. And you know what side that might be, don't you?

 

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com .

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/307394

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