The Cause of Iggun

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Rabbinic marriage is a unilateral act, performed by the groom upon the bride, whose passive acquiescence is the only behavior she manifests in the marriage act, under the marriage canopy (huppa).

 

This being the case, rabbinic divorce—a get-- equally, is a unilateral act performed by the husband.

 

Rabbinic law mandates that a get is valid only if the husband gives it of his free will. 

 

This means that men refusing to give a get is a perfectly acceptable act under halakha; the husband’s will in the matter is sacrosanct and has utter predominance over any desire of the wife who can ask for a get, under halakha, but can neither force receiving one from her baal (lit., master, owner; term for husband), nor divorce him, herself.

 

This means that

•  men who refuse to give a get, including with typical extortion for it; 

• men who are not mentally competent (e.g., a man in a persistent vegetative state), to act in the legal process of giving a get is).

• and that men who have gone missing, either wilfully, in desertion, or because of accident, mishap, or war— who disappear, for whatever reason--are all empowered to hold wives in marital captivity, intentionally or not. 

 

There is no time limit to a wife’s marital captivity.

 

The presumed death of a husband, e.g., in a shipwreck with no survivors, or in war, does not in itself free a wife to remarry, no matter how much time, years, decades, elapse.

 

Iggun—Jewish women’s marital captivity—results—necessarily and inevitably—from the unilateral nature of rabbinic marriage as a patriarchal act over the wife.

 

Bad husbands and bad rabbis, however these abound, are not the source, the origin, of iggun.

 

Rabbinic marriage, enacted through kinyan and kiddushin,is.