Rubashkins: not winning any prizes anytime soonSince the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

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Last week, Tamar did a great post about agunot, the "chained women" who wish to divorce their husbands but cannot get a get from their (missing or stubborn) men.  Traditionally, these women find themselves at a loss, without much recourse, since only the get can return a woman's legal rights to her, allow her to remarry, free her from the asshole she picked. 

 Technically, a beit din, a Jewish court, can pressure the husband to release his wife, but in today's world that doesn't work as well as it might have once upon a time. Envision a situation where the woman is orthodox, but the man has left the orthodoxy and so the beit din holds no clout.  She's SCREWED!

But I digress...

 I wanted to revisit this issue today not to further discuss divorce, but to introduce the subject of the beit din.  Because I think some of us have a very vague sense of the Jewish tradition as a "legal" faith.  But maybe we don't really know what that means in a practical sense.  And for those of us familiar with the term beit din, maybe we don't know what that consists of.  We have a loose image in our heads of a circle of old dudes wearing black in a dusty corner of Brooklyn.

So what IS a beit din?

In orthodox Judaism, a beth/beis din needs to be made up of three adult Jewish males, at least one of whom needs to be widely knowledgeable in halakha (Jewish law), and must be sufficiently knowledgeable to instruct the other two members in any matters of halakha relevant to the case being heard...

Battei din are required or preferred for the following matters:

• Validation of religious bills of divorce (get, pl. gittin);
• Hechsher: kosher certification of restaurants and food manufacturers;
• Examination of Shochetim and the control of the Shechita Inspectors
• Monetary cases: Jews are exhorted (Shulkhan Arukh, Choshen Mishpat 26) to have their civil cases judged by religious courts instead of taking their cases to secular judges (arka'oth); In modern practice, the litigating parties will sign an arbitration agreement agreeing to accept the judgment of the Beth Din as binding. In the event of non-compliance, the agreement may be taken to secular courts for enforcement with the permission of the Beth Din.
• Religious conversion: a ger tzedek ("convert" or "proselyte") requires a beth/beis din to be accepted into Judaism; it is convened to determine whether or not a prospective convert is sufficiently prepared to enter the "Covenant of Abraham" and to join the Jewish people. At least one member of the court must be a rabbi who is an expert on the laws of conversion.
• Supervising the building and maintenance of a mikvah;
• Determination of "personal status" (i.e. whether someone is a Jew according to halakha) - some battei din hold local records of marriages and deaths within the community.
• the authorisation and supervision of mohelim.
• Questions relating to burial practices and mourning.

Okay... I get it.  But now, here's my question for you... what if the same was true for say, Christians?  What if Christian leaders in American exerted this kind of power over their congregants?  What would you think of some evangelical dude in a position of power like that.

I admire the Jewish legal tradition, the particularity of our faith, the practice and function of it all... But if I take away the traditional/historical veil from my concept of the beit din... it scares me.  Because as a secular-ish Jew, I'm accustomed to the separation of church and state.

And hey... if you disagree, that's cool.  But I want to hear about it. 

Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat: Get Your Sue On.Americans have yet to find an issue that they didn't think would look much better in a law suit. And Sacha Baron Cohen is learning that lesson all too well as a result of his highly successful, yet equally controversial film, "Borat." From Starpulse News Blog:

Sacha Baron Cohen has been hit by a new lawsuit from a man who claims he was "accosted" by the British funnyman in character as Borat in a South Carolina restaurant last year. Footage of the incident, in which Cohen posed as a toilet attendant, did not feature in his hit movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan," but has appeared on the Comedy Central network and the internet.

I didn't realize that being "accosted" warranted suing someone, but maybe I'm still a little fuzzy on the rules for America's favorite pastime.

Sacha Baron Cohen Hit By New Lawsuit [Starpulse News Blog]

You’ve all heard of the greater internet fuckwad theory, right? It’s an elegant equation that explains the jaw-dropping quantity of vulgar, libelous nonsense floating about on the internet. It goes like this:

The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: the world wide web explained

Today, internet fuckwads everywhere are rejoicing, as the California Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 extends broad protection to sites like Jewcy when we publish (say, in our comment sections) all the scurrilous, slanderous drivel that oozes from your head. The protection is so broad that it’s being described as “blanket immunity.”

"The prospect of blanket immunity for those who intentionally redistribute defamatory statements on the Internet has disturbing implications," Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote in the majority opinion. "Nevertheless ... statutory immunity serves to protect online freedom of expression and to encourage self-regulation, as Congress intended."

Ms. Corrigan later explained that "The volume and range of Internet communications make the 'heckler's veto' a real threat," and that this threat must be preserved. “Heckler’s veto,” of course, is just legal fancytalk for “rantings of an internet fuckwad.”

Groups like American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are over the moon, but not everyone's happy. Whined losing attorney Christopher E. Grell,

“What you couldn't put in your print newspaper, you can put in your Internet newspaper. The notion of fact checking and verifying things doesn't apply to the Internet."

Is this guy for real? “Fact checking”? “Verifying things”? Anachronistic gobbledygook like that just makes my eyes glaze over. Barukh Hashem for the 21st century, online media, and the California Supreme Court.