I was married to a handsome, brilliant, generous man with a
huge heart who swept me off my feet, just like in the movies. He was larger than life, charismatic and
could sell sand in the desert, for a profit.
He was a PHD, a teacher, a biochemist working under a Nobel
Laureate. I was an uneducated, naïve
Hasidic girl who yearned to break free from the patriarchy I was born to. I was too young and not strong enough to rebel
on my own, because I loved the Torah and my parents, even more. He was my ticket out. He turned out to be a round-trip ticket with
many arduous and hellish stopovers in countries you’d never want to visit. I’m safe now and at peace, with my past and my ex, but I write this,
because I want, in my limited way, to explain the situation in Israel that people
just don’t seem to understand. Maybe I
can simplify it for some who think it is complicated, because it, really, is
not.
When I was young, I thought things were exactly what they
appeared to be. If someone looked,
dressed or spoke a certain way, I believed them, no matter what my gut might
have told me. When someone seems too good to be true, they
generally are. That is why con men are
so successful. It’s how Ponzi schemes succeed
and young girls fall into traps and abusive relationships. I don’t blame anyone and I have long ago
realized that all the challenges I went through have defined me and made me,
and my children, the loving, evolved people that we are. I am grateful to this man who gifted me these
shining lights and regardless of what we went through, I know that anyone who
has faced hell and survived can relate to the fact that when you finally get
through the dark cesspool, you praise the demons. Whereas, In the past you were frightened of
them, they are now frightened of you.
So, when I finally gathered the courage to get a divorce, I
knew it would be unbearable, I just didn’t realize how much so. This troubled, yet loving man, who I had
helped get through many unfathomable circumstances and who lied, cheated, stole
and put us in danger, but always professed to be this devoted father and
husband that he sometimes was, decided to punish all three of us. He took us to court, abandoned and terrorized
us, left us financially destitute, while he established foundations, ironically
in his kids’ names, to assist others and fought me for custody, even from jail.
(Yeh, amazing how corrupt the system is.) He fought me for 13 years, costing me
money and time that I didn’t have. I
couldn’t hold down a job, since I was the sole parent and the courts don’t care
that I needed to work, since I wasn’t getting child support or any other
income. You MUST show up and they don’t
accommodate any job you may have. But
most of all, my kids suffered and it became so hard not to feel, at times, like
the perpetrator myself. Every day was a struggle that I, sometimes took minute
by minute, because if I didn’t, I might have driven off a bridge to relieve the
pain, but I loved my children and G-d, more than I loved myself, always.
Always a peaceful even passive person, I fought. It killed me, but I had to, because it was a
fight for the existence of innocent souls that I had put in this position. I had no choice, but still I didn’t
maliciously go after him. I knew that if
I did, I was no better than he was.
During all this, I
would cry out for help to people, because I was scared. I thought that when I finally divorced him,
people would gather around me and support me, because of his blatant
psychological, emotional and criminal issues that caused me to isolate. Quite the opposite, frequently, occurred. People would say. “Oh, in a divorce, there are three sides to
the issue. His, Hers and the truth”. Even the elementary school did not get
involved, because they still thought they would get tuition from my ex’s family,
which they never did. I will never
forget going to PTA with my soon to be ex-husband during the divorce, where he
denied that we were even getting divorced, while I was informing a teacher
about what my kids were going through.
She would call me every night, because she was scared that we were in
danger. During that, specific, time, a father of a student murdered his wife in
cold blood in front of their children and then the same forensic psychiatrist
on my case ordered the kids to visit their father in jail. That’s right, the
man whom they had seen kill their mother.
The courts had never protected her, nor her children, but protected a
soon-to –be murderer who had a history of instability, even after he committed
the most heinous crime, imaginable. This poor teacher felt something was wrong
and didn’t alert anyone and carried around tremendous guilt, because of it.
So here are the two sides. He was a felon who had served a
lot of time. I didn’t have a speeding
ticket. He was the skeleton in my
closet. I wanted to help him, to make
the marriage work, but even when he had to go to court mandated therapy (prior
to the divorce) for his criminal behavior, the therapists would tell me to
leave him, because he never took accountability for his actions. We had no financial assets. We were evicted
out of our home and then in rentals for years, because he knew our marriage was
precarious and didn’t want to have to give me any financial security or any
money to support myself and the kids if we got divorced. I was lucky that
during the marriage, we didn’t have joint accounts and I was given very little
money. I was clueless to our finances,
because he lied and controlled everything.
It turned out to be a blessing, because if we had, I probably would have
been prosecuted criminally, as well.
When I left, all I had were my two “assets”. The most
important ones of all. I would start
from scratch and do what I needed to raise healthy kids, but the divorce was
not the end. It was the beginning of a
relentless and ghastly ordeal. The worst
being the so called “justice system” of the matrimonial courts. Divorce is not what
destroys people. It’s the acrimony and
war that is, unbelievably, ENCOURAGED by the courts.
You see the courts
must perpetuate their business. The
lawyers must drive Porsches, the forensic psychologists must bill by the hour
and everyone benefits from prolonged nasty divorces, other than the people
involved, especially the children.
Believe me (no I’m not related to Trump) I have only touched the surface
of the idiocy, destruction and corruption of our system. You would think a predicate felon would not
be allowed to fight for sole custody, but the courts didn’t care and when I got
no child support and he didn’t want to see the kids, but rather, just destroy
me, I realized that his hatred of me blinded his love for his children. He
manipulated the system to eviscerate me …and here is where the analogy with
Israel applies.
Because he had the “right” attorneys, at first, everything
went his way. They said the right things
i.e..the kids didn’t really remember his two year jail sentence, when they were
babies. He lied about me, saying I was never
home and that I had mental problems. He
even called a psychologist that I had gone to just to cope to try to coerce her
to write a letter that I was mentally ill and unstable, but it backfired when she
came to court to support me along with an Assistant District Attorney who had prosecuted
him for grand larceny, but most didn’t want to get involved.
So, he ramped it up.
He sued me for stealing furniture, he stalked one of my kids. Still, I tried to
come to some sort of peace and each time we tried to mediate a settlement, he
used excuse after excuse not settle. I
tried to speak and reason with him. He
wouldn’t talk to me. I told his lawyers,
that I would take whatever money he thought was fair for child support. I
agreed to a pittance. Anything to make it stop.
I wanted my kids to have their father in their lives, troubles and
all. I wanted an open dialogue. I wanted peace. I will never forget one judge finally admonishing
him and his lawyer’s response was “An elephant doesn’t marry a giraffe’,
insinuating that we had the same moral equivalency. I think you get the picture. He lived for the fight, because when the
fight was nearing the end after 13 years and he was finally forced to sit down
with the kids at a therapist and they began to have a semblance of something of
a “relationship”, he passed away, suddenly and it was worse than any of the
torture we had withstood. It was the
most heart-breaking day of my life and my kids buried him and sat “shiva” for him
and the loving relationship they never remembered with their father and never
would.
So after this long-winded essay, you ask “How does this
self-indulgent, self-righteous woman, compare her divorce to the eternal
conflict in the Middle East”. Well,
here’s how.
Regardless of who you think is right or wrong in this
eternal conflict, there is only one-side that has shown that they want
co-existence and peace. There is only
one side that does not want war. There
is only one side that wants compromise to make death stop. There is only one side that celebrates lives
and goes out of their way NOT to harm civilians, while one side’s goal is to
kill as many civilians as they can.
There is only one side that is a democracy. There is only one side that doesn’t go into
homes to stab women, children, babies in cold blood and then call those
murderers “heroes” and incite violence daily.
There is only one side that loves their children more than they hate the
people that kill them and that is Israel. Yet, they are punished for it, just
as I was punished by the courts, while my ex barely was, because the courts
“expected” me to be better than he was.
Israel is consistently vilified by the United Nations (which used to be
the universal mediator and is now the biggest advocate of countries that
endorse terror and violate human rights)
I am not dehumanizing those who disagree with me. I am not dehumanizing Palestinians, Muslims
nor any other individuals who long for peace along with me, just as I never
tried to dehumanize the father of my children.
I am not, G-d forbid, comparing my ex to a suicide bomber, but I am
comparing a government that does not want compromise, but complete
annihilation. I am comparing having so
much hate in your heart that you will destroy yourself and your loved ones for
that cause.
I know that so many long for peace on both sides, but to
have peace we must acknowledge the right to exist in peace. Just as the court, consistently ignored the
continuous, gross violations of my divorce agreement by my ex-husband and
called me out on the smallest infraction on my part, the United Nations, along
with much of the media and world opinion, does the same with Israel. I am not perfect and neither is the State of
Israel, but, as long as hate rules and is encouraged by the ruling parties of
our neighbors on the other side of the conflict, we must do everything we can
to protect our people from being eviscerated from our tiny homeland.
I am no longer naïve, nor young, but I will never allow hope
to die in my life, no matter what. Hate
will ultimately destroy you, regardless if you are fighting a physical or
spiritual war. I have seen it first-hand. I, also, know that the true testament of a
person’s character is when they are suffering.
If they still maintain mercy, even when forced to fight, they are the
ones we should be siding with. It takes
one side to incite a war, but two sides to make peace. The most current history of the Jewish people
taught us that when someone demonizes you by calling you monkeys, vermin and
pigs and threatens to annihilate you, they mean it. Don’t YOU be naïve.
