Last night, someone shared with me a recent episode of Law & Order. I don’t think this episode would have aired while Stephen Hill, one of the entertainment world’s more famous baalei teshuva, was playing the role of District Attorney. He would have pointed out the inaccuracies that former Sen. Fred Thompson, and the rest of the cast and crew, simply don’t recognize. What the world got was another wildly skewed version of the life of a Jewish woman, with the Get process playing a supporting role.
A warning to those who might actually plan to watch the show… the following is what’s called a spoiler. In order to discuss what’s wrong with the show, I have to tell you how it ends.
The episode depicts members of the Bukharin community, a group of traditional Sephardic Jews from a region in the southern part of the former Soviet Union. They are described as traditional though not necessarily religious, which is fair enough as it goes. And the idea that one of them could get mixed up with the Russian mob isn’t terribly far-fetched.
We learn, however, that the wife wanted to divorce her mobster husband, but he was refusing to grant a Get, a religious divorce. So the wife remains in their shared home, because were she to leave the house she would lose custody of her children, and no one in her community, including her children, would speak to a woman who left home without a Get!