Six years ago, while I was still a PhD student and a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, Dr. Yossi Beilin, then Minister of Justice, turned to the Dean of the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan and asked to meet with professors in the department for some sort of speed workshop. As fate would have it, despite my lesser academic standing, I was among the participants chosen by the dean. During the meeting, I gave the Minister an overview of the civilian and religious predicament which originates from the existing family law in which laws are split into two systems – civilian and religious – and a civil marriage is nonexistent. I went on to explain that, ironically, the partial solutions developed by Israeli law, for example common law marriage, often intensify rather than alleviate the situation. I then presented claims made by two religious professors, the late Professor Ariel Rosen-Zvi and Professor Pinchas Shiffman, for the need for civil marriages in Israel.
The Minister informed me that in his opinion, having been in politics for quite some time, there is no chance that civil marriage will be established in Israel any time soon. He chose to end the meeting by challenging us to find creative solutions. He said that even if establishing civil marriages in full is impossible in Israel, there must be a way to better organize laws regarding personal status so as to combine Halakhah with the religious community's wishes, on the one hand, and the secular-civilian needs on the other.
The idea of a Partnership Covenant which later gave way to the idea of a Spousal Registry occurred to me as a response to Minister Beilin's challenge. And, I expressed this idea in both my academic writing and public activities. At first, Professor Shiffman and I worked together as a team and laid down the principles for establishing a Spousal Registry. Our goal was to create an official civil system which would be recognized by the State, have civil regulations, and be available to any interested parties. We also wanted to simultaneously ensure that this form of civil marriage would not be recognized as a halakhic marriage, in order to remain sensitive to the religious community that fears having illegitimate children ("bastards") and in order to not let the lack of a solution lead to a major rift in the Jewish nation. For the record, a bastard, according to Halakhah, is one who is born to a married woman outside that marriage. Ironically, if these marriages will not be recognized according to Halakhah, this would eliminate the fear of having illegitimate children.
We then believed, as I still do, that the deep religious resistance to civil marriages is embedded in the symbolic importance that religious Jews attribute to the recognition of the State in a religious marriage; and, in this symbolic/theoretical aspect – as opposed to an existential/practical aspect – a secular compromise that would lead to a practical solution is thus optimal from a civil perspective and is a worthy compromise. Based on these understandings, we decided to draft a recommendation that would be based on two principles: preserving the status quo in which the only marriages recognized by law are orthodox, and founding a new legal body that would be called the Spousal Registrar.
According to the proposal, couples that would seek to live together with leg