Family Values - Not Just an American Issue

MK Rabbi Chaim Amsellem

Mazal tov! A new subcommittee has been formed in the Knesset: the Subcommittee for the Examination of Claims of Legal Severity Against Men in the Areas of Welfare and Family. The subcommittee is expected to change its name to the Subcommittee for the Family.

It is headed by MK Rabbi Chaim Amsellem of Shas, and its members include MKs Rabbi Avraham Ravitz (UTJ), Moshe Cachlon (Likud), Marina Solodkin (Kadima) and Nadia Hilou (Labor).

If you look very carefully at the names of the people present in the July 4th session of the Knesset's Labor, Welfare, and Health Committee, in which Committee Chairman Moshe Sharoni announced the formation of the subcommittee, you may see some familiar ones.

Why is this subcommittee important?

It is important because family is the basic building block of society, and of Jewish society in particular. And it is precisely this basic cell of our national tissue that has come under violent attack by marxist-based ideologies in the past 30-40 years. These ideologies pose as chivalrous defenders of the rights of women, just as their predecessors, the socialist and communist movements, posed as defenders of workers' rights. But the leaders of these movements care about women just as much as Stalin cared about Russian peasants.

The subcommittee will try to understand why the divorce rate among secular Israelis has reached 50%, and whether this truly is a necessary evil of modern times. It will examine whether government policies are designed to encourage divorce. It will find out who profits from the divorce industry and try to understand the logic behind a plethora of laws and regulations, written and unwritten, which have taken away basic rights - such as the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to love and raise your children and the right to be loved and raised by both parents, the right to live in your home, the right to freedom, the right to live free of unjustified financial persecution - from countless men, women and children of both sexes in our generation.

If anyone has a good idea as to how to convince dati-leumi leaders that this is an important issue, please let me hear it.