effective remedy to the plight of many agunot. Nonetheless, the Orthodox rabbinical courts today do not utilize physical coercion as a means of inducing a husband to divorce his wife. Even in Israel , where state law empowers the beit din to exercise coercive power in such cases, that grant of power extends only to imprisonment of the husband, the revocation of his passport or driver’s license and the imposition of other disabilities. The judges are not permitted to beat him, even though the halakhic sources would allow them to do just that.” Orthodox scholars tend to explain this stance on the grounds that physical coercion, when used inappropriately, might invalidate the husband’s expressed statement of consent.”” This explanation, however, raises more questions than it answers. What, after all, is the essential difference between physical coercion, which is prohibited under contemporary law and rabbinical practice, and non-physical coercion, which the law permits? Both sorts of inducement involve the exertion of unwanted and unpleasant pressure upon the husband as a means of forcing him to do something that in the absence of such measures he would not do. It would seem that a more elemental distinction is at work. Although the rabbinate is not opposed to coercion per se, it is disturbed by the specter of physical coercion. To put this in contemporary legal language: in the legal culture of a civilized society, the application of physical force as a means of compelling an individual to do the right thing is an act“that shocks the conscience.” The authorities refrain from using it, even though they do allow themselves other forms of coercive pressure, and even though in doing so they deprive themselves of a powerful tool for the attainment of a just result, precisely because“we are better than that.” They see themselves as representing a just society, and such a society is one that recoils from remedies of this sort. In other words, the law of physical coercion remains on the books, but we no longer act in accordance with its terms. The community’s narrative, its understanding of the nature ofits law and of the purposes it is meant to serve, denies the law its literal application.
All of this suggests that Jews no longer understand their world in accordance with the plain sense of that Maimonidean text; rabbis, including Orthodox rabbis, no longer accept torture as a force for social good, a legitimate instrument of government power. Our ancestors may have lived in a different world, one where the beit din wielded(at least in theory) virtually unlimited coercive power over disobedient citizens. For them, it may have been a foregone conclusion that the end, so long as it was required by the Torah , justified the application of violent means in order to secure it. In our day and age, we are loathe to vest this sort of