With little family support in Israel, we found ourselves at loggerheads much of the time, and our relationship was under continual strain

I was sitting with my eight-year-old son at an Avos U’Banim learning session, when one of the heads of the local Avos U’Banim chapter got up to speak.

After a short devar Torah, he began to discuss the importance of father-son learning in general, and of the Avos U’Banim program in particular. I agreed with every word that came out of his mouth — until he said something that made me sit up in my chair with a jolt.

“With divorce becoming increasingly common nowadays,” he declared, “we have to find a way for even kids from these broken homes to participate in our community learning events.”

He was talking about my son!

My ex-wife and I met in Eretz Yisrael, when she was studying in a second-year seminary program and I was learning in yeshivah. Young, idealistic, and flush with wonder at the Hashgachah pratis that had brought us together, we decided to make Yerushalayim our permanent home. My wife came from a small city with a tiny Jewish population, and she assured me that she had no reason to ever return to chutz l’Aretz. We agreed that she would work to support me in kollel at the beginning of our marriage, like so many other couples in Yerushalayim whose homes we aspired to emulate.

Things were good at the beginning. But about a year into our marriage, at around the time our first daughter was born, we found ourselves fighting a lot. At around the same time, I switched to a different kollel and lost contact with my rebbeim from yeshivah, who had guided me until that point.

A year and a half later our son was born, followed by another two kids in quick succession. My wife was working, caring for four children under the age of six, and running a house, while I was learning in kollel, and later juggling a job and a learning seder. With little family support in Israel, we found ourselves at loggerheads much of the time, and our relationship was under continual strain.

We went for marriage counseling, but that accomplished little other than to deplete our meager savings and make me feel pilloried. Each time we left the therapist’s office, we felt further apart.

“This therapist is ruining our marriage, not fixing it,” I said.

So we stopped going.

The next few years were a series of ups and downs. Yet even during the most difficult times between us, the thought of divorce never even occurred to me. That’s why, seven years into our marriage, when my wife told me she wanted a get, I was flabbergasted.

“A get?” I spluttered. “But why? Our issues aren’t so major. And we have four little kids, including a baby! Can’t we try to work things out?”

But she wasn’t interested. She had been seeing a therapist who told her there was no hope for our marriage, and she had a close friend who was urging her to muster the “courage” to leave me and move closer to her family, where she would have the help and support of her parents and siblings. I offered to move back to chutz l’Aretz with her to try to save the marriage, but she refused.

Soon after my wife dropped the bombshell that she wanted a get, her friend arranged a hearing for us in beis din. When I complained to her that things were moving too fast, and that I wanted to try to work on our relationship, I got a call from a rav who was helping her through the process.

“Don’t turn your wife into an agunah,” he warned me.

“She just asked for a get now!” I exclaimed. “If I want to save the marriage, I’m turning her into an agunah?”

“She wants a get and you’re withholding it,” he replied. Then he added, “Your wife has a lot of people backing her who are going to ruin your life if you don’t let her go. If you want my advice, just give her the get.”

That scared me. At that moment, I knew that my marriage was over. My next step was to contact a lawyer.

By law, I learned, I could insist that the children remain in Israel. We could hammer out a standard custody agreement, in which I would have visitation rights and possibly full custody over the boys once they reached a certain age, and that agreement would require my wife to continue living in Israel — or leave the kids with me.

But my wife didn’t want to stay in Israel. She’d had enough of being far away from her family, and she wanted to move back to the tiny community where her parents lived.

I knew no one in that town, and my rebbeim strongly discouraged me from relocating there as a divorced man. “Here, you have a life, friends, a community,” they said. “There, you’ll just be a nebach. Insist that your wife stay here in Israel so that you can share custody.”

I wanted to fight to keep my kids near me. I loved them deeply, and I couldn’t bear the thought of them living under a different roof, let alone across the world. The law was on my side, and my rebbeim were ready to back me in my fight not to lose my children.

But the night after that unnerving call from my wife’s rav, when I realized that there was no way to stop the divorce from happening, I asked myself what I really wanted out of this process. And, after much thought, I concluded that the most important thing, for me, is that my children should be happy.

I will not fight my wife on anything major, I resolved. Because if I do, my children will suffer.

It was as if Hashem had come down and opened my eyes. After that revelation, I knew exactly what I had to do. I instructed my lawyer not to insist that the children stay in Israel.

“Why?” he argued. “If she takes the kids overseas, you’ll lose them.”

“My children are so young,” I replied. “They need a happy mother. If I force her to stay here, where she’ll be a single mom with no family, she’ll hate my guts, and that will filter down to the kids. Even if she doesn’t utter a single negative word about me to them, they’ll grow up with a miserable, angry mother who feels like she’s in prison. Is that what I want? Better she should take them out of the country and raise them in the way that’s most comfortable for her, while I do my best to maintain a relationship with them from afar.”

Several days later, I stood in beis din and gave the get. It was the saddest moment of my life.

I hadn’t chosen to get divorced. But now I did have a choice: I could go the way of anger, bitterness, and resentment, or I could accept my new reality and make the most of it.

I didn’t want my children to grow up in an environment of anger and bitterness. From the time of the divorce, therefore, I davened every day that my ex should remarry, both because I wanted my children to have a father figure in the house and because I wanted my ex-wife to find happiness. If she would be happy, I reasoned, my children would be better off.

When she did get married a couple of years later, to a widower with several children, I was genuinely glad.

In the meantime, she fulfilled her side of the divorce agreement. The agreement stipulated that I was allowed to speak to my kids on the phone a few times a week, and she made that happen. I would visit twice a year, and during these visits she would allow them to spend time with me every day. She would also allow the older two children to fly to Israel once a year to visit me, with a relative or other chaperone accompanying them on the flight.

I attribute her willingness to cooperate to the fact that I did nothing to antagonize her during the divorce process and didn’t stop her from leaving Israel with the kids.

Even so, often it simply does not work out for me to have the kind of contact I’m supposed to have with the children. The older ones come home from school late in the afternoon and need time to eat and unwind before they are ready to speak. Considering the significant time difference between our locales, this means that our calls have to be scheduled for midnight or 1 a.m. my time, which is difficult for me, since I have to be up at six the next morning so that I can daven and learn before heading to the yeshivah where I work as kitchen manager. Not infrequently, I stay up late and call at the designated time, only to discover that my ex took the kids out shopping, to the dentist, or to a friend’s house, and forgot to tell me.

Rather than be frustrated, I tried to see things from her perspective. She has moved on with her life and is doing her best to manage a blended family, and I’m hardly her uppermost priority.

I also realize that our divorce agreement is worthless unless she is motivated to implement it. My relationship with the children depends on her goodwill, and if I give her any reason to resent my involvement, that would be an invitation to her to sabotage that relationship, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Therefore, no matter how badly she inconveniences me or neglects to fulfill her end of the divorce agreement, I try to hold my tongue. On the rare occasion that I do speak up, probably one out of a hundred times that I’d like to say something, she invariably gets annoyed.

Because I’m focused on what’s best for my kids, I try not to take things personally or focus on my own “rights.” I’ve also learned to let go and accept the fact that I can’t control my ex-wife or my relationship with my kids. Instead, I daven to Hashem a lot that I should be the best father possible and that my kids should grow up healthy, happy, and well-adjusted.

At the same time, I do the best hishtadlus I can to maintain a good relationship with them. Because I want to be able to travel and host my kids for significant chunks of time, I’ve avoided taking a regular job with typical hours and a set number of vacation days. My job in the yeshivah allows me to travel several times a year, during bein hazmanim, and I live on a shoestring budget most of the year, putting aside a large portion of my salary to finance my trips to visit my kids and their trips to visit me.

Because my interactions with my kids are so limited, I invest tremendous thought into finding creative ways to build a relationship with them. I’m a frequent customer at local toy and craft stores, where I buy all sorts of prizes and games. During my and my kids’ visits, I take them on outings, do fun activities and crafts with them, and spend lots of time schmoozing with them and discovering their inner world.

On a recent visit to see my kids, they spent Shabbos with me in the apartment I had rented. Shabbos afternoon, my nine-year-old daughter wanted to play at a friend’s house, and we arranged that I would drop her off at two o’clock and pick her up at four. When I came to get her, however, she didn’t want to come home. “Can I stay until after Shabbos?” she asked.

My first reaction was to think, I flew across the world and spent a month’s salary to come see you and you don’t want to come home? How could you do this to me?

But then I thought to myself, My goal isn’t for my kids to spend time with me and make me feel good. My goal is that they should grow up happy and normal, and a normal nine-year-old girl prefers to play with her friend rather than go home to be with her father.

My approach seems to be working, baruch Hashem, because whenever I speak to my kids, they always tell me how much they love me and miss me, which echoes the sentiments I constantly express to them. From what I can see, they are normal, well-adjusted kids with age-appropriate issues and concerns. And I thank Hashem every day that I didn’t fight my ex over custody, even though it means I’m not as much a part of my kids’ lives as I would like to be.

Once, I was speaking to the principal of a major girls’ school, and I asked him whether he sees a difference between kids of divorced parents whose fathers live nearby and those whose fathers live far away. “I haven’t noticed that the distance of the non-custodial parent is a factor in the way these kids turn out,” he replied. “But I have seen a huge difference between kids whose divorced parents maintain an amicable relationship and those whose parents are in a constant state of acrimony. The ones whose parents work together well grow up a lot healthier.”

In truth, there are children whose homes are broken even if their parents happen to be married to each other. Some of these parents stay together “for the sake of the children,” even though they detest each other and are either fighting or ignoring each other most of the time, which makes the kids feel unsafe, unloved, and frightened. I think kids in that toxic situation might be better off if their parents would go their separate ways and maintain a decent working relationship for the sake of the children, instead of staying together under one roof.

Occasionally, men from my community confide in me that they’re struggling in their marriages and are considering divorce. They look at me and see a happy, productive person, and they think they’d be better off in my shoes.

“I have a good life,” I tell these people, “but it’s a very lonely life. Unless your home environment is toxic for the kids or seriously dysfunctional, you’re a lot better off married, with all the challenges that married life entails.”

That’s before a divorce happens. After the fact, a divorced person has to look ahead, rather than stew in indignation. Although divorce is unquestionably tragic, it doesn’t have to break a person, or a family. Our family structure may not be typical, but it’s not “broken.”

Despite my failed marriage, I’ve managed to build a meaningful life for myself, and I’m a respected, involved member of the community despite my single status. Rather than drown in self-pity while pining for my faraway biological children, I’ve become a surrogate father of sorts to some boys in my neighborhood whose father left his wife and kids. I take these boys to Avos U’banim and learn with them, and I accompany them to other events where a father’s presence is expected, while davening to Hashem that He should guide and protect my own children when I can’t be there for them.

When I heard the head of Avos U’banim talk pityingly about children from “broken homes,” I wanted to go over and tell him that, aside from the fact that it’s highly insensitive to use that term in front of an audience that includes children of divorced parents, the term as he used it is simply inaccurate. Just because a child’s parents don’t live together doesn’t mean his home is broken. My children certainly don’t come from a broken home. They are growing up in a stable, two-parent family, with a stepfather who is kind to them. And there’s another parent in the picture, too: a biological father who loves them deeply and has made some very painful sacrifices so they can grow up healthy and unbroken.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 748)