When 15 rabbinic court judges, 12 of whom are ultra-Orthodox, were selected Monday, this was another step - whose significance is difficult to overestimate - toward deepening the rift between the religious and the secular.

The new justice minister, Prof. Daniel Friedmann, played a role in this. Friedmann had the authority to prevent the judicial selection committee from convening, and could have done so. His argument - that he didn't do so because of the need to overcome the foot-dragging in the court system - is only technically correct.

There are thousands of women in our midst whose husbands have refused to grant them a Jewish divorce. This is due to not the shortage of rabbinic court judges, but to their refusal to free those women from their recalcitrant husbands. This is also the case with the foot-dragging in conversion proceedings. One can assume that most of the new judges, being from the ultra-Orthodox camp, will act no differently than the current judges. Shas chair Eli Yishai admitted the judges were selected because "the sages of Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Shalom Yosef Elyashiv, supported their selection."

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The ultra-Orthodox, whose appointees head the chief rabbinate as well as the rabbinic courts (Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, currently under investigation, was also chosen because Yosef and Elyashiv ordered his appointment; the attorney general has asked him to resign for ethical violations), do not recognize the very institutions their people control - it's that absurd. The ultra-Orthodox never go to state-run rabbinic courts - even though the judges are ultra-Orthodox - for matrimonial or financial matters, the two primary issues these courts handle. Nor do the ultra-Orthodox turn to the chief rabbis, or to the city or neighborhood rabbis, to ask what religious law permits and forbids. Heaven forbid they recognize institutions bearing the state flag. Instead, the ultra-Orthodox turn to their private rabbinic courts - those of the Lithuanians, the Hassids and Shas.

The chief rabbinate, a state entity, was a sign of cooperation between the religious and the secular, and a stage in the establishment of a Jewish Zionist state in the Land of Israel. The ultra-Orthodox opposed both the state and the rabbinate. Their control of the rabbinate, then, can be described as a hostile takeover intended to undermine the institution established by their major historic rival, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook. For the ultra-Orthodox, Rabbi Kook's great sin was using his tremendous authority in Torah, philosophy and ethics to grant religious legitimacy to secular Zionism and its most atheist element, the first pioneers.

The rabbinate and its offshoot, the rabbinic courts, were not totally pure even when their leaders were Zionist rabbis - far from it. But as long as the Zionist element was dominant in religious rulings, personal, public and national sensitivities were taken into account - certainly in the last few decades. The situation was reversed when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, via their representatives in the judicial selection committee, granted the ultra-Orthodox - particularly Shas - control of the chief rabbinate and rabbinic courts. Thus they purchased Shas' support of their rule and the Oslo Accords.

True, nowadays there are no Zionist rabbis of Rabbi Kook's standing, just as there are no statesmen on David Ben-Gurion's level, but there are rabbis with the religious, personal, ethical and leadership qualifications to take on high-level religious authority. But this was instead given to ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who did not serve in the Israel Defense Forces, who were given preference because secular politicians - this time Kadima members - used appointments to religious posts to stabilize their teetering government.

The politicians, too, are therefore to blame for the fact that there are, and will continue to be, thousands of women whose spouses refuse to grant them a divorce, and that the status of the chief rabbinate has sunk so low.