The AHAVA Method
A method developed by attorney and mediator Motty Danos, after twenty-five years of marriage, four shared children, and a long search for kinder language for the moment a family changes shape.
A new vocabulary
The work began with a single document. Looking down at a draft titled “Divorce Agreement,” Motty Danos asked himself: is this really the peak of how we describe this moment? He sat down and rewrote the entire agreement in a different language.
In agreements signed at the AHAVA Center, parents commit to a different world of values. The word divorce does not appear, not even once.
Headlines change. Divorcée becomes the mother of my children. Custody becomes shared parenting.
Targets & aspirations
01
Replace the headline “Divorce Agreement” with “Agreement for Happy Lives Apart.” Retire the root “to divorce.” Speak about updating personal status, separating beds and homes, and continuing as a parenting partnership for life.
02
After years of partnership, we learn how to release intimate, financial, emotional, social, family and legal entanglements - so that two adults can pursue separate dreams, side by side.
03
We act, in any way we can, so that the smile and laughter on our children's faces stays real, free, and ordinary. We will not erode it. We will protect it, and grow it.
04
A quiet agreement between the parents: no sharp words, no public blows, no quiet revenge. The peace inside the home begins with the peace between the two adults who built it.
05
Birthdays, holidays, ordinary Friday evenings - we hold them gently, together when we can, and separately with the same warmth when we cannot.
06
If she is happy, the children are happy, and then he is happy. And the reverse is just as true.
07
Calculation principles inside the AHAVA method allow real balance between the parents.
08
Parents live close to one another and ease the transitions between homes for the children.
09
Children are not messengers, spies, or witnesses. Both of you stay aware of what is happening around them.
010
Simple and immense. The holiday table can still hold us all.
011
Roughly a tenth of a litigated case.
012
This is the moment to make changes that have waited for years.
The process
Meeting 1
Reading an opening text together, signing a participation agreement, and beginning the work with structured exercises.
Meeting 2
Each parent listens, in a defined format, to the other's needs.
Meeting 3
A grounded look at the financial life of the family.
Meeting 4
An agreement is drafted in a vocabulary that holds both the practical and the emotional life that follows separation.
Meeting 5
A short ceremony, held with care - a final reading, a signature, a photograph, and a sentence sent the next morning.
In the founder's words
“People walk in through the door crying, and walk out holding one another. It is a bridge over reality, and I am moved by it every single time.”
Motty Danos, founder of AHAVA Foundation
A precedent
In August 2020, the Rabbinical Court in Netanya granted the force of a court ruling to a mediation agreement signed by a couple ending their marriage - titled, for the first time, “Mediation Agreement for Happy Lives Apart”, rather than “Divorce Agreement.”
