daf bit: Gittin 24

[cellio]

A bill of divorce (get) must be written carefully and precisely, so a husband hired (and I believe still hires) a scribe to prepare the document. (This is similar to how, today, many hire a lawyer to prepare a will.) The mishna teaches: any bill of divorce that was not written specifically for the woman being divorced is invalid. If a scribe is practicing and writes a get for Ploni to divorce Sarah, and a man says "I'm Ploni and my wife is Sarah and I want to divorce her", he can't use that document. Similarly, if a man wrote (or hired a scribe to write) a get to divorce his wife and then changed his mind, he can't pass it along for somebody else with the same name to use -- so even though it was written with the intention of divorcing (rather than practicing, as in the first case), it still doesn't count. And further, if a man has two wives with the same name, he can't tell the scribe to write the name and he'll decide later which one to divorce; it has to be written about a specific wife. (24a-b)

On 26a, the next mishna is going to talk about forms -- even in rabbinic times, apparently scribes wrote out documents with blanks to fill in the names and dates later. There is a dispute about whether you can do this with a get.

(Today's daf is 25.)

Comments

[goljerp]

Do you happen to know if it's usual these days for the couple to go together as opposed to using a messenger to deliver the document?

I think a lot depends on circumstances. In my case, ex and I both lived in NYC, and were both pretty poor, so why pay for a shaliach if we didn't need to?

My brave Orthodox friend whose husband turned out to be a shmuck, and whose family tried every dirty trick in the book in the civil divorce, would probably never have gotten a get if she hadn't seized a moment of civility. I wasn't there, but my impression was that he said that he would give a get, so she basically said, "don't move", called a Rabbi, and stayed with her husband until he finished the get. In her case, I doubt she trusted him to use a messenger. Alas, the subsequent civil divorce was, as I implied, messy.

The Second Jewish Catalogue (1976) has an anecdote of a couple going together for a get, but also talks about messengers as a solution still being used for various reasons, including geography and emotional.