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]

a husband hired (and I believe still hires) a scribe to prepare the document.

Yep. In my case[1], there was a Rabbi was helping out, so he organized the scribe (and witnesses), but I was definitely paying for the scribe. Today, a get (or at least, the I was directly involved with) is very specific. So the get that was written identifies me by my hebrew name (Ploni Ulmoni ben Ploni), my full english name, and also "Goljerp". It wasn't a fun experience, but the surreal experience of listening to the scribe and the rabbi deciding how to write "Goljerp" in hebrew characters did lighten the moment.

[1] this was years ago -- Joy and I are still married. :-)