Whoever Hears My Voice

The Hook

A man has fallen into a pit, or been thrown into one. He cannot see who is standing at the edge above him. He calls up into the light: whoever hears my voice, write a get for my wife. Strangers write it. They give it to her. She is divorced. And even if they pull him out afterwards and cannot recognize the man they have just rescued, the get holds, because in a time of danger a get may be written without knowing who the husband was.

Now a second scene, with no danger in it at all. A healthy man, in a city, in a room, with a scribe available and the whole afternoon ahead of him. He says to two colleagues: tell the scribe to write a get for my wife, and tell the witnesses to sign it. They walk across the room and pass on the instruction. The scribe writes a flawless document, the witnesses sign, the get is given. And the Rambam rules that this get is unacceptable, and adds a sentence that is almost a warning: this matter should be deliberated upon at length, because the get is close to being considered void.

The voice from the pit works. The voice across the room does not. Yesterday this treatise established that a marriage ends only through a written document placed in her hand. Today the Rambam asks the harder question underneath it: whose word is the document carrying?

The Word Has to Be His Own

The verse in Deuteronomy says that he shall write for her a bill of divorce and place it in her hand, and the Rambam reads both verbs twice. He shall write covers a man who writes with his own hand and a man who tells somebody else to write for him. He shall place covers handing it over himself and sending an agent. And each verb teaches something the other half could not. He shall write teaches that divorce happens only through a written document. He shall place teaches that she may not simply take it.

So agency is permitted. That is not the issue. A man may say to two colleagues, write a get, sign it, and give it to my wife, and those same two can serve as agents and witnesses both. A get may be written for a man whose wife is not present, as long as the scribe and witnesses know exactly who the husband and wife are. Where two men in one city share a name and their wives share a name, neither may divorce except in the other's presence.

What cannot be done is the relay. The husband himself must tell the scribe to write and the witnesses to sign. If two colleagues ask a man whether they should write a get for his wife, and he tells them to write it and sign it, and they do it with their own hands, the get is good. If those same men pass the instruction on, telling a scribe to write and witnesses to sign, the get is void, because it was written by somebody the husband never told to write it, and it stays void even if the document is handed to the husband and he personally gives it to his wife in front of witnesses.

It was written by someone who was not told to write it by the husband himself. Nothing the husband does afterwards repairs that.

The Rambam pauses here to define his own vocabulary. When this text calls a get void, it means void by Scriptural law. When it calls a get unacceptable, it means disqualified by Rabbinic decree. The difference is not academic. A woman holding a void get is still married. Every strictness in this chapter is paid for by somebody, and the somebody is always her.

That instinct shows up again in the rules about repeating the attempt. If a man told people to write, sign and deliver a get and it turns out defective, they may write another, and another, a hundred of them, until she is holding something valid, because he charged them with the divorce and the mandate stays open until it has happened. But if he told them to write and hand it to an agent, and that one is defective, they may not write a second without going back to him, because his charge may have been spent the moment they handed it over.

The Words That Do Nothing

These phrases work. Write a get and give it to my wife. Divorce her. Send her away. Release her. Discharge her. Write a letter and give it to her. Say any of them to two people or more, and they write an acceptable get and deliver it.

These accomplish nothing whatsoever, and a get written on their strength is void. Dismiss her. Give her what she needs. Do as our faith requires to her. Do as the law requires to her. Do unto her as she deserves.

Look at the second list again, because it does not sound careless. It sounds responsible. A man who says do as the law requires appears to be submitting to the halacha rather than to his own temper. A man who says do unto her as she deserves may be saying something generous or something bitter, and that is exactly the problem. Not one of those sentences contains a decision. They are all the same move, handing the decision to somebody else while keeping the appearance of having made it.

And there is a third list, of phrases the Rambam will not resolve. Get her out. Let her go. Permit her. Let her be. Assist her. These might mean divorce and might mean something else, so no get should be written on them, and if one is written the divorce is in doubt, which is the worst outcome available to a woman here. A word that could go either way leaves her where nobody can tell her what she is.

Even the right words are read for their scope. A healthy man who says only write a get for my wife has asked for a document, not a delivery, and if they hand it to her the divorce does not take effect. But let that sentence be spoken by a man suddenly ill and deteriorating fast, or led away in chains even over a debt, or boarding a ship, or leaving with a caravan, and they write it and give it to her without asking anything further. The Rambam explains why in one line. It is clear what he meant.

When the Situation Speaks for Him

The chapter now becomes a study in reading a person, and the cases are extraordinary.

A healthy man says compose a get for my wife, and they write it and give it to her. Immediately afterwards he throws himself from a roof and dies. The get is acceptable, because the act tells you what the words were. He was a man setting his affairs in order. But if he climbs onto a high roof and the wind buffets him until he falls, the get is void, because then he was only a healthy man asking for a document. Where it cannot be established which of the two happened, the get is valid unless it becomes known with certainty that the wind took him.

A man whose windpipe and gullet have mostly been cut through, who cannot survive, makes motions and says write a get for my wife. They write it and give it. The Rambam's reasoning is four words long and it is one of the most humane sentences in the Mishneh Torah. He is alive at this time.

Against that, the cases where the words do not reach the man. Someone troubled by an evil spirit who speaks as the affliction takes hold has said nothing, because his thoughts are not organized and settled. Someone as drunk as Lot has said nothing. A healthy man who gives clear instructions and then loses his mind is not divorced by them yet either. They wait until he is well, and then write it with no need to ask again, because the instruction was sound when he gave it.

And a man who has lost the power of speech but not the power of thought is not abandoned. They ask him whether they should write a get for his wife. He nods. Then they test him with three questions, some of which should be answered yes and some no, and if he answers each one correctly they write it, and the Rambam insists his mind be checked thoroughly. Against that, a man who married while he could hear and speak and then lost both cannot divorce until he recovers. Yet a man already deaf and mute when he married may divorce by gesture, since he married by gesture. The law meets a person at the level on which he entered.

The Unifying Principle

Nineteen halachot insist that the word must be the man's own, unmediated, decided, in his own mouth. The twentieth turns the whole thing over.

A man whom the law requires to divorce his wife refuses. The court has him beaten until he consents, the get is written, and the Rambam rules that it is acceptable. Always, everywhere.

A get has to be given willingly. So how is this one willing? Because, the Rambam says, compulsion means being forced to do what the Torah does not obligate you to do. A man beaten into a sale was compelled. A man beaten into doing what he was already obligated to do was not. This man wants to be part of the Jewish people and to keep the mitzvot, and it is only his evil inclination that is pressing on him. Beat him until that pressure weakens, and what comes out of his mouth is his own will, finally audible. The Rambam even turns the word compulsion around and aims it the other way: the man refusing was the one forcing himself.

So the chapter's definition of a man's own word is not what he says. It is what he wants underneath what he says. Say it through a messenger and it is not yours. Say it in a formula that hands off the decision and it is not yours. Say it drunk and it is not yours. And say no, out of a resistance you cannot explain to yourself, and the law says that was not yours either.

Chassidus rests a great deal on this ruling. The Alter Rebbe builds the argument of Tanya on the claim that a Jew's true will is already whole, that refusal is a covering over the will rather than the will itself, and that the work is not to manufacture a new desire but to get the covering out of the way. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned to this halacha for decades, because it is where the most rigorous of codifiers writes into law that a person's inner will is intact and the outer refusal is the impostor.

And the man in the pit is the Baal Shem Tov's case. He taught that nothing a person hears reaches him by accident, that what comes into your ears was sent there so you would do something about it. Whoever hears my voice. Those strangers were not looking for a task, and by writing they freed a woman whose name they would never learn.

Modern Application

Take the second list seriously and it is uncomfortable, because those phrases are in constant use. Do what you think is best. Handle it however you see fit. Do the right thing here. Each one sounds like trust and functions as an exit. The ruling on them is not psychological, it is structural: a sentence that contains no decision cannot carry one, however sincerely it is spoken.

The relay is the same failure one step out. A man who instructs two people to instruct a scribe has not done less than a man who instructs the scribe. He has done something different, and the law can tell. The words arrive intact and the person does not arrive with them. There are conversations that never work through a third party for exactly this reason, and accuracy in the transmission does not repair it, because accuracy was never the thing missing.

These are also the days for the last ruling. Two days ago a man may have found, standing in shul, that there were things he could not bring himself to say, and he called that a fact about himself. The Rambam refuses to call it that. The refusal is not the man. The man is what is left when the pressure of the inclination is lifted off him. There is an old teaching that these days between Yom Kippur and Sukkot begin the new accounting, because somebody just forgiven walks straight out and starts building, and the Sfat Emet reads what a person does first, before anyone asks him, as the proof of what he wanted. Nobody is looking at the confession. Everybody is looking at the boards in the yard.

The Closing

It is worth saying plainly that this chapter is about the end of a marriage, and the Rambam treats it with a gravity that never slackens. Every rule here about the husband's own voice exists because a defective get leaves a woman bound to a man who has already walked away from her, and her children's standing can turn on a phrase chosen carelessly years earlier. The pedantry is the mercy.

And the two men from the beginning have not moved. One is at the bottom of a pit, with no name anyone will remember, calling up to people he will never see, and the law accepts his voice. The other stands in a comfortable room, able to do it himself, arranging for the message to be carried by somebody else.

The Rambam is not measuring how clearly the words were transmitted. He is measuring whether the man came with them. A sentence that hands the decision to somebody else is void no matter how responsible it sounds, and a voice out of a pit is valid even when nobody knows whose it is. The only real question this week is which of the things you have left for other people to say were always yours to say.