Thursday, September 24, 2026
The Blanks the Scribe Leaves
Gerushin 3|Sefer Nashim
The Hook
A scribe sits down to practice his craft, or to teach it to a student, and writes out a get. Not for anyone. Just to have the letters right. He uses a common name for the husband, a common name for the wife, and the name of the town he is sitting in.
Later a man walks in who happens to be called by that name, whose wife happens to be called by that name, who lives in that town. Every word on the page describes his situation accurately. He takes the document and gives it to his wife in front of witnesses, exactly as the law requires.
The Rambam rules that nothing happened. She is not divorced. The marriage stands.
There is no error anywhere in the document. Every letter is correct, every name is correct, the delivery was correct. What is missing is not on the page at all. The get was not written for the sake of this man and for the sake of this woman, and a get that was not written for their sake is void. The third chapter of the laws of Gerushin is that one requirement followed all the way down, and it runs further than anyone would guess.
A Document That Is Perfect and Void
The Rambam builds the case in three escalating steps, and each one removes an excuse. First, the scribe's practice copy. Someone might say that of course it fails, since it was never meant to divorce anyone. So the second case. A man genuinely had a get written in order to divorce his wife, then changed his mind. A neighbor notices it and points out that they share a name and their wives share a name. He takes it and divorces his wife with it. Invalid. It was written for the sake of a divorce, just not for the sake of these two people.
Someone might still say that it failed because it belonged to a different household. So the third case. One man, two wives with the same name. He has a get written intending to divorce the older, then changes his mind and gives it to the younger. Invalid. Same husband, same name on the page, same handwriting, same intent to divorce. The document was written for a woman, and it was given to a woman, and they were not the same woman.
Everything visible about the document is identical in all three cases. What differs is invisible, unverifiable from the page, and decisive.
If the husband tries to keep his options open by telling the scribe to write it and he will divorce whichever wife he chooses later, the Rambam rules the status of the divorce doubtful, which in these laws is its own kind of misery. A decision deferred is not a decision made, and the document written during the deferral carries the ambiguity in it.
Then a detail that closes the last door. If a get was not written with the proper intent, it stays void even if the scribe goes back over the letters and traces them again with the right intention this time. Writing on top of writing is not writing. You cannot repair a document by darkening the ink. There is nothing to fix on the page, because what went wrong was never on the page.
And one case easy to read past. A man tells a scribe to write a get for a certain woman now, to be held until he marries her and then used. Void, because at the moment it was written she could not have been divorced by it at all. But if he says, write a get for the woman who is already consecrated to me, and after the marriage is consummated I will divorce her, then the divorce holds. The difference is whether a real bond existed when the pen moved. A document cannot be written for a relationship that does not yet exist.
The Four Lines Left Blank
Here the chapter does something practical and quietly beautiful. Scribes have slow afternoons, and the Sages did not want a woman waiting while a document was produced from nothing. So they permitted a scribe to write out the standard text of a get in advance, keeping it ready.
But he must leave four places empty. The place for the man's name. The place for the woman's name. The date. And the sentence that does the actual work: behold, you are permitted to any man. Those four are the toref, the essential portion, and they are the only parts that have to be written for the sake of this husband and this wife. The rest, the whole frame of the document, can be prepared for nobody in particular. Afterwards the witnesses sign, and they too must sign for their sake.
Read the list again, because the list is the teaching. Who he is. Who she is. When this is happening. And what is now true about her. Everything that can be borrowed from a general form is borrowed. What cannot be borrowed is identity, time, and release.
The Rambam then takes up the witnesses, and does something he does rarely enough that it stops you. If the scribe wrote the get properly but the witnesses signed without the required intent, and the husband nevertheless gave it to her in front of witnesses who observed the transfer, the get is valid by Torah law and merely unacceptable by Rabbinic decree. Why not void? Because the requirement that witnesses sign a get was never Scriptural. It was instituted as a protection for society, and specifically for the woman, in case the witnesses to the transfer should die and she be left unable to prove her own status.
Some authorities disagreed and held that such a get is a kind of forgery and therefore void. The Rambam records their view and then writes, in his own voice, that this ruling does not appear correct to him. Although it resembles a forgery, he says, it is not an absolute forgery, and since it was transferred in the presence of acceptable witnesses it is only unacceptable by Rabbinic decree. He is arguing for the woman. A ruling of void would leave her married to a man who believes he has divorced her, and the Rambam will not let a defect in the signatures do that when the Torah never demanded the signatures at all.
The Name, and the Man Who May Write It
The rest of the chapter concerns identification, and it is more gripping than that word suggests. An agent carrying a get loses it, and it is found. Lost in a place where caravans do not pass, it is presumed to be the same document even after a long time. Lost where caravans pass, it counts only if it was found immediately, before any passerby had time to linger, or if it was found inside its original container and the agent can identify the length and width of the rolled document. If another man in that place bears the same name and a stranger passed by, the status becomes doubtful. But if the witnesses can name a distinguishing mark, a hole next to a particular letter, or can say that they signed only one get with these names, the identification holds even after a long time, even where caravans pass, even where two men share the name.
And the case that reads like a parable. Two men with the same names send gittin at the same time, the documents are switched, and nobody knows which is which. The Rambam's solution is to give both documents to each woman in the presence of witnesses, so that each of them receives, among the pages in her hand, the one that was written for her. And then the consequence: if one of the two is lost, the other is void, because neither woman can now receive what was hers.
On names, a person with two names is written by the name most used, with the phrase added, or by whatever names he is called. A nickname is acceptable. But if the less used name was written, even with that phrase, the get is unacceptable. And if the name of the husband, or of the wife, or of the town, was written incorrectly, the get is void, and the catch all phrase does not save it. So intent alone is not enough either. This is the counterweight the chapter needs. Writing for her sake does not mean that sincerity covers a misspelled name.
Finally, who may write a get. All are fit except five: a gentile, a servant, a deaf mute, a mentally incompetent person, and a minor. A woman may write her own. And the Rambam gives the reason rather than leaving a list. A get must be written for the sake of the husband and the wife, and a gentile writes with his own intent. The three others lack the capacity to form the intent. The servant is excluded because the laws of marriage and divorce do not apply to him at all. Every disqualification is about intent, not about competence with a pen. Which is why the leniency follows exactly: if one of the five wrote only the standard frame and a competent adult Jew wrote the four essential portions with the proper intent, the get is acceptable.
The Unifying Principle
Lishmah, for its sake, is one of the most demanding ideas in Jewish law, and the laws of the get are where it is most exposed. A get is not a record of a divorce. It is the divorce. So the question of what the writer had in mind is not a question about sincerity or piety. It is a question about what the object actually is.
The Alter Rebbe, in Tanya, brings the teaching of the Zohar that Torah studied without love and awe does not ascend, because those two are the wings, and a bird without wings cannot rise. He is not saying the learning was wasted. He is saying it stayed where it was. That is the get written without intent: a genuine document, correct in every letter, lying flat on the table. The Baal Shem Tov taught that a person is located wherever his thoughts are. Not that his thoughts reveal where he is, but that they constitute it. Read that alongside a get written for practice, and the ruling stops sounding technical. The scribe's hand was in the room. His attention was on the shapes of the letters. Nothing was done for anyone, so nothing was done.
What makes the chapter more than a lesson about kavanah is the other half. Write with perfect intention and spell her town wrong, and the get is void by Torah law. The phrase or by whatever names she is called, which sounds like it should cover everything, covers nothing once the name is wrong. Intent without precision is as empty as precision without intent, and the thing the law is protecting with that insistence is a particular woman's ability to know what her own status is.
Modern Application
It is worth saying plainly that these are laws about the hardest day in a family's life, and the Torah does not treat that day lightly. What is remarkable is where all the stringency is aimed. Not at making divorce harder. At making it exact.
The Torah will not let a marriage end by accident. It will not let it end with a borrowed document, or a form filled in, or a page that happened to fit. A man cannot divorce his wife with something he found. If this is going to happen, it will happen with her name, written for her, on a day that is recorded, with a sentence composed for her release. She is not permitted to be a category. Even at the end, especially at the end, she has to be addressed by name.
That is a standard worth holding up against ordinary life, where almost nothing is done for a particular person. Most work is done for a role. Most kindness is done for a category. A great deal of what a family does for each other is done out of a general policy of being decent, which is not nothing, and is also not a get. The four blanks are a good instrument for checking. Who is this actually for. Who am I, doing it. What day is it, meaning is this a real moment or a habit running on its own. And what does the other person actually get out of it, stated in a sentence. The Lubavitcher Rebbe pressed continually on the same point the Rambam presses here, that a mitzvah is done with a face in front of you. The frame can be prepared in advance, the way a scribe keeps forms ready, and there is nothing wrong with the practice. But the moment arrives when the name has to go in, and nobody else can write it.
The Closing
Two days from now the structures go up, and every one of them is built by somebody for somebody. The season is about to be full of activity that could easily be done for no one. Meals produced, guests received, a roof laid down and the stars checked through the gaps, all of it correct and none of it necessarily for anyone in particular.
The scribe with his stack of prepared forms is the honest image for these two days. He has done real work. The frame is genuine, the letters are right, the paper is good. And the document on the top of his pile is not yet anything at all, because it belongs to nobody.
A life can be written the way a scribe writes practice copies, every letter correct and nothing addressed to anybody. Before the fragile house goes up, take one thing you are about to do and put the name in. Not the role, not the category, not the general good intention. The name, spelled right, on this day, for this person, with the sentence that says what they are now free to do.