He Must Send Her Away, Not Himself

The Hook

A man writes a document and hands it to his wife. On it are the words: I am no longer your husband. Nothing has happened. She is married exactly as she was an hour ago.

The same man, at the same table, with the same intention and the same grief, writes instead: you are hereby permitted to any man. That is a divorce, complete and immediate.

The Rambam draws the difference out of a single word in the verse. And he will send her away. Not himself away from her. A get that announces the husband's withdrawal is not a bill of divorce, because withdrawal is a thing a man does to himself. What the Torah requires is that he release her, and release has to be written in the second person or it has not been written at all.

Today the one chapter track turns a page it has been walking toward for a long time. The laws of marriage are finished, and what opens now is Hilchot Gerushin, the laws of divorce. The Sages treated this subject with no lightness; the Gemara says the altar itself sheds tears over a man who divorces the wife of his youth. It is one of the most technically exacting chapters in the Mishneh Torah, and the exactness is not coldness. It is what seriousness looks like written down as law, and it arrives the morning after a day on which nothing was left to be inferred.

Ten Things in One Verse

A woman is released only by receiving a written bill of divorce, called a get, and the Rambam opens by listing ten things the Torah itself establishes as fundamental to it.

The husband must initiate the divorce of his own will. He must effect it by a written document and by no other means. The document must say that he is divorcing her and releasing her from his domain. It must sever the bond entirely. It must be written for her sake. Once written, nothing must remain except handing it over. He must hand it over, before witnesses, for the sake of divorce, and he or an agent he appoints must be the one who gives it. Everything else about a get, the Rambam adds, including the date and the signatures, is an institution of the Sages.

Then he shows where the ten come from, and all of them come from one verse in Deuteronomy. If it comes to pass that she does not find favor in his eyes, and he will write her a bill of divorce, and place it in her hand, and send her from his home.

She does not find favor in his eyes teaches that the divorce proceeds only on his initiative, and one forced on an unwilling husband is void. By Torah law the woman's consent is not required, an asymmetry the Rambam states without softening, and one that Rabbenu Gershom would restrict centuries later by ordaining that a man may not divorce his wife against her will, which is the universal practice now. And he will write teaches that it must be a document, for her that it must be written for this woman, a bill of divorce that it must cut and leave him no jurisdiction over her at all, since a partial release is no release, and he will place it in her hand that she is not divorced until the get is in her hand, her agent's hand, or her domain. And he will send her teaches that the writing must send her away and not send him away from her.

The Words That Do It

The Rambam then works out what may actually be written.

Behold you are sent away. Behold you are divorced. You are independent. You are permitted to any man. Any of these works, and the essence of a get, he says, is that last one: you are now permitted to any man.

I am no longer your husband does not work. I am no longer the one who consecrated you does not work. I am no longer your man does not work. All three are sincere, all three are almost certainly true, and none of them divorces anybody, because the verse said send her and these send him.

And one more failure, the quietest and the most revealing. If he writes, behold you are free, the divorce is not effective, because that is the language used to release a slave. It sounds generous. But it is the wrong release, drawn from the wrong relationship, and a woman is not a servant being let go. The law will not accept a formula borrowed from somewhere else, however kindly it sounds.

A release is not a mood. It is a sentence, addressed to a particular person, saying exactly what she is now free to do.

The last phrase, and he will send her from his home, might have meant that the divorce takes effect only when she leaves. It does not. The divorce is complete the moment the get reaches her hand, even while she is standing in his house. But the phrase is not idle: if he divorces her and then does not send her out, and the two go on living under one roof, it is treated as though he divorced her and married her again, and she needs a second get before she can go.

Nothing Left but the Handing Over

Write, and place. The order of the verbs is itself a law: once the get is written, the only thing left should be handing it over.

Which produces some of the most memorable rulings in the chapter. A man may write a get on the horn of a cow, but then he must give her the cow, and if he cuts the horn off after writing on it the get is invalid, because something besides writing and giving had to happen. He may not write it on a plant still growing, nor on a leaf in a flowerpot, even one he hands over whole, though he may write it on the clay of the pot itself.

Then the requirement that it be given for the sake of divorce, where the chapter becomes unexpectedly human. If he hands it to her calling it a promissory note or a mezuzah, or slips it into her hand while she sleeps so that she wakes and finds it there, the get is void, unless he tells her afterwards: behold, this is your get.

And then a case that has more compassion in it than most people expect from a legal code. A man tells the witnesses, see this get that I am giving her, and then turns to his wife and says, take this promissory note. The divorce is valid. He told the witnesses the truth, and he lied to her only because he was ashamed to face her. The law reads the shame correctly and does not punish anyone for it.

And he must give it. She may not take it. A get lying on the ground that he tells her to pick up is void, and a get tied to his hand or his thigh that she unties herself is void, and in both cases it stays void even if he afterwards says, behold this is your get, because neither he nor his agent ever gave her anything. Yet the bar he sets for giving is almost nothing. If he bends his body toward her, or merely tilts his hand so that she can take it, and says behold this is your get, the divorce is valid. He does not have to place it. He has to lean.

Who Has to Be Watching

The requirement that witnesses observe the transfer is what the Rambam calls the essence of the divorce, and his reason is stark. It cannot be that yesterday this woman was forbidden and relations with her carried a death penalty, and today she is permitted to any man, with nobody having seen the change. A get given privately, or before a single witness, is utterly void.

The signatures are a different matter. They are a Rabbinic ordinance, in case the two men who watched the transfer should die and leave the woman holding a page no more useful than a shard of pottery, so the testimony was moved inside the document. Which gives a result that sounds backwards until you see the logic: a get nobody signed is acceptable if witnesses saw it handed over, while a get signed by two unsuitable men is unacceptable, because it looks like a forgery. Missing testimony is survivable. False testimony is not.

The get must be read aloud before the transfer witnesses. If it was read and then thrown into the sea or a fire, the divorce stands, and the husband's later claim that it was some other document is not believed. If it was never read and then destroyed, her status is in doubt, and doubt here is the worst outcome of all.

And then the ruling that shows what all this precision is for. The signing witnesses must be able to read and to write their names, and if a man cannot write, the court traces his signature in spittle, or in anything leaving no permanent mark, and he signs over the tracing. This is permitted for no other legal document. The Rambam gives the reason in one clause: so that Jewish women will not be forced to live without a marriage partner.

The Unifying Principle

Everything in this chapter is built to stop a marriage from ending by erosion.

It cannot end because he stopped coming home, or because both of them understand that it is over, or in a mood or a slow withdrawal of attention. Somebody has to write a document, for her, saying what she is now free to do, and lean toward her, and put it in her hand, and say what it is, in front of two people who read it aloud first.

The Alter Rebbe describes thought, speech and action as the three garments of the soul, and marks the difference between them precisely: thought is the garment that stays inside a person, while speech and action are the garments that go out and reach somebody else. A thing that has never left your thought has not happened to anyone but you. The whole architecture of the get is the Torah insisting that the end of a marriage is not an internal event.

The Baal Shem Tov went further about speech itself, teaching that the letters by which heaven and earth were made are not a description of the world but the continuous flow of its life. On that reading a get is not a record of a divorce that happened somewhere else, in the heart, weeks ago. The get is the divorce. Before it is written and handed over, there is no divorce anywhere, however finished the marriage feels.

And the second half of the principle is easy to miss under all the technicality. Every one of these rules protects her. The date so that she is not left with an undatable document, the signatures so that she is not left holding a shard, the reading aloud so that she is never in doubt about what she received. And when the rules themselves threatened to strand a woman, because the only witnesses available could not write, the Sages bent their own ordinance rather than let her be trapped. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned often to the idea that the compassion of Torah is not found in its exceptions but inside its details. Here it is unmistakable.

Modern Application

Most endings in a life are not marriages, and almost none of them are performed.

The friendship that did not end, it thinned. The partnership nobody dissolved, it just stopped producing anything. The parent and the adult child who have not spoken in four years without either one ever saying what happened. Somebody withdrew, and withdrawal feels like an ending from the inside and is not one from the outside, because the other person was never released.

What that costs is clarity, and clarity is not a small thing to take from someone. The woman whose get is unread, or thrown into the fire before anyone looked at it, is neither free nor married. She is in doubt, and the Rambam treats doubt as the one intolerable outcome. A person left in doubt cannot build anything on their situation, because they do not know what it is.

The instruction hidden in the halacha is uncomfortably practical. If something is over, the burden is on the one ending it to say so, in the second person, out loud, where it can be heard. Not I am done with this. You are free of me. And if it is not over, then the withdrawal was never an ending at all, and something has to be said about that instead.

The Closing

She can be divorced standing in his kitchen, and she can live in his house for a year and not be divorced at all. The door is not what does it. The handing over is what does it.

Yesterday was built on the same principle and almost nobody notices. Nothing about Yom Kippur was left to be inferred. The whole day was speech, not a private feeling of regret but a confession said aloud in order and said again, because the Torah does not accept an internal ending any more than it accepts an internal divorce. Nobody was left in doubt about what had been received.

And this is why the chapter that opens the laws of divorce is really a chapter about the dignity of the person being released. The law's concern is not that the husband feel finished. It is that she know, with certainty, from a document written for her and read in her hearing, exactly what she is now permitted to do. That is the standard the Torah sets for an ending between two people, and it is set high on purpose. There are people in your life right now who have never been told. They are not in your house and they are not out of it. They are holding a page nobody ever read to them, waiting to hear whether they are free.