Thursday, October 1, 2026
Forbidden to Both
Gerushin 10|Sefer Nashim
Two Gittin and No Husband
A woman’s husband travels and does not come back. Months pass, and two witnesses come before a court and testify that he died. The court believes them, because that is what a court does with two witnesses, and permits her to remarry. She remarries. And then her first husband walks back into the city.
The Rambam rules that she must be divorced by both of them. Both men write her a get, and she is forbidden to either of them again, forever. She relied on a court. She relied on witnesses. She did nothing that anybody in this chapter criticizes. A few lines later he itemizes what she is owed, and every entry is a negative. Neither man takes an object she finds or the profits of her work. Neither can annul her vows. Neither owes her the money of her marriage contract or her sustenance, and if she took support from either of them she returns it. Neither answers for property of hers that wore out or was lost. The accounting is thorough and the total is nothing. What does a legal system owe a person it has not managed to protect?
Three Words and What They Cost
The chapter opens as a glossary, which is itself a statement. Nine chapters have used three expressions, and only now does the Rambam say what each one costs. When the text has said a get is void, nothing happened under Scriptural law. The woman is married in the full sense; if she has remarried she must leave, and a child she bore the second man is illegitimate. Then an unexpected precision: if her husband is a priest she is not forbidden to him as a divorced woman, because she is not one. The exception is the man whose document says, you are divorced from me, but you are not permitted to marry anyone else. That divorce fails too, and yet by rabbinic law she is now barred from the priesthood, since the verse speaks of a woman divorced from her husband. The Rambam calls it the wisp of a get: a divorce that accomplishes nothing and still leaves a trace.
When the text has said a get is unacceptable, the defect is rabbinic only. By Scriptural law she is divorced, so she is forbidden to the priesthood. She should not remarry, but if she has, she need not leave and her children are legitimate; a second valid get is written while she stays with the second husband. If he is scrupulous enough to divorce her voluntarily, that is praiseworthy, provided she has borne him no children. If she has, he should not, because it would put a question mark beside his own sons’ names for life. The Rambam will not let a man buy his scrupulousness with his children’s reputation.
And where the status of the divorce is in doubt, she should not remarry; if she has, she must leave, and her children by the second man are of doubtful status. Then the ruling that shows how literally all this is meant. If a man divorced his wife with an unacceptable or doubtful get and wants her back, she is permitted to him, and he need not renew the marriage, recite the seven marriage blessings, or write her a new marriage contract. Nothing was interrupted, so nothing needs restarting.
Forbidden to Both
Now the hard rulings. Where a woman was given a void get and remarried, our Sages ordained that the second husband must divorce her, so that nobody says a married woman was handed from one man to another without a get. She must also receive a second get from the first, so that she will be permitted to marry anyone at all. And she is forbidden to both of them forever, even if she entered the second marriage with no idea anything was wrong, because the concern is what will be said: that a man took his divorcee back after another man had her.
Read that slowly and notice who it is about. The stringency is not aimed at her conduct. She has none to answer for. It is aimed at what a watching community would conclude, and she absorbs the cost of the community’s clarity.
Which is why the next ruling matters so much. If she had only been consecrated, the kiddushin given and the marriage not consummated, and then the first husband returns or the get proves void, she is permitted to her first husband and the second need not give her a get at all. The reason is structural: a marriage bond cannot be established with a woman forbidden by a severe prohibition, so there was nothing to dissolve. And people will simply assume the consecration was made on a condition that went unfulfilled.
That halacha is the key to the chapter. The difference between a woman who goes home and a woman forbidden to two men for life is not her intention, her knowledge or her innocence. It is whether an onlooker has an innocent explanation available. A man whose wife traveled abroad hears she died and marries her sister, and the wife turns out to be alive: the sister needs no get and the wife is permitted to him, because that marriage never attached. But where he had only consecrated the first woman, the sister must receive a get lest people say the first kiddushin were conditional, and the first woman then becomes forbidden to him. One ruling protecting appearances creates the next prohibition.
Resolve, Suspicion, and Rumor
The second half of the chapter turns from the woman’s status to the men around her, and the first thing it legislates is the inside of a man’s mind. Where a man divorces his wife because of unsavory reports, or because she is indiscriminate with vows, he is told: inform her that you are divorcing her to chastise her, and know that you will never be able to remarry her. The reason is given in full. She may marry another man, reform, and live chastely with him, and her first husband may then say that had he known, he would not have divorced her. A divorce he would not have given resembles one given on an unfulfilled condition, which would mean that retroactively the get was void and her later children illegitimate. So the law refuses him the comfort of a door left open. The same applies where he divorces her because she is an aylonit or because she bleeds during relations. The transgression is in the reservation, not in the reunion.
Then a run of rulings about people with something to gain. The agent who validated the get, the lone witness who testified her husband died, and the sage who ruled her forbidden by a vow may none of them marry her, lest one of them was attracted to her and testified for that reason. Yet each of these women may marry such a man’s son, on a principle stated in one clean line: a person will not commit a sin so that another person will benefit. And the suspicion arises only where a single witness freed her, never where two did.
What follows is the chapter’s most generous presumption, and then its limit. When a man divorces his wife and then has relations with her before witnesses, before she has married anyone else, we assume he remarried her and intended consecration, not licentiousness, even if we watched him pay her money. So she is consecrated and needs a second get. But when the geonim extended that to any woman at all, the Rambam calls such opinions far from the paths of Torah judgment and not fit to rely on. The presumption was said about a man’s wife. It was never a statement that men behave well.
Then rumor. Where a woman is known to be married and a rumor spreads that she was divorced, it is given no credence whatsoever, even if the entire city repeats it. But where a rumor of kiddushin was reported in court, a rumor of divorce from those kiddushin releases her. She was forbidden on the basis of a rumor; she is permitted on the basis of a rumor.
The chapter closes on the husband’s own conduct, and it does not flatter him. He should not marry a woman if he intends to divorce her, nor keep her as his wife and live with her while intending to divorce her. He should not divorce a first wife unless he discovers sexual misconduct, and he should not hurry to divorce her; a second wife, if he hates her, he may send away. And the last halacha. If his wife becomes a deaf mute he may divorce her and the divorce is effective. But if she loses control of her mental or emotional faculties he may not divorce her until she becomes stable again, so that she will not be left unattended and violated, because she cannot care for herself. He must provide a place for her and food and drink from her own resources, and he may marry another woman. He is not obligated in her sustenance, her garments or her conjugal rights, nor to pay for her medical treatment, nor to redeem her if she is taken captive. And if he transgresses and divorces her, the divorce is binding and he may remove her from his home.
The Law of the Door Left Open
What the chapter hunts, from the first halacha to the last, is provisionality. A get given with a reservation in the back of the mind is the most dangerous document in the treatise, because if it was really conditional then it was void, and if it was void then the children of her second marriage are illegitimate, and that cannot be repaired afterward. So the law reaches into the man’s intention before he acts and demands that he close the door himself. A marriage entered while already planning the exit is forbidden for the same reason.
The woman forbidden to both men is that same principle paying its bill. Her position is ambiguous through no fault of hers, the law will not let an ambiguity of that kind stand in public, and so it resolves it in the direction that protects the institution and then tells her the cost, in the language of a ledger. This is where the Alter Rebbe’s care in Iggeret HaTeshuvah earns its place. He insists that returning a person and repairing what the person did are two different operations, and will not let the first be mistaken for the second. She is not blamed. She is not punished. And she is also not restored, because the law declines a restoration it cannot accomplish.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that providence reaches every detail, down to a leaf turning over in the wind, which means it reaches the parts of a life a person never chose. That teaching is often used carelessly, as if it made suffering comfortable. It does not. What it does is refuse to call her situation an accident, which is a harder consolation. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe returned often to a point this chapter needs, that the severity of a law and the worth of a person are separate subjects. Sfat Emet reads the rulings made for appearances as concerning the honor of the Torah as a public thing, which has to stay legible to everyone. She is standing, through no choice of hers, at the one place where it became illegible.
An Exit Already Written
Of everything here, the ruling with the longest reach sounds the least dramatic. A man should not marry a woman if he intends to divorce her, and should not keep her as a wife and live with her while intending to divorce her. That is not a rule about marriage law. It is a rule about holding a person provisionally.
The posture is familiar now, and it has a vocabulary that makes it sound responsible: keeping options open, not rushing, seeing how it goes. The arrangement is that the other person is fully in it and you are ninety percent in it, and the missing ten percent is never stated out loud, because stating it would end the thing. The Rambam forbids exactly that. Not the ending. The reservation.
And he gives the reason in the law of the conditional get. A reservation held privately does not stay private and does not stay inert. It changes what the act was. The man who divorced his wife while quietly thinking he might take her back if she improved did not give a clean get, and years later other people’s children carry the consequence. That is why he is made to say it out loud, to her face, in advance.
The second thing to carry out is the chapter’s honesty about where a cost lands. Two witnesses testified truthfully as far as they knew. A court ruled correctly on the evidence in front of it. Nobody behaved badly, and a woman lost both marriages. Most of the serious damage people do is shaped like that: not malice, but a confident decision on good information, made by someone who will not be paying if it turns out incomplete.
And then the last halacha, where the chapter is least willing to be comfortable. A man may not divorce a wife who has lost control of her mental faculties, and the reason given is that she would be left unattended and violated. The Sages took away his legal power precisely at the moment she could not protect herself. That is the real material, and it should be read alongside the list of what he does not owe her, which is long and cold and includes her medical treatment and her ransom from captivity. The Rambam does not harmonize the two for us. He states the protection, states its limits, and lets us see exactly where a legal obligation stops. What happens past that line is not law. It is whoever decides to show up.
Where the Chapter Will Not Soften
She is still standing there with two gittin. One from the man she married in good faith and one from the man everyone believed was dead. She consulted a court. She waited. She did everything a person in her position is supposed to do, and the chapter rules, without any softening at all, that she may live with neither of them.
A religious imagination that cannot sit with that page will go looking for a lesson that makes it all right, and there is none available. What the Rambam offers instead is accuracy. He tells her precisely what she may and may not do, and precisely what she is owed, which is nothing. And he spends the second half of the chapter making sure the next man cannot create this situation by keeping a reservation to himself.
Everything that went wrong here began with somebody holding something back. A door left open in a man’s mind, a testimony one witness short of certain, a status nobody said out loud. The Rambam cannot give her back what that cost. He can insist that you say the thing, in front of her, before it costs anyone else.