On Monday, those who adhere to the regimen known as daf yomi—whereby a single folio page of the Talmud is studied each day—completed the tractate of Gittin, or “bills of divorce.” In Jewish law, the issuance of such a writ, or get, is a complex procedure, and Gittin is the basic source for most halakhic jurisprudence concerning legal documents. Dovid Bashevkin explores the tractate’s ethical meaning:
Tractate Gittin is written backward. [It] begins with a discussion about sending a get overseas. Not a word about more basic questions: how do you write a get? What is a get? It is only on the final page of the tractate that we find the beginning: under what grounds divorce is permissible. And for those who have ever been through a divorce of any kind, maybe the structure of this tractate provides a poetic lesson of sorts.
The entire opening of the tractate describes a couple who live apart, requiring the husband to send the divorce document overseas. It’s a strange situation to begin the discussion of divorce. . . . This question occupies the first six pages of the tractate. Why spend so much time on such a remote scenario?
Rabbi Yehuda Brandes offers a moving theory that highlights the difficulty of achieving closure. “All of these issues,” he explains, “are a cover for something much deeper—the emotional difficulty of truly severing the connection between the man and his wife.”
[B]uried in the fifth chapter of the tractate are stories that retell the events leading to the destruction of the Temple. Traditionally, these are read on Tisha b’Av, when we mourn the destruction of our Temple. Why are they housed in Tractate Gittin? Because Gittin is not just about divorce between a husband and wife; it also retells the marital rupture between the Jewish people and God. If our relationship with God should ideally be seen as a marriage, then when God becomes distant, it feels like a divorce.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/gett-shape-talmud-divorce-tractate-gittin