Gittin 84: Conditions that Cannot be Fulfilled

How can a get be valid if the husband requires that his wife meet an impossible condition before the get can take effect?  A number of examples are shared.  He might insist that she eat pork.  He might tell her to fly to the sky or to go to the depths of the Great Sea (the Mediterranean).  He might tell her to swallow a four foot reed.  He might tell her to have sexual intercourse with someone in particular - in fact, he might tell her to have sexual intercourse with her father or with his father, those of forbidden relationships.  Is the woman able to marry if she meets one of these conditions?

Rabbi Yehuda ben Teima states that a condition that is simply impossible to meet renders the get valid.  How could this be?  It is assumed that the husband included that condition simply to upset his wife. The condition is thus ignored and the get is valid.

The rabbis are aware that a husband might divorce his wife and offer her to another man simply by adding a specific condition in her get.  If that were allowed, husbands could use this glitch to justify giving their wives to other men as "gifts".  If a woman met the condition in order to get divorced, she would be labelled licentious.  However, the rabbis note that a woman who did this would become divorced as the act happened, and that divorce could take place retroactively.  Conversely, it is argued that she could be flogged for her sexual licentiousness in the moment before intercourse took place.  Still, this sounds a lot like using a woman as a sexual commodity; a gift or a prostitute.  Certainly the rabbis were concerned about this possibility.

Similarly, the rabbis worry about women participating in a condition that had her having intercourse with a close male relative.  The rabbis argue that most upstanding men would not give in to such an offer, even if the wife offered them money to do so, for forbidden relationships are such serious crimes.  There is a strange balancing here between wives as simple servants of their husbands' whims and wives as seductresses, using these circumstances to flaunt their sexual prowess.  I am not clear about the rabbis' understandings of women's motivations and limitations.

The rabbis are careful to separate conditions that demand wives breach Torah law from conditions that demand wives breach rabbinic law.  They also consider differences between oral and written stipulations, though they do not take those circumstances with as much importance.  If a woman is told that her get will go into effect after she eats pork, for example, she is permitted to eat pork and then be divorced.  She will be punished for that sin, but she will be divorced.  

Similarly, if a woman is  told that she will have her get after she sleeps with a certain man who is not her relative or another forbidden relationship, she will be divorced retroactively immediately after the beginning of intercourse with that man.  But if she is asked to have intercourse with her father or if she is asked to fly to the sky before being given her get, the get is valid without fulfilment of the condition.  Torah law cannot be broken to uphold a contract, nor can a woman be expected to defy gravity to receive her get.

While Abaye is more lenient and Rava is more stringent about gittin being valid including challenging conditions, Rava states an interesting comment toward the end of amud (b).  He says that scribes should ask husbands to be silent while they are writing their gittin.  This way the central portion of the get is penned before the husband can add a condition.  This causes me to wonder about what the rabbis were witnessing in their communities.  Were they aware of husbands using their power to victimize their wives through the addition of disturbing or ridiculous conditions within the gittin?