Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Outdated Gittin (Divorce) Process - כתיבה וחתימת גיטין

I observed 2 Gittin proceedings a couple of years ago. I was really struck by how outdated the process is in the context of our modern world and technology. When considering the core Gemara issues  from which the halachot come from it seems downright farcical some of the practices we still have in place nowadays in the כתיבת גיטין process.  A few points that readily come to mind:
  • Writing the גט with a stylus (קולמוס) is fine by me but the signing of the witnesses (עדי חתימה) with a stylus makes absolutely no sense. Literally no one nowadays signs their name or even uses a stylus hence the entire concept of קיום עדי חתימה is out the window if no one can connect the witness' stylus signature with the witness!!.... I don't understand why no one sees this as an issue...

    Assuming one wants to continue the halachot of עדי חתימה nowadays (one could argue that modern day databases and archives could take the place of עדי חתימה particularly since we hold עדי כתיבה כרתי) it still would make alot more sense to require the witnesses to sign the Get in the same manner they sign on their financial statements-- a pen-- so that the mechanism of קיום חתימה is logically possible.
  • The witnesses signing their name as Reuven ben Yaakov also could use a fine tuning. Nowadays there are a plethora of better criteria that could be used as a form of ID of a witness such as Last Name, Social Security #, fingerprint, saliva sample, etc; who in the world even references their friends or business associates by "Reuven ben Yaakov"? Again, the whole mechanism to allow for קיום עדי חתימה ceases to apply. 
  • The meticulousness of writing all various names and spellings of the location of the man and woman.... wouldn't the use of the International Standard of Longitude and Latitude be a better and more precise way of  getting the point across. I mean you can still keep writing the city you're located in and all that but once you add in the Longitude and Latitude coordinates there would then be no need to further add details such as  דיתבא על נהרא פלן and the like....
All this I say while admitting the fact that my knowledge of Gittin is truly very limited and כל שאינו יודע בטיב  גיטין וקידושין לא יהא לא עסק עמהן but still I feel the issue should be raised and as yet I haven't seen it anywhere... will keep searching...

2 comments:

Eliezer Eisenberg said...

We are very particular about אם כן אתה מוציא לעז על הראשונות. Otherwise, you would surely be right. As for using a quill, that's just a habit, not a halacha. I'm sure plenty of people sign with pens.

Daniel said...

Good points. Don't know if it sways me enough to change my opinion but still good points. As regards to writing with a stylus... to me it should be absolutely אסור not optional since it's essentially אי אפשר לקיימו.