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Why does divorce require witnesses (eidei kiyum) when a woman's own admission would seem sufficient? The shiur develops the Rambam (רמב"ם)'s yesod that marriage and divorce are public matters, not private transactions. Because beis din bears responsibility for capital punishment in adultery cases, the community must know who is married—removing kiddushin and gittin from the realm of hodaas baal din and placing them under dover d'Oraysa mi-mamon.
This shiur analyzes Gittin 4a, focusing on the fundamental question of why divorce requires witnesses (eidei kiyum) when ordinarily a litigant's admission (hodaas baal din) should be sufficient. The Gemara (גמרא) establishes that unlike monetary matters where hodaas baal din works, divorce requires formal witnesses due to the principle of dover dover mi-mamon—a gezeiras hashavuah that extends the requirement of witnesses from monetary law to gittin. The mefarshim offer multiple approaches to reconcile this with the case of meis ba'alah (when a wife reports her husband's death), where a single witness—or even the woman herself—is believed. The first teretz holds that eidei kiyum is required by both gittin and meis ba'alah, but in the latter case the principle of kol mekadesh adas daas rabanan mekadesh allows the rabbanan to uproot the marriage retroactively. The second teretz maintains that eidei kiyum applies only to get, not to meis ba'alah, so dover dover mi-mamon doesn't extend to death testimony. The Lechem Mishneh offers a third approach: neither case requires eidei kiyum per se; rather, one needs certainty, and yesh dayah kamitzvas provides that certainty in death cases but not in gittin.
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Gittin 4a
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