What Does a Healthy Marriage Look Like? A Powerful Lesson from the Talmud

The Torah places the highest value on the institution of marriage. Yet there are times when there is no alternative but divorce. In this week’s parashah, the Torah presents the laws governing the dissolution of a marriage:

“When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it comes to pass that she does not find favor in his eyes because he has found in her an unseemly matter, he shall write her a bill of divorce, place it in her hand, and send her from his house” (Deuteronomy 24:1).

Tractate Gittin discusses the detailed laws of Jewish divorce. Its final Mishnah, however, raises a broader and more fundamental question: Under what circumstances is divorce justified? A closer look at this Mishnah can teach us something profound about how our Sages understood marriage itself.

When Is Divorce Justified?

The final Mishnah in Gittin records three opinions:

“Beit Shammai say: A man should not divorce his wife unless he has found in her a matter of sexual immorality, as it is stated, ‘because he has found in her an unseemly matter.’ Beit Hillel say: Even if she burned his food, as it is stated, ‘because he has found in her an unseemly matter.’ Rabbi Akiva says: Even if he found another woman more beautiful than she, as it is stated, ‘and it comes to pass that she does not find favor in his eyes.’”

Beit Shammai’s position is readily understandable. Divorce, in their view, is justified when something serious has occurred that fundamentally damages the marriage, such as infidelity. As long as such critical boundaries have not been crossed, divorce is not warranted.

Beit Hillel, however, appear to go much further. They say that divorce may be justified even if a wife burns her husband’s food. They derive this from the Torah’s use of the word davar, “matter,” understanding it to include misconduct beyond the grave offense described by Beit Shammai.

At first glance, this is difficult to understand. Should a marriage really end because a meal was burned?

The question becomes even stronger when we remember Hillel’s famous teaching: “Be among the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace.”Avot DeRabbi Natan describes how Aaron HaKohen went to great lengths to restore peace between husbands and wives. How, then, could Beit Hillel suggest that something as seemingly trivial as burned food could justify divorce?

Some commentators explain that Beit Hillel are referring to a situation in which the wife deliberately burns the food. The issue is not a cooking mistake but an intention to hurt or antagonize her husband. If one spouse deliberately seeks to make the other uncomfortable, something fundamental has already begun to deteriorate.

But the Mishnah may contain an even deeper message.

Rabbi Akiva’s Surprising Opinion

Rabbi Akiva’s position is even more difficult to understand. He states that divorce may be justified if a husband finds another woman more beautiful than his wife, based on the words, “she does not find favor in his eyes.”

Can that really be Rabbi Akiva’s view of marriage?

After all, Rabbi Akiva himself teaches in Tractate Shabbat (25b), “Who is wealthy? One who has a wife who is beautiful in her deeds.” Rabbi Akiva certainly understood the value of inner character, and his own extraordinary relationship with his wife Rachel is one of the most famous marriages in Jewish tradition.

How, then, can we understand his words?

The book Adam U’Beito, based on the teachings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, offers a remarkable perspective on this Mishnah.

Perhaps the Mishnah is not merely teaching us when a marriage may formally end. It is teaching us what a healthy marriage is supposed to look like.

Divorce Can Begin Long Before the Get

By the time a husband and wife arrive at a beit din and a get is formally given according to Jewish law, the process of divorce is reaching its legal conclusion. But the real, internal separation may have begun much earlier, sometimes years or even decades before.

It may have begun in the living room, in the kitchen, in countless small interactions, and ultimately within the hearts of the husband and wife.

Seen from this perspective, the final Mishnah of Gittin asks a deeper question: When does the real separation between husband and wife begin? What are the first warning signs that a couple is no longer experiencing marriage as it is meant to be?

A husband and wife may still be legally married. They may still live under the same roof and share the same daily routine. Yet emotionally, their hearts may already have drifted far apart.

After an entire tractate devoted to the laws of writing and delivering a valid get, the final Mishnah may be pointing us toward the inner get, the emotional separation that can precede the legal one.

The Warning Sign of Beit Hillel

Beit Shammai identify the breaking point with a dramatic violation. Something serious has happened, something that strikes at the foundations of the relationship.

Beit Hillel look earlier in the process. Even when there has been no dramatic betrayal, if a wife deliberately burns her husband’s food because she wants to aggravate him, something is already wrong. The desire to cause pain, even through small acts, is itself a warning that the marriage is no longer functioning as it should.

But Beit Hillel’s message can also be directed toward the husband.

Imagine that you are married to a good woman who prepared a meal for you, and the only thing you can see is that the food is burned. If your entire response is criticism and dissatisfaction, perhaps something in the relationship itself requires attention.

In a healthy marriage, a husband does not value his wife’s cooking merely because she happens to be an excellent cook. Her food has a special quality because she made it.

It is similar to the way parents look at their children. To a loving parent, their own child possesses a beauty and sweetness that cannot be measured objectively. Love changes the way we see.

In this reading, “she burned his food” becomes symbolic of all the small imperfections that spouses inevitably encounter in one another. When there is genuine love and connection, those imperfections do not define the person or the relationship. But when every mistake becomes irritating, every flaw becomes magnified, and everything the other person does seems inadequate, the problem may run much deeper than the burned meal.

When No One Else Is More Beautiful

Rabbi Akiva takes this idea one step further.

What does an ideal marriage look like? When does a person know that something essential in the relationship has been lost?

Rabbi Akiva points to the moment when a husband begins looking elsewhere and thinking that another woman is more beautiful than his wife.

His statement can be understood not merely as permission to divorce, but as a description of what has already gone wrong.

The Jewish ideal of marriage is a bond so deep that a husband does not measure his wife against other women. She is not one woman among many competing for first place. She occupies a category of her own because she is his wife, the person with whom he has built his life.

If another woman begins to appear “more beautiful,” Rabbi Akiva’s words can serve as a warning: Pay attention. Something in the marriage may need to be repaired.

Marriage Changes the Way We See

The final Mishnah of Gittin can therefore be read not only as a discussion about how marriages end, but as a lesson about how marriages endure.

A marriage does not necessarily begin to unravel with one dramatic event. Sometimes the first signs appear in ordinary moments: when spouses begin intentionally hurting one another, when appreciation gives way to constant criticism, when imperfections become impossible to overlook, or when a husband or wife begins comparing a spouse to others.

The lesson is not that a healthy marriage contains no disappointments or flaws. Every marriage does. Rather, love creates a different way of seeing the person with whom we share our life.

Perhaps that is why this teaching appears at the very end of Tractate Gittin. After teaching us the laws of how a Jewish marriage is formally dissolved, the Sages leave us with a question that reaches far beyond the laws of divorce:

What does it take to make sure that the hearts themselves never become divorced?