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Chapter 6 deals primarily with appointing a messenger to send or receive a Get. As background: for a Get to take effect, the husband must give it to the wife. As with many legal activities, a husband and a wife can appoint a messenger to send or receive a Get on their behalf rather than hand it over directly. When it comes to Gittin, a few key concepts are important to consider.
At what point is the Get considered to have been delivered? This is a crucial question since up until the Get is delivered, the couple is fully married. Per the mishnah, the moment of handoff depends on the language of appointing the messenger. Some phrases imply that the messenger's role is simply to "pick up" or "drop off" the Get to / from the other spouse (at which point delivery is complete); other phrases are acts of appointing the messenger as a stand-in for the spouse him or herself.
How do we ensure there are witnesses? This is an important issue because allowing for a messenger in the process means one or the other spouse isn't actually present for the transaction. Amongst other issues, we want to ensure witnesses are present so that the husband can't cast aspersions on the Get down the road.
Ambiguity. In an ideal situation, we'd see the husband give a clear command to deliver a Get to his wife. What do we do if things aren't clear? The chapter explores a few examples:
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Stipulation or information? If the husband says "Give my wife a Get in such-and-such a place" might either be information about where to find the wife, or an explicit instruction to only give the Get in that particular place — and if the messenger delivers the Get elsewhere, he doesn't meet the condition of delivery and it's as if the Get has not been delivered at all.
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Instruction or cruelty? The chapter discusses how to address language that may have been an instruction to send a Get, or may have been a cruel joke with no intention to divorce.
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"Missing" husband The mishnah discusses leniencies we can apply to write a Get on behalf of a husband we hear — but don't see — who's fallen into a pit where he'll likely die, and gives orders that whoever hear him write up and deliver a Get to his wife (so she won't be left an agunah or obligated to do yibum).
Cruelty or kindness? In one particularly sad story from our chapter, a healthy man says to write up a Get for his wife — which, because of a nuance in his phrasing, we assume was a cruel joke and not an actual instruction. Shortly afterwards the man goes up to a roof and falls to his death. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel rules that if we can determine the death a suicide, we assume the man meant to give the Get to his wife in earnest (so she wouldn't be tied to Yibum) and the Get should be delivered posthumously.
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