[Avodah] e: Sefer HaChinuch on why 2 weeks Nidah for a girl and only 1 for a boy

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:38:29 -0500, RRW <rabbirichwolpoe at gmail.com>
wrote:
: One thing HAS changed over the doros. Usually acharonim have been
: called upon to justify their decisions, whereas Rishonim were more
: terse and often did not bother justifying a decision.

And geonim even less so. Amoraim, OTOH, were recorded as debates.

Does it imply the masses accept their authority less, and therefore
the rabbanim needed to prove their point? Or that the acharonim felt
"nisqatnu hadoros" and therefore less secure themselves in their
conclusions? Or was it a shift to having less mesorah and therefore
being more about reason than repeating what one was taught? Or a shift
from inarticulable feel for the material to conscious and vertical
reasoning? A loss of the Rambam's proverbial "nir'eh li".

But you lose me here:
: While Tosafos bends over backwards [most of the time] to try and PROVE
: his point.  Many find Tosafos pilpulistic as a result. I find it
: refreshing to see someone wrestling with the issue and not just coming
: down with a decision.

You just spoke about rishonim being terse, and then list the baalei
Tosafos (who may qualify as many counter-examples), then the Tur, the
Beis Yoseif, etc...

I would instead suggest that the difference is not necessarily any of
the possibilities I raised above, but one of format. Rashi explains
peratim. The peshat would be harder to follow if Rashi or the Meiri
bothered to explain how they got there.

Rambam's Yad, the Tur, the SA and the Mappa are codes. The Rif is a
little of both. Those formats are not ones that call for reasoning.
Again, it gets in the way.

The Rosh, the Tosafos, etc.. are trying to fit pieces together.
Peirushim, but of the kelal, not the perat.

Different goal, different standard format, different emphasis in content.

Teshuvos are more split, and that's really where I think my question
stands.

...
: The Rambam et. al. seem to be pretty sure that NO poseik after the
: Gemara is absolute...

The Rambam holds that no poseiq after the gemara was accepted by
everyone, and therefore no subsequent poseiq is absolute. However, he
wasn't alive to see people study SA and Mappah for their semichah. He
could have been theoretically right, but pragmatically get different
results for today.

That is RYBS's position, BTW. "Qiblu aleihem kol Yisrael" is what
gives the SA its authority, and what closed the period of the rishohim
with that text.

I still say that we don't so much differ in process as differ in how
much priority we give each of the factors people weigh in that
process. Reason vs accepted practice vs accepted sefarim vs awe of
da'as Torah (in the sense I used it this morning) of the authors vs
movement weltenshaung (eg Chassidic practices)... But we've done that
one already.

SheTir'u baTov!
-micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "Man wants to achieve greatness overnight,
micha at aishdas.org        and he wants to sleep well that night too."
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