[Avodah] Lo Bashamayim Hee

[Michael Makovi]

>
Hazal wanted us to know that once th
Torah left the heavens it would no longer remain the pristine Perfect
Handiwork of HKBH, but would henceforth be managed and interpreted by
error-prone humans. Nevertheless - despite the loss of innocence for
the Torah - this step was necessary. The time had come for the
innocent Torah to mix it up with the mortals and to help us even if if
would not remain in its original state.

Kol Tuv / Best Regards,
RabbiRichWolpoe at Gmail.com
see: http://nishmablog.blogspot.com/
>

Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner makes a large point of this, saying that
the truth of Torah She'be'al'pe is not what Hashem says but what we
say (Rabbi Eliezer and the oven), in line with Drashot haRan on the
oven and Sefer haChinuch on the mitzvah of following the judges, that
we follow our rabbis even when they're wrong.

(Rabbi Glasner simply takes it a bit further than most. Likewise Rabbi
Berkovits on Moshe seeing Rabbi Akiva's class and not understanding
and learning from this that Torah does evolve over time; both are more
extreme than most, but the gist of what they say is quite normative
IMHO. In fact, IMHO, once we say that halachot could be forgotten and
had to be recovered by humans, and once we say that many drashot were
in fact used by humans to actually derive the law (often **but not
always** they were asmachtot for laws already known as kabbalot), we
are admitting the human element of many halachot, and we can no longer
say it is purely m'Sinai as most say TSBP is, and we are forced, IMHO,
to adopt some sort of opinion similar if not as extreme as those of
Rabbi Glasner and Rabbi Berkovits.)

Mikha'el Makovi