[Avodah] Roast lamb

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, February 29, 2008 9:47 am, RAM <kennethgmiller at juno.com> wrote:
:          Maybe there's a shiur for how much liquid is needed to
: separate tzeli from bishul? And maybe that shiur differs depending on
: situation. For example, korban pesach vs. hechsher keilim vs. brachos
: -- we could very easily use a stricter definition for one and an
: easier definition for another.

Someone recently pointed the chevrah to R Jed Lewinson's article in
the TuM Journal titled "Philosophy in Halakhah: The Case of
Intentional Action" <http://tinyurl.com/27ovz5> (from yutorah.org).

The author asks "Why, then, do we consistently ignore halakhic texts
as primary sources for Jewish philosophy?" It seems he doesn't know
about Telzher derekh and asking "fahr vas?" RJL then analyzes the
issues of meizid, shogeig and mis'aseiq in light of modern
philosophical "action theory". (Major implications for understanding
pesiq reishei as well.) What constitutes one action, what constitutes
2? What is a human action (roughly: maaseh adam) and what is accident
(eg sneezing)?

Along the way, he notices conflicting implications between REW's
implied definition of action and the masqanah of every rishon he found
to comment an another inyan. I tried squeezing definitions of the
cases into this email, and failed do so comprehensibly. The article is
32 pages (if you don't bother with the footnotes, although he makes
points, not just mar'eh meqomos in the footnotes, 40 pages in all). I
thought it was worth the time. But then, it's a synthesis of TIDE,
Telzher derekh and philosophy; how could I not?

Along the way, RJL addresses RAM's question -- how do we generalize?
See below. (Easier to append to the end than put "> " before each line.)

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."
http://www.aishdas.org     - Rav Yosef Yozel Horwitz, Alter of Novarodok
Fax: (270) 514-1507


RJL writes in the TuM Journal:

...
Once we realize that the Rabbis are really making claims about
action (the real thing), another question quickly arises. Don't
the standards of action differ in different sugyot? If they do,
wouldn't this be deeply problematic? Let us begin answering
this question by distinguishing between two different senses of
"standards of action." In the first sense, "action" is used
imprecisely, and the challenge, relatively benign, is that
different sugyot designate different degrees of attending
intention for prescribed (or proscribed) behavior. In some
cases, the Rabbis may be demanding a level of intention that
goes beyond what is needed, on a given account, to make the
behavior an action. In other cases, the Rabbis may hold people
responsible for behaviors that do not, on a given account, qualify
as actions. In response to this challenge, we must insist that
none of these considerations implies that there are conflicting
accounts of action at play. In many normative systems, people
are held responsible for non-actions. The primary example of this
phenomenon is wrongful omissions of action, like failure to pay
taxes, which are not even behaviors. Moreover, there is no reason
that Halakhah cannot demand, in circumstances that it deems fit,
a higher level intention than that which is needed for the behavior
to constitute an action.

In the more literal sense of "standards of action," the worry is
that different sugyot hold different accounts of action (ma'aseh
adam). I do, in fact, claim that if one can tease from a sugya that
a behavior can be a ma'aseh adam without any attending intention,
then one can raise a kushyah against R. Wasserman's position. Due
to the possibility of such a challenge, I in no place endorsed
R. Wasserman's (or the Steipler's) theory, or claimed that it is
consistent across all of Shas. I simply highlighted his position
and revealed his commitments. All that said, such kushyot are not
easily launched. Before offering any, one would have to make sure
that the sugya upon which one bases one's challenge discusses
the concept of ma'aseh adam and not some similar concept. As
the discussion in the previous paragraph indicates, it is easy
to mistakenly assume that two sugyot invoke the same concept
when they do not. Just because a sugya discusses intention and
a specific behavior, for example, does not mean it invokes the
concept of ma'aseh adam.36

Before progressing to more general claims -- and readers
uninterested in these claims will lose nothing by jumping to the
next section -- let us take careful notice of the distinction
between a concept and a word.  Words are signs, and are generally
comprised of lines on a page or sounds in the air; concepts, by
contrast, infuse the word with meaning.  Some words (e.g. "bank")
can be used to invoke multiple concepts, and many concepts can
be expressed by multiple words (synonyms, like "student" and
"pupil," or perfect translations, like "tree" and "ez.").

Regrettably, one can only write about concepts by using words;
nonetheless, it is critical to keep the difference in mind. (I will
aid the reader by using quotation marks when discussing a word.)

Armed with this distinction, we may, with caution, generalize,
and claim that whenever halakhic sources rely on a particular
analysis of a concept, they commit themselves to this analysis in
any halakhic context.  Indeed, one can detect a strong impulse in
halakhic discourse to assume that a concept invoked in multiple
halakhic spheres will have the same standards of application
throughout (universalizing principle). In more technical terms,
talmudists assume that an analysis of a concept cannot take the
irreducibly contextual form: p1 in context A or p2 in context B,
where the different contexts are different halakhic contexts
(e.g. hilkhot Shabbat or nezikin).37

This universalizing principle is particularly salient given the
Talmud's further assumption -- an assumption, it should be noted,
not merely about concepts but also about words -- that when the
same word is used in different halakhic contexts it invokes the
same concept, unless there is independent reason to think otherwise
(strong universalizing principle). An interesting yet by no means
exceptional example will, I hope, illuminate these principles.

... [End of teaser. Go see the article! -mi]