[Avodah] Sephardi-ism: some food for thought

[Zev Sero]

Chana Luntz wrote:

> But one cannot always find a circumstance when a particular shita leads
> the person to be mekil in another area.  There are many shitos which are
> just machmir.  And, according to this understanding, what is the
> sensible thing to do if faced with two shitos, once which is makil and
> one which is machmir?  Well, the mekil is clearly a vadai shita, because
> he must be really sure of himself to be mekil, and the machmir is a
> safek, because maybe he is not for precisely the reasons you have given.
> So if choosing between the two, a vadai and a safek, would it not be
> correct to follow the vadai?

No, this is not bari veshema.  It's not a personal financial dispute
between R Reuven and R Shimon.  R Reuven has paskened that what you
want to do is forbidden; but you speculate that perhaps he did so
because he wasn't sure.  Even if your speculation is correct, he was
presumably aware of R Shimon's reasons for permitting, and nonetheless
decided not to.  So if you have a rule to follow his psakim then you
must be machmir.  At most, what you have is not a safek but a sfek
sfeka.

Where kocha dehetera adif *does* come in to substantive halacha is
if you have a new case, and you want to apply R Reuven's underlying
shita from the first case and deduce how he would pasken here.  In
that case you have to be careful, because you can't be sure that he
really holds that shita.  Particularly if his shita there leads to a
kula here, you can't be sure that he really would be mekil.  Or if
the case in which he paskened was d'oraita, and you now have a
d'rabanan, then you can't be confident that he'd be machmir here too;
if he was sure of his shita then he would, but if he wasn't then maybe
he would be mekil here.

-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas