[Avodah] mesorah

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 11:43:49PM +0300, Eli Turkel wrote:
:> Mesorah is a living tradition of a development of ideas. The Oral
:> Torah is oral, a dialog across the generations. If we see a quote in
:> the gemara from Rav Yochanan, we might be curious about the historical
:> intent of Rav Yochanan. But in terms of Torah, important to us than
:> what R' Yochanan's original intent is what R' Ashi thought that
:> intent was....

: I have great difficulties with this. What of know that they made a mistake.
: There are places where it is clear that Rashi was wrong because he didn't
: completely know Israeli geography or the burial procedures or medicine.

I intentionally didn't touch the subject of metzi'us. I spoke about how
we understand the evolution of halakhah. I spoke about how we're to
understand R' Yochanan, not the situation.

My argument is basically the against the use of Revadim or W-t in order
to clarify a shitah.

...
: Sperber brings examples where we better understand a Mishna because of modern
: archaeology of how various instruments looked or what clothing they wore.
: In many cases it is clear that the Yerushalmi had a better knowledge of many
: Mishnayot while the Bavli is based on what happened in Bavel and not
: in Mishnaic EY.

You don't have to convince me -- I wear a snail slime on my tzitzis that
Rashi didn't.

As for the question you raise, we discuss it 2 or 3 times a year. Basic
possibilities that we've found:

1- Many acharonim deal with it casewise, and don't have a kelal.

2- R' Kook, following an idea from the Gra, holds that changes in
   knowledge about the metzi'us can only drive chumeros.

3- More recently we saw R' Chaim Kanievsky write
   (see
<http://parsha.blogspot.com/2009/06/do-gentiles-have-more-teeth-than-jews.html>
   for a scan of the Hebrew):
        Question: "I have heard from Rabbi Yitzchak Shinker, zatza"l,
	that one time there was an incident with a fatal illness,
	rachmana litzlan, and a great physician came and said "if he is
	a gentile, he will die, but if he is a Jew, he has hope, for it
	has been shown that this disease by Jews is not necessarily
	fatal." And he explained in this what we say in Tefillah, rofei
	cholei amo yisrael -- that there is a special healing in the
	Jews.
   But the case here is saqanah to the life of a non-Jew, so it might be
   a special case and in general RCK would not ignore new science lequlah.

4- RDLifshitz taught that mamashus depends on direct human sensation,
   not observation via equipment. Generalizing from bugs to beitzei
   kinim. This avoids many of these questions, since the new science
   tends to invoke things that by RDL's rules lack mamashus.

However, WRT how we view the mesorah, it doesn't make the earlier
Torah "wrong". Rather, it is a valid pesaq that happens to apply to a
non-existent case. But if we did find maggots that did abiogenetically
emerged from the meat they are found within, all would agree with the
gemara's pesaq that the kashrus of the maggots are defined by the
kashrus of the meat.

Here I raised the question of the relationship between what a tanna or
amora meant and current pesaq. Or, for that matter, do we need to
distinguish between why the Rambam really differed from the gemara, or
R' Chaim's interpretation of the Rambam in order to pasqen?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Today is the 22nd day, which is
micha at aishdas.org        3 weeks and 1 day in/toward the omer.
http://www.aishdas.org   Chesed sheb'Netzach: Do I take control of the
Fax: (270) 514-1507                 situation for the benefit of others?