[Avodah] Well, we are back to the achbor shechetsyo basarvechetsyo adama in the daf yomi

[hankman]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 10:36:21AM -0400, hankman wrote:
: Well, we are back to the achbor shechetsyo basar vechetsyo adama in the
: daf yomi. I know this has been discussed in the past, but I guess it is
: time for a repeat. Does anybody have a peshat in this Mishna and gemara
: Chulin 126b (as well as the gemara in Sanhedrin 91a) that does not run
: afoul of modern scientific understanding? I think the previous discussions
: were pre Slifkin ban. Any new ideas post Slifkin ban? I do believe that
: we are MECHUYAV to look for a peshat that does not incorporate what is
: currently believed to be untrue scientifically into Toras Emes.

RMB wrote:

I fail to see the big question.

The natural philosophy of the day taught that sch an animal existed.
Chazal applied halakhah to that case. But they don't assert the case is
real, they take that for granted.

....
Does this mean our gedolei haposeqim were wrong? Certainly not! They were
discussing the halakhah of a case that turned out to be hypothetical.
But what they were doing was the halachic analysis, not staking zoological
claims.



CM responds:

Frankly, I find your approach less than satisfying, leaving much to be desired. However, when you have no other valid approach even an unsatisfying one may have to do in a pinch. I am pretty sure that if I were to ask a godol a shaila as to whether a Yeti or a Saskwatch is metame be’ohel I would be thrown out of the beis hamidrash. Dito if I were to ask a shaila whether a Unicorn is mafris parsa or is a ruminant or not and therefore kosher I would again not last long in the beis hamidrash! Or if I asked whether Nessie has fins and scales etc, etc, etc. I am not sure why even in those days a mouse made half of basar and half of adama was not at least in the same class as these I mention above. Besides when you ponder creatures you have never seen, but only heard about in legend or tales from travellers (who want to write a book), there is very little info and fact of the sort you need to base halacha on. Who gives the course in the anatomy of these creatures so you could determine appropriate halacha on what kind of animal it really is and how it is metamei? How does it become a treifa? etc, etc.

Personally, I prefer the derech of the OTM, but I still have no hesber for the gemara in Sanhedrin. But it takes “groisse pleitsis” to say something that Rashi differs with even if you think he is scientifically in the wrong. You see this sort of timidity (humility) fairly often and of course it is mostly a positive thing but there may be times (if you have big enough pleitsis) where it would  be appropriate (as the Gr”a, CI, RMF and others have shown). Another example of this is R. Schwab’s proposal for the missing Persian Kings and missing 168 years in Chazal’s timeline of that period. He again just put it forward as a maybe out of humility.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I also think that the further down we go in the mesorah, the easier it is to do this. Not because the gedolim of our time are to be given less kavod than those of previous doros, Yiftach bedoro keShemuel bedoro, but because I think the further down you go in time the more the mesorah is passed through a larger number of people with less emphasis on any one or several particular individuals. So for example if you differ with Shemuel Hanovi or Dovid Hamelech you are not just differing from a great individual, you essentially differing with the main bal mesora of the time – so in the time of the Shoftim and then the Neviim, a litlle less so in the time of the Tannaim and still less so in the time of the Amoraim, dito Rishonim and much less so in the time of the Acharonim where the bits and parts of the mesora lay on the shoulders of many individual talmidei chachamim. I would say that the number principle individuals upon whom the mesora rested over the generations is somewhat in the shape of a pyramid very broad at its base in recent times and with Moshe at the pinnacle. If this is accurate, then a  challenge to the understanding of a particular godol in very early times was tantamount to a challenge of the mesorah itself, whereas a challenge to the understanding of a particular godol in more recent times (while not to be undertaken lightly) is at least not also a necessarily a challenge to the mesorah at the same time. I would also add that I think that this broad base of the pyramid began to broaden more rapidly with the permission to write Torah shBal Peh after the period of the Mishna and even much more so with invention of the Gutenberg Press since even more of the mesorah was now in writing and not just on the shoulders of the living gedolim of that generation. For the most part, I was just thinking out loud when I wrote this post as it came to mind. I hope I am not too far off base.

Kol Tuv

Chaim Manaster

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20111031/33a05c1d/attachment-0002.htm>