[Avodah] Parshas Zachor and Women (was: mechitza)

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

I asked:
> Can someone please help me understand how halacha can change
> so radically? I can understand how, over time, View A might
> shift from being held by only 5% of Am Yisrael to 95%, while
> View B becomes less popular, shifting from 95% popularity to
> 5%. This can happen when a person who was a mere talmid of a
> View A community when he was young, became a major teacher
> later on.

R' Joel Rich asked:
> Please say more on this - how did it go from 95 to 5? Was it
> that poskim were eventually won over by something that earlier
> poskim missed? That there were practical reasons?

I thought my first explained at least one way. I'll repeat it now, more fully:

Suppose there is a certain issue on which 5% of the rabbonim, poskim, gedolim, whatever, hold a certain way. I'll call it View A. The other 95% hold by View B. Each rav, posek, whatever, holds the same way as his teacher taught him, and so this 5/95 split has been going on for generations. But then, one rav, or several, from the smaller group becomes very popular, perhaps becoming not merely a teacher or rosh yeshiva, but a *major* Rosh Yeshiva. His views affect the next generation tremendously, and his talmidim carry his opinions far and wide. Inexorably, the balance shifts, and what had been a minority opinion becomes the majority opinion, and vice versa.

I have no citation, but I've been told that this is similar to what happened to Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel. In the beginning, Beis Shammai were the unquestioned leaders in learning, but as time went on, they had a popularity problem, and more and more students flocked to Hillel's school. And so it has stayed since.

The balance can shift in other ways too, as RRW suggests ("something that earlier poskim missed"). This can easily happen with technology, where someone might notice a different way of looking at similar items.

Sometimes the balance can shift on practical grounds. Situations change. What was a desirable but impractical chumra or hiddur for one generation, becomes easily obtainable in another generation, and standard halacha after that. And vice versa: A shita can be relied on only b'shaas hadchak gadol in one generation, but then things got tough and people had legitimate reasons to rely on it; meanwhile, so many people came up with additional "limud zechus"im, that when the emergency passed, it continued as standard halacha.

In any case, none of the above seems to have happened for Parshas Zachor. Rather, it seems that a view which was not held by even a minority - not even by 5%, not even a daas yachid, but was rather entirely new - sprang on the scene and seems to have become the majority.

I asked:
> How did people of the Binyan Tziyon's time view this? I don't
> doubt the forceful and compelling nature of his halachic
> reasoning, but surely there must have been some people who
> said, "That can't be right, because if it is right, then our
> mothers and grandmothers, for millenia, were mevatel a Mitzvas
> Aseh D'Oraisa."

to which R' Zev Sero answered:
> That is exactly what most people did say, and why it took so
> long for this chiddush to become popular practise.  It took
> several generations for the idea to take root, and it didn't
> really become a ubiquitous practise until 20 or 30 years ago.

>From previous posters, it seems that prior to the Binyan Tziyon, there were ZERO poskim who held that women were mechuyavos in Parshas Zachor. That's what bothers me. The balance didn't shift from 95%/5% to 5%/95%. Rather a new mitzva arose out of thin air.

Well, not exactly out of thin air. He had reasons and evidence to support his idea. But what does this psak do to the whole concept of Torah Sheb'al Peh?

We're not talking about a new piece of technology, like tefillin whose quality is so high that (according to some poskim) one should specifically *avoid* checking them without good reason. And we're not talking about a new social circumstance, like men who have gotten accustomed to the sight of married women's hair, and have new leniencies from that.

Rather, we're talking about a specific d'Oraisa of the Taryag Mitzvos, which is now being applied to an entire class of people who had previously been considered exempt from it.

Let's compare this to "Moavi, v'lo Moaviyah". In that case, many people had accused Boaz of inventing a new and illegitimate drash to justify his actions. In actual fact, he did no such thing, but merely relied on a limud which had been in existence all along, except that it was not well-known, having been largely forgotten among everyone but the highest echelons of the mesorah.

Is that what happened with Parshas Zachor? I don't hear any such claims. I don't hear any claims that such a shita was pre-existing. What I hear is that someone (some posters pinned it on Binyan Tziyon, but last night I saw it in the name of the Minchas Chinuch) went through the following steps:

1) Saw that Mechiyas Amalek is on both men and women
2) Felt that Zechiras Amalek and Mechiyas Amalek are on the same classes of people
3) Concluded that women are obligated in Parshas Zachor
4) Informed many people that although the women did not hear Parshas Zachor in previous years, they had better be sure to do so in the future.

My problem with the above is in step 3. Instead of concluding that women *are* obligated in Parshas Zachor, he should have concluded that women *ought* to be obligated, and then step 4 would have been to ask, "But we know that women are *not* obligated, so where's my mistake?"

Akiva Miller