[Avodah] Minhag Yisroel

[T613K at aol.com]

From: "Richard Wolpoe" _rabbirichwolpoe at gmail.com_ 
(mailto:rabbirichwolpoe at gmail.com) 



>I  would tend to believe the following: Halakhah - within bounds - clearly
>  develops over time.


>>Agreed. but how many right-wingers agree  to this premise?<<


 
 
>>>>>
100% of them.
 
The area of disagreement is not whether halacha underwent some historical  
development -- the Gemara itself says that it did, when it describes the reasons 
 and circumstances under which various derabanans were promulgated.   
Everyone knows that the mitzvos of Chanuka and Purim, for example, were the  products 
of certain historical events.  
 
The area of disagreement concerns the question of whether the entire  corpus 
of halacha is entirely man-made, subjective and random.   Right-wingers would 
say that only /allowable/ developments occurred over time,  and that there is 
a system of rules under which not all developments are  allowable.  
 
Even when two poskim disagree on a given psak, they do not choose from an  
infinite array of subjectively chosen possibilities when they arrive at their  
respective decisions, but from an allowable range which is distinctly finite 
and  bound by known rules.
 
You can play a hundred games of chess, according to the rules of chess,  and 
from the same initial setup you can arrive at a hundred different final  
chessboard arrangements, but all of them will be derivable from the same  rules.  A 
chess player can glance at the final chessboard and tell you  instantly that 
in one case, the final board was not a possible outcome of the  rules of chess 
and that his three-year-old must have put pieces on the  board after the game 
was over.  (The three-year-old in my analogy is a  Reform or Conservative 
rabbi who isn't happy with the allowable range of  chess moves and doesn't really 
care how he gets to the final board as long  as he likes the way it looks.)
 


--Toby  Katz
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