[Avodah] Minhag Yisroel

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 07:16:33PM -0400, Richard Wolpoe wrote:
: And is a Sanhedrin needed?
: So wjhy fan't the Jews of circa 1948 IMPOSE 5 Iyyar as a hhag for all of us
: decsendents?I

This is a totally different topic. You went from pesaq to legislation.
This conversation had a number of things that look like blurring
fundamental differences -- minhag with pesaq, legislation with pesaq,
changing the halakhah with responding to changes in environment, etc...
Of course the rules differ.

Perhaps it does. Perhaps it requires true semichah. Perhaps it requires
neither, only consensus. After all, if the person isn't really speaking
for all of kelal Yisrael, how do they "own" the calendar? We don't
know when that kind of consensus ended, but by R' Saadia Gaon's day,
we already had two claimants to ownership.

Similarly, the question of hafkaas qidushin.

: Why can[t the community issue a cherem, any ba'al that is mesarie to give a
: get will have his original Kiddushin nullified retroactively by communal
: fiat?

A cheirem doesn't remove a chalos, it says "avoid this person". But in
any case...

The BY has a teshuvah which is simply his notes of someone else's (who I
hadn't heard of before). I don't own his teshuvos to refresh my memory.
In it, the BY accepts the argument that only the 5 situations which were
named by chazal justify hafkaah.

(Notice, BTW, that all require a maaseh -- either chazal remove the
chalos of a just-performed chasunah, or they create a chalos to an
invalid attempt at gittin.)

Why the limitation? Because since chazal, who could say they are the
"das Moshe veYisrael" upon whose say-so the qiddushin depends?

:> Perhaps because those who started celebrating 5 Iyyar were already
:> bound by the minhag to mourn during sefirah, so it's arguable that
:> they had no authority to make a new exception to it.

: so a New minhag can BRECHT a din but it CANNOT brecht an old minhag?
: I would posit that the GRA's revival of 2 matzosGEBRCHTed the pre-existi9ng
: minhag that  had been 3 matzos as testified to by the Beis Yosef!

The Gra chooses the textual pesaq over the mimetic norm. Both pre-xisting
shitos. We already discussed when I believe he holds that's an option. You
use this to compare to new legislation -- which no one is sure is possible
bizman hazeh keneged esablished minhag? What's the point of comperison?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             A person must be very patient
micha at aishdas.org        even with himself.
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