[Avodah] Ta'am of eating matzah

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 7:14 am, R Michael Makovi wrote:
: Guilty as charged - paraphrase. I'll have to check my Sefer Ha-Aggadah
: again for where that Tanchuma is, but the gist is the same, whatever
: it says. G-d kept the calendar for a while, but handed the buck off to
: us.

Except that the calendar is the most clear case of halakhah being as
we decide it rather than as someone might objectively determine a
truth. Meqadeish Yisrael vehazmanim -- the qedushah of the zemanim is
DERIVED from our being maqdish them. Similarly, the diyuq halashon in
"hachodesh hazah LAKHEM" -- we decide and define (not discover) the
chodoshim.

(Although there is an inherent error in type theory, confusing the
domains of law and of fact. It's a sibling of the Naturalistic Fallacy
and of Hume's Is-Ought Problem. I checked wikipedia's entries on "type
theory", "Naturalistic Fallacy" and "Is Ought Problem" and decided I
could rely on their explanations for this tangent.)

So I'm not clear exactly what meaning the words "our calendar" have
without a beis din hagadol defining it.

SheTir'u baTov!
-micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "Man wants to achieve greatness overnight,
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