[Avodah] Education - was RAYK and the end of chol

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R"n Toby Katz wrote:
> I don't know how you're defining "understand" but you most
> certainly can keep the halachos of kashrus, Shabbos and so
> on in your home if you know Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (or even
> if you have learned halachos mimetically at your mother's
> knee, as girls did for doros...

R' Micha Berger countered:
> You need more than a KSA to know what "unusual" means. It's
> not a good guide to knowing what issues are contraversial.
> But I would agree with the general point, that a few
> handbooks is sufficient for daily din.

For many years (for example, see my posts to Mail-Jewish from 1995, at http://tinyurl.com/5q94gc and http://tinyurl.com/5d43lq) I wrestled with the reality of centuries long past, when a Jewish woman's ONLY knowledge of kashrus was what her mother taught her. Her husband, the town's Av Beis Din, may have spent many days in the beis medrash debating a point, and getting all the local rabanim to agree that a certain item is nonkosher. Yet, that very night, his wife serves him that very item, because her mother taught her that it is mutar. Each goes in their own way, confident that they know the halacha. But over the ensuing centuries, the two streams never learn the subject together, to the level of detail necessary to see this point of halacha, and so neither stream realizes that the other has a different tradition. Yet the one cooks for the other, and ignorance is bliss.

When I asked these questions, I had not yet found Dr. Haym Soloveitchik's important article "Rupture and Reconstruction", now available online at http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm. I did not realize that my question was a prototypical example of the friction between the mimetic world and textual world, and he himself used it in footnote 18 there:

> The traditional kitchen provides the best example of the
> neutralizing effect of tradition, especially since the
> mimetic tradition continued there long after it was lost
> in most other areas of Jewish life. Were the average
> housewife (bale-boste) informed that her manner of running
> the kitchen was contrary to the Shulhan Arukh, her reaction
> would have been a dismissive "Nonsense!" She would have been
> confronted with the alternative, either that she, her mother
> and grandmother had, for decades, been feeding their families
> non-kosher food [treifes] or that the Code was wrong or, put
> more delicately, someone's understanding of that text was
> wrong. As the former was inconceivable, the latter was
> clearly the case. This, of course, might pose problems for
> scholars, however, that was their problem not hers. Neither
> could she be prevailed on to alter her ways, nor would an
> experienced rabbi even try. There is an old saying among
> scholars "A yidishe bale-boste takes instruction from her
> mother only”.

To me, a most telling comment is that "Neither could she be prevailed on to alter her ways, nor would an experienced rabbi even try." Despite the illogic of it, the two streams ARE compatible, in an "eilu v'eilu" kind of way, I suppose. The men learn their way, and the women learn their way, and if there are halachic differences, well, we'll muddle through somehow. Because that's how G-d wants it.

Akiva Miller
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