[Avodah] Halachic Texts: More Background

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 12:07:46AM -0400, Richard Wolpoe wrote:
:> Give me a rigorous definition of "new enough" that allows for ther Rambam
:> and not the Gra.

: I already did!. Shulchan Aruch Choshen Mishpat 25 wherein the mechabeir
: insisted that to'eh bidvar mishneh included posqim...

But that does NOT exclude the Gra. The Gra, each and every time he rules
against minhag, has a reason to say that the minhag was based on a ta'us
bidevar mishnah. He didn't overturn accepted pesaq just because he had a
batter sevara, it was only when he felt that the accepted pesaq was wrong.

E.g.
- Making baqashos after benching (the "harachaman"s) on Shabbos
- Having MORE portions instead of fewer for the sake of lechem oni (an
  oxymoron, no? particularly since mishneh lechem on YT is itself iffy)
- Adding a proof from Zecharia at the end of a Aleinu, attributed to
  Yehoshua bin Nun (implies a rejection of that mesorah)

...
: Also see Heramann Stracks' quote that the "MAIN TASK" for posqim today is to
: read the codes and trace them back to the Talmud.  IOW, the Talmud isnow
: jsut  background for the p'saq, not the foreground.  I posit this morphed
: from the early Rishonim to the end of Rishonim and I can actually quote you
: sources to this effect.

One could attribute this to today's poseiq not being a throwback. Thus,
he has neither lesser wisdom nor precedent to confine him.

:> The Gra argued that he only changed pesaqim that were against halakhah
:> (as he understood it) in favor of those that are not.

: Guess what? so does every body else. I argue that bachurim not wearing a
: Tallis Gadol  is against p'saq, and the Darchei Moshe, Ba'er Heitev, and the
: Mishna Brura concur. As well as all Sepharadim and all yekkes.  It is
: interesting that the Ga overtunred many Ashkenazic models in favor of
: Sephardic alternatives but never pushed for Tallis Gadol - at least AFAIK

If it were assur to daven without a tallis gadol, then it would fit
the Gra's model to overturn Ashkenazi norm. It's not against halakhah
because tallis is a reshus. Same argument we had WRT tefillin on ch"m.
There is no actual issur against missing a day of tefillin. Both are
"merely" mechzei kemeshaqeir.

:> and probably a product of the collapse of the ghetto's culture
:> during his times.

: Nah.  Gra dies 1797, Napoleon invades Russian Emptire in  1812 The ghettoes
: only BEGAN collapsing 15 years after Gra's passing.

: Gra knew his pesakkim were private.  He never even tried to popularize
: them.  Those who reached back to the GRA to create a new Halachic norm
: really wer quite radical to abandon Minhag Avos.

These two paragraphs largely cancel. By shifting "blame" of making the
Gra's rulings common practice to his students, you move the time that
this happened to after the fall of the ghetto. But I didn't mean it
literally. Chassidus started because the old mores just weren't enough
to hold people in anymore. The ghetto was porous enough that simply
relying on norm wasn't working.

: Let's face it, If any one else said about Halachah what the Gra said.[ you
: fill in the blanks]

That's not the question. The question is whether what the Gra said still
within the eilu va'eilu of halakhah.



On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 09:04:00PM +0000, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
: ... I would like to suggest that anyone unfamiliar with the word
: "mimetic" should go out of their way to read "Rupture And Reconstruction:
: The Transformation Of Contemporary Orthodoxy" by R' Haym Soloveitchik,
...
: I find it to be an excellent history of the transformation of halachic
: Judaism from being based on what we learned from out ancestors, to one
: based on what we learn from printed texts. The word "ghetto" appears in
: that article exactly once, and I think it might be debatable whether or
: not he supports RMB's post. Tze ul'mad.

He does not.

I wrote about why I disagree with R"D HS before on list, and blogged
about it as well.

Particularly given his name, I find it particularly ironic. How can
someone named for R' Chaim Brisker think that mimeticism held sway in 19th
cent Litta, only to collapse during the war years and the population shift
away from Eastern Europe? What about all the changes in practice brought
on by Chassidus, talmidei haGra, and the chumros of his own namesake?

RD HS writes about two poles: mimeticism and textualism, minhag avos and
sevara. I posited a third pole -- derekh. The initial response to the
break in status quo in the 18th cent, well before RD HS's rupture, was the
establishment of movements. (Nebich some of those movements left Yahadus,
but that's not our topic.) Having distinct pesaqim that are justified
by the Ism of the movement unifies its population. Aside from simply
making sense -- it's easier to follow halakhah with a modicum of kavanah
if the ideal driving your lifestyle and your pesaq are consistent. And
so SA haRav isn't always halakhah as pasqened before Chassidus.

Yes, mimeticism finally collapsed when Eastern Europe did. But as RD HS
himself notes, the MB was wreitten BEFORE that collapse, and is repleat
with cases of choosing the pesaq with the stronger textual argument
over normal practice. Mimeticism was no longer dominant well before
then. What really fell was that derekh-based idealism. When we stopped
losing children in excitement to competing Isms, we also lost the need
to tie our pesaqim to derekh.

Then, textualism alone was left.

(BTW, textualism includes the historical rov poseqim. Mimeticism is what
most people do, not what argument most intelligensia accept.)


On Sun, Jul 06, 2008 at 08:46:17PM -0400, Richard Wolpoe wrote:
: RYBS once showed that eino ra'uy l'achilas kelev is not a LAB experiment
: [with a black lab or a chocolate lab] but it is the estiamte of what the
: POSEIK sees as eino Ra'uy.

This may be a manifestation of the Brisker notion that only halakhah
can serve as a basis for halakhah. An opinion which made the Briskers
early textualists, since derekh based pesaq had no interest to them.
IOW, you don't check with a dog for the same reason you don't check the
identify of a chilazon with an archeologist or checking the identity of
"orez" as the word was used by the gemara.

But that would make it a difficult argument to get non-Briskers to
accept.

: I willconcede that Halcha is NOT an exact science, but that is imho NTO an
: excuse for TOTAL subjectivity. There must be a way to have object criteria.
: Why?
:    1. We ahve a concept of To'eh bidvar Hamishah
:    2. We have the concept of an errant Sanhedrin

Again, a weighting scheme would be a middle ground between "TOTAL
subjectivity" and objective determinism. Something that allows people to
weigh different concerns differently, which we see in practice is true
of noted poseqim, and yet gives limits to what is possible halakhah,
and what is not.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Never must we think that the Jewish element
micha at aishdas.org        in us could exist without the human element
http://www.aishdas.org   or vice versa.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                     - Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch