[Avodah] Classical Academia, Deconstruction, and Mesorah

[Michael Makovi]

> The classical academic approaches a text looking to see what the author's
> original intent was.
> ...
> The post-modern approach is not to look for the meaning the text had to
> the author, but the meaning the text has to the reader. A hyper-correction
> to the opposite extreme.
> ...
> Mesorah, however, is a living tradition of a development of ideas. More
> important to us than what R' Yochanan's original intent is what R' Ashi
> thought that intent was, which in turn can only be understood through
> the eyes of what the Rosh and the Rambam understood R' Ashi's meaning to
> be, which in turn can only be understood through the eyes of the Shaagas
> Aryeh and R' Chaim Brisker. It's not what the text meant to the author,
> tied to understanding the historical context and weltenschaung of the
> tanna. Nor is it what it means to me from a clean slate, an open field
> defined only by my encounter with the text, and thus shaped in part by
> personal desire and ignorance. It's entering the stream of mesorah and
> following how the idea is developed.
>
> R' Micha

Granted there are limitations; the academic approach involves a bit of
hutzpah and is probably impossible to perfectly fulfill, while the
post-modern approach is egotistically self-centered and ahistorical,
and makes a mockery of the original text. But I think we can salvage
them if we use them in moderation. We don't have to slavishly adhere
to one approach alone.

I don't claim to have all the answers, or to have all the details
worked out, but my basic solution is two-fold:
1) Whether to use academic historicism, post-modernism, or mesorah,
depends on our given goal at the given point in time;
2) These three choices should be used in tandem, to different degrees,
in moderation, with common sense.

Rabbi David bar Hayim, following Rav Kook's distinction between perush
(explanation of the author's intent) and biur (expository drash), says
that biur is legitimate, as long as one realizes that he's not
explaining the author's own intent. Similarly, Professor Shapiro,
Rabbi Yehiel Weinberg, and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein all say that
Brisker lomdus cannot claim to have the Rambam's own authority behind
it. Professor Shapiro notes that sometimes, we follow the Rambam or
the Shulhan Arukh even when later teshuva of the Rambam or R' Karo
disputes the book; we are following the book itself, not the human
authority behind the book.

Sometimes Rambam said something difficult, and so later authorities
found justification. Even if we later find that the girsa was wrong,
the fact remains that the wrong girsa has been given justification,
and has its own halakhic validity. The question is: do we want to
follow Rambam himself, or the mesorah of interpretation? One must
honestly ask himself what his goal is.

The common thread in all of those is that one must ask himself what
his goal is. Is one's goal to pasken like the Rambam himself, or to
pasken according to how the halakhah organically evolved over time in
the historical interpretation of Rambam?

Therefore, different approaches should be used, in different degrees,
in tandem. Professor Haim Kreisel, for example, says that in his work
as a scholar of Medieval Jewish philosophy, he tries to use the
academic approach to narrow down the interpretation to only those with
historical legitimacy. But even after that, several possible
historical readings remain, without a possibility of limiting the
choices to only one (because we are too far removed from the original
time, and we cannot hope to understand the Tanaim as well as the
Amoraim did, etc.), so he subsequently uses the post-modern approach
to make the text meaningful to him. An ahistorical post-modernism, he
says, makes the text relevant to oneself but totally divorces it from
the original work. A cold academic approach, however, he says, makes
the work dead from the aspect of edification. The combination of these
two approaches, he says, makes the reading both historically accurate
and spiritually edifying. So if he has narrowed down a given passage
of the Kuzari to two or three possible readings, based on what R'
Halevi's Muslim philosopher contemporaries said, etc., then one may
choose the particular reading that is most personally meaningful.

In short:
1) Different tasks call for different tools
2) Using only one tool without the other leads to an extreme; all the
tools should be used in tandem, according to the present need.

A personal example: the Meiri never dealt with moral secular
individuals such as we have today; he assumes that a non-Jew must be
G-d fearing to be availed of the "nations bound by religion" thesis.
Nevertheless, Professor Moshe Halbertal, followed by Rabbi David
Berger, both say that the general tenor of Meiri's thesis seems to be
that if someone fears G-d, therefore he is moral, and therefore the
halakhah is such-and-such. We can extrapolate that if someone is moral
alone, even without fear of G-d, this is just as well for Meiri, since
Meiri's concern was not with belief in G-d per se as a metaphysical
notion, but rather with the practical consequences of fear of G-d. The
Meiri never said all this, but it is consistent with what he said.
>From a purely academic standpoint, all this is rubbish (the Meiri
technically demands fear of G-d, end of story), but it all works if we
mix the academic and post-modernist approaches. The Meiri seems to
equate fear of G-d with morality, and he apparently is more concerned
with the results of fear of G-d than he is with the fear of G-d
itself, and so, for our own personal purposes, we can adapt Meiri's
own view, tweak it a bit but stay mostly but not totally within the
historical bounds of what Meiri himself said, and come up with
something that works for us personally.

What I have said is more of a general guideline. This is all very
subjective, and I cannot say anything quantitative. My point is that
halakhists and theologians should use all these methods in tandem,
according to the goal and the case at hand, according to what their
common sense dictates.

I agree we shouldn't
a) Coldly analyze the text historically for only what the author meant, nor
b) Discard all baggage and all previous interpretations and interpret
the text with no background whatsoever, nor
c) Naively trust the words of the chain of transmission, without
questioning these interpretations at all
I think the best approach is to combine all three; combine the
historical data, with what one's own mind and heart say personally,
with what the chain of transmission says. All three of this should be
combined, in various degrees.

Michael Makovi