[Avodah] inconceivable-- Ben Sorer uMoreh

[Michael Makovi]

> Two laws that are currently ignored come to mind
>
> Burial of suicide - we consider all of them now as not having da'as
>
> No hespedim on certain days
> Except maybe some Yekkes and our own REMT, the no hesped rule is almost
> always waved
>
> RRW

I'd add saving a nicht Jude on yom ha-shevi'i. Rabbi Aharon
Lichtenstein and Rabbi Yehuda Amital posed the following question:
you're on a desert island, and so mishum eiva doesn't apply. What do
you do? Honestly, how many of us would follow what the halakhah says
in this case? (Rabbi Dr. David Berger, in "Egalitarian Ethos", says
that this is the *one* halakhah that he says *completely* frum and
pious Jews have told him that they'll ignore the explicit halakhah and
violate it b'meizid if they have to.)

By the way, Rabbi Lichtenstein said he'd save the nicht jude and do
teshuva (teshuva, since the formal law is still on the books and
binding), while Rabbi Amital said he'd save the nicht jude and *not*
do teshuva, since it was G-d's will to save the nicht jude (following
Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner that natural law can override d'oraita
formal law; Rabbi Glasner's own example is choosing between treif meat
and human flesh, or choosing to go naked or wear clothing of the
opposite sex - he says to choose treif and opposite-sex clothing, even
though the formal law would say to go naked and eat human flesh).
Rabbi David Bigman of Maale Gilboa, in relating this story, said, "I
wouldn't violate Shabbat to save him...[audible pause]...I'd find a
heter."

Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm (http://www.forward.com/articles/11308) and
Professor Marc Shapiro (http://www.lukeford.net/blog/?p=2595) both
cite this case of the nicht jude on yom ha-shevi'i as an example of
how halakhah can evolve over time, with the law on the books remaining
technically unchanged, even as its actual application and underlying
ethos radically reverses. Rabbi Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits ("A Modern
Blood Libel – L'Affaire Shahak", Tradition, 8:2 1966, URL below)
explains "mishum darkei shalom" in a manner extremely similar to how
Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits does, viz. that the laws of the Torah all
exist for the sake of peace, and that the Torah itself avers that the
formal law, however logical in itself, must be put aside if it
violates morality. (I covered up R' Jakobovits's name and asked my
ra"m to read the article and guess its author, and he was sure it was
R' Berkovits.)

URL for R' Jakobovits:
http://www.edah.org/backend/coldfusion/search/document.cfm?title=A%20Modern%20Blood%20Libel&hyperlink=jakobovits1%2Ehtml&type=Document&category=Jews%20and%20Gentiles%3A%20%93Other%94%20in%20Modern%20Orthodox%20Thought&authortitle=Rabbi&firstname=Immanuel&lastname=Jakobavits&pubsource=Tradition%2C%208%3A2%201966&authorid=433

Michael Makovi