[Avodah] lo plog

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 05:45:38AM -0400, Rich, Joel wrote:
[R Eli Turkel:]
:> More generally in some cases we say X is different than Y and so the
:> prohibition of Y does not apply and in other cases we say lo plog

: imho this is a specific case of a more general question - is the
: halachic process reproducible?

Is this a question -- I thought the answer was clearly "no". E.g.
gezeiros. There are gezeiros for some cheshashos that are real
stretches, and yet nothing protecting things that nowadays are often done
incorrectly. (Hand clapping on Shabbos vs amirah le'aqum for tzarkhei
rabbim, as an example.) I think the only way to understand which things
get a gezeirah is to assume that in practice at the time when there was a
Sanhedrin that /could/ make a gezeira, those were the things that people
actually did err on.

Another problem is that the halachic process is non-deterministic, and
thus what people actually chose to do, and how a particular poseiq
happened to see the options, does end up being why we hold one way and
not the other.

E.g. It's not that Beis Hillel's pesaqim are more correct, it's that
they became current in the larger school that showed kavod to the other
school. The history ended up shaping the flow of halakah.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Man is capable of changing the world for the
micha at aishdas.org        better if possible, and of changing himself for
http://www.aishdas.org   the better if necessary.
Fax: (270) 514-1507            - Victor Frankl, Man's search for Meaning