[Avodah] lo plog

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 09:19:27PM -0400, Rich, Joel wrote:
: Don't think so - that would be reproducible - i.e. if we knew what
: the practice at the time was, we would come up with the same result.
: I'm talking about examples where in case A we say Lo Plug but not
: in B which seems the same "stretch". Even more recently (where your
: explanation would be less likely) why do we sometimes see poskim saying
: things like, "in this case we're choshesh for the deiah of X" wheras in
: other cases X is dismissed as a daas yachid?

I'm saying that history could very well distinguish A from B, even though
they are the same "stretch". E.g. the taqanah in case A was made at a
time when we were fighting the general zeitgeist, but in case B were
were not. Therefore, they rounded the corners to be machmir in more cases.

We also have things like the rule to follow shitas Beis Hillel because
of the middos of the people who articulated that shitah. Again, it is
very hard to reproduce without knowing the history. Would the MB have
the gravitas the current generation gives it if the CC wasn't the CC?

And you need to know the culture of the yeshiva in question. When a
Brisker comes up with a chiddush (eg standing feet together for Shemoneh
Esrei), there are now talmidim scattered in every shul doing it. This
creates a "presence" for X's dei'ah that might not exist for other
dei'os yechidim.

IOW, because of all of the above, reproducing halakhah would require
knowing more history than is possible to.

And last, you need to have daas Torah, that absorbtion in the Torah
Weltanschaunng to the extent of being able to fill in the gaps between the
rules of pesaq, to go from conflicting sevaros and shitos to lemasseh. Is
that reproducible?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Between stimulus & response, there is a space.
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