[Avodah] Assur to be Stupid...

[Ira Tick]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org> wrote:

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 10:27:54AM +0200, Daniel Eidensohn wrote:
> : I remember seeing an article or hearing a tape of RYBS in which he
> : stated that the Jews sacrificed their minds on the altar of Sinai.
> :
> : He was saying that there is now a limit to the range of thought and
> : questions that can be asked...
>
> That's stronger than I understood his intent.
>
> RYBS was wont to knock on the desk or microphone three times as a
> mnemonic for the idea of submission. We can have all our rationales --
> we can ask the questions and propose answers -- but none of that can
> change our observance. At some point, we have to live with hte question
> or table it for later, because halakhah comes before logic. I saw him
> as speaking of submission to halakhah, not to ideas.
>

I don't believe that submission of human logic to Halacha is a trend
supported by history. Many times the Sages understood details of the
halacha, or changed their own Rabbinic dinim, or even subverted the halacha
completely in order to accommodate certain conclusions of moral and
pragmatic logic. I've heard people talk about the existence of rules for
things like Es La'asot LaShem, etc, but I've never seen them written.
Perhaps other list-members have and will be good enough to share after this
post. Regardless, nowhere is it explicit in Halacha that Torah SheBa'al Peh
be written down if necessary. Within whatever rules or lack thereof that
govern their extralegal powers, the Rabbis decided that the compelling logic
of history required them to subvert the Halacha for the greater good and
write down Torah SheBa'al Peh.  The Voice from Sinai doesn't just allow us
to place logic over ideology, it requires us to use logic together with
Halacha, even to the point that at certain times, under the right
circumstances, that logic may overturn the Halacha, not just help us deduce
it. (Although, one could make this whole discussion tautological and argue
that the two processes are really the same, that Halachic determination
itself includes logical consideration to that degree, so by definition
Halacha and human logic cannot conflict, yet we find that the seem to do so
often enough to present us with a more sophisticated dilemma.)
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