[Avodah] Hilchta Lmishicha

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 09:59:19AM +0200, David Cohen wrote:
: R' Joel Rich asked about the Talmud's reluctance to pasken on "Hilchta
: Lmishicha."
: I think that this could be related to the issue of whether we "pasken" in
: matters of aggadeta...

I don't think so. Aggadita is about what is -- detemining truth. Pesaq is
about establishing law. I would rather say that without a real question to
deal with, the authority to say that A is law rather than B simply doesn't
exist. Pesaq defines halakhah, discussion of aggadita tries to discover.

I agree with the following:
: In short, this school of thought says that pesak (in the sense of picking
: between multiple legitimate positions) is a "necessary evil."  Really, "eilu
: ve'eilu divrei Elokim Chayim." but when it comes to practical halachah, for
: the sake of uniformity of practice, we are forced to pick a side.  When this
: concern is not relevant...

But I do not agree with your including aggadita among the list of pesaqim
we don't need to make. I would instead say that the concept of "pesaq"
doesn't apply to aggadita altogether. An aggadic position is a theory
about the reality, or a model of reality that the baal mesorah found a
useful approximation of something we don't/can't entirely grasp.


I see a parallel in the discussion of what to hold like when the shu"t
of R' Yosef Caro disagree with the BY or SA.

Do we hold like the BY, with the argument that RYC was still a rishon
when he wrote it, as opposed to the SA being the start of acharonim?

Do we hold like whichever was written later, given we could determine
when the teshuvah was written? After all, if the SA convinced himself
the first position was in error, shouldn't we?

Do we hold like the teshuvah even if it was written before the SA,
because his teshuvos were written in response to an actual question, and
therefor RYC received extra siyata diShmaya compared to a theoretical
work?

Do we give less authority to the teshuvos than to BY and SA because they
were written with a specific case in mind, and the codes were written
without assumptions about a particular situation that we lack -- and in
fact they were written for us to generalize from?


A real question for those of us who wear blue strings in our tzitzis...
Do the statements of the geonim and rishonim qualify as pesaqim, or do
we assume they were speaking hypothetically as hilkhisa lemishicha, and
they don't have the same authority we normally accord rishonim?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Good decisions come from experience;
micha at aishdas.org        Experience comes from bad decisions.
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