[Avodah] Chezkas Kehunah

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 04:23:58PM -0500, Samuel Svarc wrote:
: Come now. You are certainly disagreeing in part. When "... he first
: started law school he was thrown out of class for using gemara logic which
: did not amuse the professor", you mean to say that had he used multivalent
: logic the professor would have been OK with it? Who are we kidding?

No, but there are disciplines which would develop the same skills as
halakhah's logic. And for that matter, US Law has huge overlap too --
you just have to mind where the overlap differs.

E.g. Presidents, Senators and the voting public are repeatedly surprised
how US Supreme Court appointees turn out. They look to litmus topics,
issues that divide Dems from Reps (e.g. abortion). However, the judge
isn't thinking in those terms. He or she is a strict constructionist,
and therefore voted the way the president wanted on this issue or that.
Another is a contextualist, etc...

Sounds much like the confusion non-O Jews get into trying to understand
how a real poseiq works. It's not only about what the rav feels is moral,
it's more about how he feels the legal process works.



: I'm adding the next step, EvE and concepts like that, where it is up
: to 'shikel hadaas', where different poskim will come out differently,
: this is not what math will teach you. There are formal rules that
: cannot be broken...

Yes, halakhah goes beyond the ability to make formal rules. Queue my
usual plug for R' Moshe Koppel's "Metahalakhah" here. Formality is a
stop-gap we use as nisqatnu hadoros and we lose more and more of the
"native speaker's" informal knowledge of how the language is to be spoken.

Moshe Rabbeinu dies, and Osniel ben Kenaz restores the lost elements of
Sinaitic culture through his pilpul.


Tangents related to other threads:

Someone recently posted a side-comment that was disparaging of pilpul.
The way I hear the words used today, pilpul and lomdus really mean the
same thing. When I don't understand or like the system of lomdus the
other person is using, I call it "pilpul". KNLAD.

This informal knowledge is what RYKamenecki was saying you need shimush
for. Someone who learns but doesn't engage in sufficient shimush can
extrapolate from the material in absurd directions. They have no idea
when they're heading toward the center or out on a limb.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The Maharal of Prague created a golem, and
micha at aishdas.org        this was a great wonder. But it is much more
http://www.aishdas.org   wonderful to transform a corporeal person into a
Fax: (270) 514-1507      "mensch"!     -Rav Yisrael Salanter