[Avodah] Truth and the Rambam

[David Riceman]

  We've done some offlist debating, and I would like to propose an 
alternative theory.  I suspect that RMB is conflating several 
independent issues.

1.  Clutter:  The Rambam did not like clutter.  He would not have liked 
the shul I attend (recall that he banned the silent Amida in his shul).  
He did not like the idea that Moses might not have been able to give 
decisive answers to any halachic query, independent of any metaphysical 
preference for uniqueness.

I suspect that it really bothered him that the 13 midot shehatorah 
nidreshet bahem do not yield unique answers, and that may be why he 
claims that few laws were deduced from them.  OTOH he does permit a 
future Sanhedrin to overturn any law deduced by a previous Sanhedrin 
using the 13MSNB.  The clutter that he objects to is discordant practice 
in a single place and time.

2.  Psak:  The Darkei Moshe uses the inspired phrase "nohagin lifsok" 
and variants thereof quite often.  What he means is that often the 
halacha is unclear, and a region (think kehilla) has the authority to 
establish a customary psak for that region (see H. Shehita 11:10).

The Rambam knew quite well that by the time of the Holy Babylonian 
Talmud there were machloksim in just about everything, and he knew quite 
well that often klalei hapsak do not yield unique solutions.  I suspect 
that the Rambam thought he was doing just what the Rama later described; 
he was writing a book of normative practice for Egyptian Jewry.

3.  Truth:  I think the Rambam changed his mind about TruthwithacapitalT 
between the time he wrote the introduction to ShM and the time he wrote 
the MN.  At the earlier time he thought that great metaphysical truths 
were embedded deep in the details of halacha; by the later time he 
thought that they were to be found in aggadta, and that halachot had 
general significance, but the minutae of halachot did not.  Hence, for 
example, he casts aspersions on "havayyot d'Abbaye v'Rava" in one of his 
letters.

In sum, I question RMB's claim that a preference for uniquely determined 
halacha is a byproduct of a metaphysical commitment to a unique Divine 
Truth.

David Riceman