[Avodah] NishmaBlog: Pardon my French! "Bon Matin" and "Franglais"

[Rich, Joel]

Here is how I summarized RMK's position here in the past:

There are two ways to learn a language: The native speaker doesn't learn rules of grammar before using them, he just knows what "sounds right". In contrast, an immigrant builds his sentences by using formalized rules, learning such terms as "past imperfect" and memorizing the forms that fit each category. R' Koppel notes that the rules can never perfectly capture the full right vs wrong. A poet has to know when one can take license.

He argues that halakhah is similarly best transmitted by creating "native speakers". It is only due to loss of our progressive loss of the Sinai culture with each generation that we need to rely on transmitting codified rules. (RMK notes in a footnote the connection between this idea and some ideas in R' Dr Haym Soloveitchik's essay "Rupture and Reconstruction", Tradition, Summer 1994.) Earlier cited cases are the loss of culture that occurred with Moshe Rabbeinu's death, when 300 halakhos were forgotten, and Osniel ben Kenaz reestablished them -- chazar veyasdum. Similarly the reestablishment of numerous dinim by Anshei Keneses haGedolah after the return from the Babylonian exile -- shakhechum vechazar veyasdum. Leyaseid, he suggests, is this codification.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

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Does such a system in theory eventually converge to total codified rules as a basis for decisions?  IMHO part of the issue today is we have a system with detailed analytic rules and analysis which every so often gets a wild card "poetic" response (which would not have been the obvious result of the analytics and there are no clear analytic rules when to go poetic). It's not surprising that people (even natives) are sometimes left shaking their heads.
KT
Joel Rich
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