[Avodah] MB vs AhS

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 08:27:24AM -0800, Saul.Z.Newman at kp.org wrote:
: http://torahmusings.com/2012/02/mishna-berura-vs-aruch-hashulchan/

We have discussed this several times in the past.

RDLifshitz was also among the AhS supporters.

RARakeffetR believes that 200 years from now, the Shoah will be deemed
a line in halachic authority between the acharonim and something else.
Although he clearly thinks the line is only possible with hindsight, he
still proposes possible names without having that perspective yet:
mesaderim or me'asefim.

This is an era more characterized by people collecting and presenting
structure to existing ideas than by innovation. Otzar haPosqim, Bar Ilan
CD and Encyc Talmudit are extreme but peripheral examples. But all those
tertiary halachic guides are also produced by collecting, providing
structure and simplifying, rather than chidushim. They have eclipsed the
teshuvos in how halakhah is spread.

And although the MB is pre-War, I think it's of the new style. The CC
says his goal is to provide a survey of opinions that post-date the
standard SA page.

The AhS is still in the acharonic style.

Rupture and Reconstruction <http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm>
fans would say the same thing for different reasons. R' Dr Haym Soloveitchik
writes:
    There is an injunction against "borer" -- sorting or separating on
    Sabbath. And we, indeed, do refrain from sorting clothes, not to speak
    of separating actual wheat from chaff. However, we do eat fish, and
    in eating fish we must, if we are not to choke, separate the bones
    from the meat. Yet in so doing we are separating the chaff (bones)
    from the wheat (meat). The upshot is that all Jews who ate fish on
    Sabbath (and Jews have been eating fish on Sabbath for, at least, some
    two thousand years [2]) have violated the Sabbath. This seems absurd,
    but the truth of the matter is that it is very difficult to provide
    a cogent justification for separating bones from fish. In the late
    nineteenth century, a scholar took up this problem and gave some very
    unpersuasive answers [3] It is difficult to imagine he was unaware of
    their inadequacies. Rather his underlying assumption was that it was
    permissible. There must be some valid explanation for the practice,
    if not necessarily his. Otherwise hundreds of thousands, perhaps,
    millions of well-intending, observant Jews had inconceivably been
    desecrating the Sabbath for some twenty centuries. His attitude
    was neither unique nor novel. A similar disposition informs
    the multi-volumed Arukh ha-Shulhan, the late nineteenth century
    reformulation of the Shulhan Arukh. [4] Indeed, this was the classic
    Ashkenazic position for centuries, one which saw the practice of the
    people as an expression of halakhic truth. It is no exaggeration to
    say that the Ashkenazic community saw the law as manifesting itself
    in two forms: in the canonized written corpus (the Talmud and codes),
    and in the regnant practices of the people. Custom was a correlative
    datum of the halakhic system. And, on frequent occasions, the written
    word was reread in light of traditional behavior. [5]

    This dual tradition of the intellectual and the mimetic, law as
    taught and law as practiced, which stretched back for centuries,
    begins to break down in the twilight years of the author of the Arukh
    ha-Shulhan, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The
    change is strikingly attested to in the famous code of the next
    generation, the Mishnah Berurah. [6] This influential work reflects
    no such reflexive justification of established religious practice,
    which is not to say that it condemns received practice. Its author,
    the Hafetz Hayyim, was hardly a revolutionary. His instincts were
    conservative and strongly inclined him toward some post facto
    justification. The difference between his posture and that of his
    predecessor, the author of the Arukh ha-Shulhan, is that he surveys
    the entire literature and then shows that the practice is plausibly
    justifiable in terms of that literature. His interpretations, while
    not necessarily persuasive, always stay within the bounds of the
    reasonable. And the legal coordinates upon which the Mishnah Berurah
    plots the issue are the written literature and the written literature
    alone. [7] With sufficient erudition and inclination, received practice
    can almost invariably be charted on these axes, but it is no longer
    inherently valid. It can stand on its own no more.

    Common practice in the Mishnah Berurah has lost its independent
    status and needs to be squared with the written word. Nevertheless,
    the practices there evaluated are what someone writing a commentary
    upon Shulhan Arukh would normally remark on. General practice as such
    is not under scrutiny or investigation in the Mishnah Berurah. It
    is very much so in the religious community of today.

    ------

    [6] Israel Meir ha-Kohen, Mishnah Berurah. This six volume work, which
    has been photo-offset innumerable times, was initially published over
    the span of eleven years, 1896-1907, and appears contemporaneous with
    the Arukh ha-Shulhan. Bibliographically, this is correct; culturally,
    nothing could be farther from the truth. Though born only nine
    years apart, their temperaments and life experiences were such that
    they belong to different ages. The Arukh ha-Shulhan stands firmly
    in a traditional society, un-assaulted and undisturbed by secular
    movements, in which rabbinic Judaism still "moved easy in harness,"
    R. Israel Meir Ha-Kohen, better known as the Hafetz Hayyim, stood,
    throughout his long life (1838- 1933), in the forefront of the battle
    against Enlightenment and the growing forces of Socialism and Zionism
    in Eastern Europe. His response to the growing impact of modernity
    was not only general and attitudinal, as noted here and below, n. 20
    sec. c, but also specific and substantive. When asked to rule on the
    permissibility of Torah instruction for women, he replied that, in
    the past, the traditional home had provided women with the requisite
    religious background; now, however, the home had lost its capacity for
    effective transmission, and text instruction was not only permissible,
    but necessary. What is remarkable is not that he perceived the erosion
    of the mimetic society, most observers by that time (1917-1918)
    did, but rather that he sensed at this early a date, the necessity
    of a textual substitute. (Likkutei Halakhot, Sotah 2 la [Pieterkow,
    1918].) The remarks of the Hafetz Hayyim should be contrasted with the
    traditional stand both taken and described by the Arukh ha-Shulhan,
    Yoreh De'ah 246:19. One might take this as further evidence of the
    difference between these two halakhists set forth in the text and
    documented in n. 7. One should note, however, that this passage was
    written at a much later date than the Mishnah Berurah, at the close
    of World War I, when traditional Jewish society was clearly undergoing
    massive shock. (For simplicity's sake, I described the Mishnah Berurah
    in the text as a "code," as, in effect, it is. Strictly speaking,
    it is, of course, is a commentary to a code.)

    7 Contrast the differing treatments of the Arukh ha-Shulhan and the
    Mishnah Berurah at Orah Hayyim 345:7, 539:15 (in the Arukh ha-Shulhan)
    539:5 (in the Mishnah Berurah), 668:1, 560:1, 321:9 (Arukh ha-Shulhan)
    321:12 (Mishnah Berurah). See also the revelatory remarks of the
    Arukh ha-Shulhan at 552:11. For an example of differing arguments,
    even when in basic agreement as to the final position, compare 202:15
    (Arukh ha-Shulhan) with 272:6 (Mishnah Berurah). This generalization,
    like all others, will serve only to distort if pushed too far. The
    Mishnah Berurah, on occasion, attempts to justify common practice
    rather unpersuasively, as in the instance of eating fish on Sabbath,
    (319:4), cited above n. 3, and, de facto, ratifies the contemporary
    eruv (345:7). Nor did the Arukh ha-Shulhan defend every common
    practice; see, for example, Orah Hayyim 551:23. (S. Z. Leiman has
    pointed out to me the distinction between the Arukh ha-Shulhan and
    the Mishnah Berurah is well mirrored in their respective positions
    as to the need for requisite shiurim in the standard tallit katan,
    noted by Rabbi E. Y. Waldenburg in the recently published twentieth
    volume of his Tzitz Eliezer [Jerusalem, 1994], no. 8, a responsum
    that itself epitomizes the tension between the mimetic culture and
    the emerging textual one.)

I am using RARR's thought to focus more on the content of the texts than
on textualism. As I've written here the the past, the dawn of textualism
was with the Haskalah, not WWII. I think the relationship change of the
1940s was more complex than only its detrimental impact on mimetics.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of
micha at aishdas.org        greater vanity in others; it makes us vain,
http://www.aishdas.org   in fact, of our modesty.
Fax: (270) 514-1507              -Louis Kronenberger, writer (1904-1980)