[Avodah] Street Minyanim

Chana Luntz Chana at kolsassoon.org.uk
Mon May 25 03:54:55 PDT 2020


R' Marty Bluke  writes:
 
<<R?n Chana Luntzs point reminds me of what Dr. Chaim Soloveitchik wrote
about derech hapsak in a footnote in Rupture and Reconstruction

Rupture and Reconstruction footnote 20 - The crux of the Gaon?s approach
both to Torah study and pesak was its independence of precedent. A problem
was to be approached in terms of the text of the Talmud as mediated by the
rishonim (and in the Gaon?s case even that mediation was occasionally
dispensed with). What subsequent commentators had to say about this issue,
was, with few exceptions (e.g. Magen Avraham, Shakh), irrelevant. This
approach is writ large on every page of the Biur ha-Gra, further embodied in
the Hayyei Adam and the Arukh ha-Shulhan, and has continued on to our day in
the works of such Lithuanian posekim, as the Hazon Ish and R. Mosheh
Feinstein. The Mishnah Berurah rejects de facto this approach and returns to
the world of precedent and string citation. Decisions are arrived at only
after elaborate calibration of and negotiation with multiple ?aharonic?
positions

I think this issue of porch minyanim is a good example of the 2 approaches
mentioned above by Dr. Grach. The MB goes with his approach of precedent
etc. and therefore would allow porch minyanim based on the the precedent of
the Pri Megadim etc. while the Gra and his ideological descendants like the
Aruch Hashulchan simply reject the Rashba.>>

Fascinating. It has been a long time since I read Rupture and
Reconstruction, and I certainly had not remembered that footnote.  And there
is some logic to sourcing the change in Ashkenazi psak to the Gra (despite,
from what I can see, us rarely following him halacha l'ma'ase).  But, while
the Gra himself might fairly be said to involve an absence of precedent (and
oddly, I have a similar sense when reading the commentary of the Chazon Ish,
which is rather at odds with his image), I don't think that is true of the
Hayyei Adam, Aruch Ha-Shulchan or more modern poskim who follow that derech.
More accurate, it seems to me, is the statement that it is the text of the
Talmud as mediated by the rishonim collectively that form the basis of the
precedent.   That is, you go back to the rishonim in the original (because
we can!) and not just one or two that have been picked out by key achronim.
And the Shulchan Aruch is then understood in the light of the collective
rishonim (including ones that he did not see, like the Meiri, but that if he
had seen, might conceivably have altered his psak).  

Here, the Magen Avraham picks out (albeit not by name) the second
possibility of the Rashba, and uses that to understand the Shulchan Aruch.
The Pri Chadash and the Pri Megadim quote the Rashba explicitly as the
source of the Magen Avraham's position.  They do not appear to go look at
other rishonim or the Talmud directly.  They do not look in detail at the
teshuva of the Rashba, or bring that this is only one of two explanations he
gives for the actual question he is answering (why can the chazan on the
bima be included in the minyan).  Here they do seem to go to the rishonic
source of the Magen Avraham's idea.  In other cases I have seen the Magen
Avraham (or the Rema) quote X rishon in the name of Y rishon in the name of
Z rishon.  And if you take the time to track back, what Z rishon actually
said doesn't always seem fully consistent with the way Y rishon or X rishon
is then quoted in the Magen Avraham or Rema.   The more modern approach
would be to make sure you read Z rishon, and the underlying Talmudic text Z
rishon was commentating on, and so break down the chain a bit (although
there is still a tendency to say, particularly if this is in the Rema, that
it is halacha l'ma'ase, based on the chain - which is why it is cleaner in
Sephardi psak).

I thus suspect that while the Gra might be the poster boy for the change in
Ashkenazi psak, he was not really what is driving it, but rather the reality
of modernity.  I can access, from my computer, on places like Hebrew
books.org if not on Bar Ilan, rishonim that it is clear the Rema and Magen
Avraham could not.  I don't believe that the Rema or Magen Avraham would not
have gone back and read the original Z rishon if they could have, just that
they didn't have access.  (In one particular case I am thinking of, the Z
rishon in question is quoted by the Rema as the SmaG, when actually it is
clearly, once you look through both books, the SmaK, so not surprisingly he
had  to quote a chain, and if you chase the chain back you can see where a
misprint or miscopy resulted in a misquote).  This is one of the ways that
modernity has influenced and is influencing psak.  In that sense it is even
more fully within Rupture and Reconstruction than this footnote would
suggest.  There is a level of rupture with the achronic past, because we can
access rishonic precedent that the achronim couldn't.  And what do we do
with that?  Because of the extraordinary reach of the Beis Yosef, we are
less able to do that with the Shulchan Aruch itself, which is why I would
hazard a guess it is weathering the blasts of modernity rather more easily.

Regards

Chana



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