[Avodah] Brisker Dialectics?

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 10:37:49PM +0000, Joel Rich wrote:
> Me-
>> ....... I've been thinking about your classes for a while and ........I
>> just wonder if you were totally sold on the "is the reason for A X Or Y,
>> and if it is, here are the implications " as if it's always a boolean
>> choice rather than possibly being some of X and some of Y?

> R' AL[ebowitz]-
>> I always tell the talmidim that things aren't that neat and this is just
>> a helpful way to contextualize the issues

When discussing Brisker vs Telzher derakhim, everyone focuses on "Vus?"
vs "Fahr vus?" (What? vs Why?)

But another major different is R' Shimon's heavy use of the concept of
hitztarfus -- the idea that a halakhah can be caused by the convergence
of multiple factors.

>From Widen Your Tent (by me), sec. 6.3:

    But there is a second distinction: Rav Chaim would explain an
    apparent contradiction by finding "the chiluk," the distinction
    between two cases that we initially thought ought to be the same, or
    the distinction between the viewpoints in two sides of a dispute. Rav
    Chaim's is a reductionist approach to analyzing a topic; it teaches
    how to understand something by identifying and understanding each of
    its parts. This methodology is suited for identifying "the cause" of a
    law. Rav Shimon also invokes hitztarfus, fusion or connectedness. It
    allows us to better ask, once we know the parts, how do they combine
    and interact to produce the given result? From this vantage point,
    rather than looking for a single cause, we can see that a given
    ruling can come from the way in which many halachic causes combine.

    Suppose we were tasked to do analysis to find out why some accident
    happened. For example: Why did David hurt his foot? Because a
    paint can fell on it. Why did the can fall? Because someone else
    accidentally knocked it off its shelf. Why did he knock it off the
    shelf? Because his nose itched, and he lifted his hand to scratch
    it, and also because the shelf wasn't on its brackets correctly and
    wobbled a bit.

    However, it's equally true that he hurt his foot because even though
    he usually wears iron-toed hiking boots, he chose not to wear them
    that that day. And why did he not wear his boots? Because when he was
    looking for something to put on his feet, someone else had turned on
    the light in another room, which changed his train of thought. And
    so on. Every event has many causes, each of which in turn has its
    own many causes.

    Rarely does an event only have one cause. We get used to identifying
    "the cause" of something. I would instead suggest that every event
    is like "the perfect storm"; each one has combinations of factors
    that come to a head at the same point.

    Similarly, Rav Shimon saw no reason to assume that it takes one cause
    to create an obligation or prohibition, rather than a combination
    of them.

Which I then relate to R Shimon's approach to chessed as a widening of
one's "ani" to include others. (The way we naturally have little problem
giving to our children, because in a sense, they're "us".)

I also use the difference between the focus on reductionism vs
interconnectedness to explain a structural difference between Aristo's
books and the Mishnah. WHich may be more relevant to the point:

    This difference between Semitic and Yefetic perspectives can be seen
    by contrasting the style of Aristotle with that of Rabbi Yehudah
    HaNasi. Aristotle catalogues. He divides a subject into subtopics,
    and those subtopics even further, until one is down to the individual
    fact. Greek thought was focused on reductionism. To understand a
    phenomenon, break it down into smaller pieces and try to understand
    each piece. This is typical of the Yefetic perspective.

    That reductionism stands in contrast to the way Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi
    redacted the first Mishnah. The beginning of all of Mishnah could
    have said outright that Rabbi Eliezer ruled that the time for saying
    the evening Shema is from sunset and for the first third of the
    night. This is the way United States legal codes are arranged divided
    and subdivided into law, section, subsection, paragraph, subparagraph,
    clauses, and items, with an effort to minimize cross-references.

    Instead the first Mishnah makes its point by invoking the priesthood,
    purity, and the night shifts in the Temple, "from the time Kohanim
    [who went to the mikvah to be purified during the prior day] may
    enter to eat their terumah until the end of the first shift." It
    describes the start and end times for the mitzvah using referents
    that one wouldn't normally assume when starting study. This is not
    to confuse the issue or needlessly close study from non-initiates,
    but because the key to understanding one mitzvah necessarily includes
    its connections to everything else. The proper time to say Shema
    cannot be understood without that context.

    The task Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi set out to accomplish with the Mishnah
    was not to explain the rationales of the halachah, and therefore
    the Mishnah spells out this holistic understanding. We are left
    not knowing why the rules of when Kohanim who needed the mikvah
    may eat terumah or the time the first shift in the Beis Hamikdash
    ended add meaning to the time span in which the nighttime Shema may
    be said. But the Mishnah does record the law in memorizable form,
    and apparently that includes helping us remember the halachah by
    association to the other halachos it relates to.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 It is harder to eat the day before Yom Kippur
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   with the proper intent than to fast on Yom
Author: Widen Your Tent      Kippur with that intent.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF                     - Rav Yisrael Salanter