[Avodah] Limits of Parshanut

[Micha Berger]

Parshanut doesn't have rules of pesaq. Nothing ever ends an opinion
(lifsoq) once it is derived. So, those 98 ways become 9,604 ways, and
then 941,192 ways as each interpretation gets its 98 interpretations.

And then we have cases where those who pursue peshat -- Rashbam, IE,
most famously -- give a peshat in the pasuq which they acknowledge runs
against Chazal. But they feel Chazal weren't working bederekh peshat. (And
the Rashbam is clear that he doesn't believe Chazal were wrong, or that
anything he says about the pasuq has halachic signicance. E.g. see
his comments on "vayhi erev, vayhi boqer".)

But, procedurally, there still has to be rules for what kind of
interpretation is valid and what aren't. I cannot believe that people
can just make stuff up, and if fits a linguistic oddity of the text or
a wording in some source of Chazal it's necessarily Torah.

I don't know what the limits are. All I know is the limits of my own
comfort zone.

*To me*, "toras Hashem temimah" means that if I have a theory of how
to understand something aggadic -- theology, mussar or parshanut -- it
must be driven by material internal to the existing body Torah. If I am
forced to an an entirely new understanding that no one proposed before to
answer a scientific question, I would prefer leaving the question tabled,
teiqu, than to run with this kind of innovation.

To me, following a tendency I heard around YU from R YB Soloveitchik's
students (my own rebbe, R Dovid, was yet more conservative), this is
related to the difference between chiddush and shinui. "There is no beis
medrash without chiddush" because learning Torah means extrapolating
new points from the existing data. Extrapolation from and interpolation
between existing Torah "data points" is chiddush. Shinui is innovation
driven by something other than Torah.

I am not sure if RYBS would say that in the context of parshanut in
particular or not. As I said, as this point we're only discussing the
not-that-relevant topic of "Micha's comfort zone".

Chodesh Tov!
Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                     Time flies...
http://www.aishdas.org/asp               ... but you're the pilot.
Author: Widen Your Tent                          - R' Zelig Pliskin
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF