<BODY><P>RCL</P>
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<P>In Yevamos 116b the gemora brings a mayse shehaya about a woman whose<BR>husband was bitten by a snake when he went out to the wheat harvest, and<BR>she came and testified to beis din that her husband had died, and they<BR>went and checked it out and indeed he had died, and at that point they<BR>legislated that a woman is believed if she comes to beis din and says<BR>her husband has died to allow her to remarry</P>
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<P>But on a deeper level what this case illustrates (and I could have<BR>brought you many other examples) is that Chazal tended not to work from<BR>the platonic ideal and apply downwards, but tended to work from<BR>individual cases and work upwards.</P>
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<P>I believe that there are very few cases in the Mishna, the obvious yesod of TSBP, in which a halachic principle is *derived* from a specific individual case, as in the case in Yevamot RCL cited (there's a very similar example in Ktuvot perek 2). The Mishna very often formulates the law it is stating in the form of a case, not a principle, but it seems to me that this is for the most part a stylistic or pedagogical form, not an essential difference in approach.</P>
<P>Let's look at a few examples. Let's compare Kiddushin 1:1 with 3:1; the former a formal statement of principles, the latter specifying the law in a specific case. Is the latter an example of Chazal's "tendency to work upwards from a specific case"? It seems to me more of a different way to present the halacha than a fundamentally different approach.</P>
<P>BM 2:1 states legal principles; 3:1 states what the law is in a case. It seems to me that the mishna in the latter is applying principles it knows to the case in hand (indeed, citing one explicitly) rather than deriving legal principles from the case. </P>
<P>I will readily concede that in the gemara, deriving halachic principles from a given case is much more common, but I still think that to say broadly that the fundamental approach of Chazal is from the specific to the general is not accurate. On the contrary, I think that for the most part Chazal tend to determine the halacha in specific cases from well-known and accepted general principles. </P>
<P>Saul Mashbaum </P></BODY>