Upcoming Final

[debka_notion]

I'm rather nervous about my Talmud final now- I'm surprised I wasn't before. But I'm also feeling like obsessing over it now won't actually do me much good at this point. So- we'll see how it goes, but it's tomorrow at 9am, so after that I can nap, prep for my Hebrew reading test in the early afternoon, and then I'm into prepping for the take home exam, that exam itself, the paper and my application.

Outside of that, today was the last day of classes, and my Hebrew listening final was pretty reasonable, I think. A little weird, but reasonable.

And I went to part of (unfortunately I had to leave early) Rabbis Roth and Rabinowitz's talk on why they resigned from the CJLS- I really did respect what they were saying, and I was really relieved that neither plan on leaving JTS, or the Conservative movement. I was interested that their reasons were really quite different: Rabbi Roth disagreed with the halakhic reasoning of the Dorff/Nevins/Reisner paper, and Rabbi Rabinowitz took issue both with the halakhic reasoning and with the general make-up and format of the CJLS as an institution. What I thought was fascinating, in a sort of strange way, was that Rabbi Rabinowitz said that he'd go from a position that facilitated his resigning from the CJLS in protest to one that would be on the far left, "uprooting a principle from the torah", if it could be proved to him that doing so would benefit Jewish society as a whole and not just folks who are gay. I think that that's a really interesting position, although I somehow can't quite parse it into something that makes complete sense in my brain. It's kind of funky: at the same time I can see where he's coming from, from a traditionalist perspective, and I can also totally object, because how could he say that something that would improve so many lives Not be good for Jewish society at large? (At the same time, I suppose one could have made that same argument for the driving teshuvah, and that didn't help us any. But I don't think it's Really the same argument in this case. In the case of worries about this leading to the Conservative movement generally becoming a non-halakhic movement- now That worry I understand.) Rabbi Roth's issues were much more conventionally understandable from a halakhic perspective, although I'd Love to spend some time looking at what he was talking about in detail at some point. It showed me exactly how much I have to learn about the process and general hierarchy of halakhic authority and chain of transmission, which was both inspiring and intimidating.

Comments

[hotshot2000.livejournal.com]

"But if we're serious about intermarriage Because halakha says we shouldn't do it, then messing with halakha to save halakha is well- sort of self-contradictory."

Well, that's the whole basis of at least one understanding of "eit la`asot lashem, hefeiru toratekha". (I forget whether the issur to write down Torah she-be-al-peh is de'oraita or derabbanan, but there's an example of permanently violating a negative commandment for the sake of the greater good.) But you do raise an interesting formalist point -- if the issur on intermarriage is only derabanan (which at least Tosafot suggest), then it might be invalid to violate a de'oraita prohibition to protect a derabanan.

(BTW, it's funny how this all makes me come off sounding. Mostly I think it's important to acknowledge the theoretical flexibility built into the formalism -- I don't think using it lekhatehila is smart or mutar.)

Fascinating point in your second paragraph. I don't think following precedent is necessarily a function of a yeridat ha-dorot mindset, except insofar as yeridat ha-dorot is an articulation of the human psychological need for connection to the past and a lack of surety that one has figured out the whole range of consequences involved in changing the form of a particular practice. (To stretch the metaphor, even for dwarves-on-giants people, if you cut the shoulders off the giants, you're screwed.)

I don't think that "that sometimes their cultural circumstances biasing their halakhic positions" is a good way of phrasing things. Of course cultural circumstances "biased" their halakhic positions -- we're all products of our culture, in the most all-encompassing sense! The question is to what extent identifying those cultural factors is useful in confronting new challenges in a different culture. I think a more productive way to look at it would be from the perspective of language. Halakha is a language -- it has grammatical elements ("legal/hermeneutical principles") and a vocabulary ("texts"). We can translate that language into the component values, needs, and consequences -- and if we think we've done a good enough job of that, and understand all sides of their position and our challenge well enough, then we can go back and rephrase the new position in halakhic language. I find it most frustrating when people fail to make that crucial distinction (between halakha as language and halakha as set of decisions embodying human responses to human problems), but it's an easy mistake to make because halakhic texts themselves sometimes use value-(sounding?)-language in legal-semantic ways.

Your point about believing in evolving morals is a good one -- I'm slowly coming around to thinking that phrasing things in such a way blinds us to the extent to which we're missing the harm we're still causing, and will inevitable cause.

"The idea that from the outset, many people are planning on using this as a blanket acceptance of something that is considered by everyone a issur d'oraita is really troubling me."

R. Steve Greenberg once told a liberal Orthodox rabbi who advises gay men to avoid the de-oraita(s) and just do the derabanans: "Great, thanks, that lets us just do what we want anyway." I don't think that liberal O rabbi gives the same advice any more, at least not without real care.

I also think you're spot-on about criticizing the anal sex/relationship connection. I'm sure there are plenty of heterosexual couples where one person desires certain sex acts and the other doesn't -- they work it out, or, if the desire and repulsion are too powerful, they get divorced.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

"Mostly I think it's important to acknowledge the theoretical flexibility built into the formalism -- I don't think using it lekhatehila is smart or mutar."
What do you mean by this? Could you elaborate a little?

I think both perspectives (yeridat ha'dorot and "standing-on-giants'-shoulders") involve the need to connect to the past- they just articulate the connection in ways that give the people at whichever end more or less power- if you're standing on a giant's shoulders, giving it a haircut, or even chopping off it's head is possibly doable, if messy (this makes sense in my head, even though it may not in transmission). By the other theory, one has no authority to do so.

I'm really finding your language metaphor interesting and potentially useful, but I'm still working on grokking it, as it were.

I do think that occasionally filtering out inapplicable cultural influences can be useful as a viewpoint and as a stretegy, used carefully. The question is possibly then how to do so without filling in too much of our own cultural influences that are not really connected to the source materials.

On the other hand, if one can help people to feel like they are doing their best to uphold a difficult and painful system that is still very important to them- then shouldn't we do so? If making the distinctions clear so that they can sin in smaller ways would help them, then can we really chose not to do so? It does seem to be an area where I can really see the advantage of having psak given to individuals rather than by committee to the general community: I am really starting to see the point made by R. Rabinowitz about the problems inherent in the CJLS and in halakha-by-committee, much as I think it's a fascinating process.