Question

Hello Rabbi. As far as I know, it is generally agreed that every person is influenced, willingly and unwillingly, by the environment in which he lives and by the prevailing values of his time. Within Jewish law, my understanding is that we usually ignore the period-specific motivations and influences that affected the halakhic decisor, and instead address the substance of his arguments—do they hold water or not? In other words, the values of his time do not really matter to us. My question is about authoritative sources whose arguments, in practice, we do not dare evaluate critically on their own merits. That is to say: the Talmud, and perhaps also the medieval authorities (Rishonim). On the one hand, it is clear that some of the rulings of the sages of the Talmud also have a cultural context that has changed in our time. On the other hand, I do not know very many people—even very great ones—who really allow themselves to address the arguments in the Talmud themselves, for example by saying that a given scriptural exposition does not hold water in their opinion, or that they have another proposal for resolving a difficulty that arose—one that would permit something the Talmud prohibited, and so on. The whole discussion is conducted מתוך a basic acceptance of the authority of the sages of the Talmud, along with interpretation of and engagement with their words. The problem is precisely this point about cultural influences: on the one hand it clearly exists, and on the other hand almost no one addresses the arguments themselves directly (and perhaps rightly so, because we are studying in their “studio”). But what happens then is that Jewish law remains with conceptions that sometimes grate on the modern learner, because he suspects that their source is not the guidance of the text but the values of the Talmudic period. As an example, one can look at the popular and worn-out topic of “attitudes toward women.” What does the Rabbi think? Is there a way to neutralize the influence of the decisor’s environment in the Talmud? Or is this an unavoidable price we are condemned to pay because we are farther removed from Mount Sinai?