Is the halakhic system valid?
I recently spoke with a law student who is taking a course in Hebrew law, and we got into a discussion about halacha. He said that his main difficulty with halacha is that it has two contradictory assumptions: on the one hand, it assumes that there is a basic collection of laws that are an unquestionable divine command. On the other hand, the sages actually have the authority to completely strip any such command of its meaning by having the power to interpret it, even when the interpretation implies that God Himself intended otherwise. The example he gave is “an eye for an eye.” I tried to argue that “an eye for an eye for wealth” is actually an obvious interpretation, certainly considering the unfamiliar ways of preaching, but in fact I myself am not entirely convinced of this. I also have a feeling that there are other examples of this (although none come to mind at the moment).
Do you agree that this contradiction does exist within the halakhic system? If so, is there a way to justify it?
This is just a demagogic way of presenting the difficulty. The difficulty is how the sages interpret the Torah in a way that does not fit the simple. And the answer is that the sermon is not obligated to be simple. The Torah has several parallel interpretations that are all correct (even when they contradict each other). The simple interpretation and the sermon interpretation are two correct interpretations, and the sermon is not supposed to fit the simple of what is written.
If the interpretations contradict each other (there are a tiny number of such cases), there are several approaches to how to approach this: 1. The Peshat instructs what should have been (that the eye be put out) but in practice money is actually paid (the sermon). 2. There is an opinion that the eye of the harmer is paid, not the damage. This probably arises from the combination of the Peshat and the sermon: the Peshat says that the harmer’s eye should be put out, and the sermon says that instead we take the eye of this harm in money.
The question of where we got the sermon methods from is the CBS. We received from Sinai that this text should be interpreted in several ways simultaneously.
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