Q&A: The Talmud: Authority or Truth
The Talmud: Authority or Truth
Question
I came up with a wonderful observation on the Sabbath, and I was interested to hear your opinion about it.
Over the years I’ve noticed that there are differences in approach regarding the weight given to the text of the Talmud between the Beit Yosef and the Chazon Ish. The Beit Yosef gives it secondary status relative to the underlying reasoning, as he himself writes that forcing the language is preferable to forcing the concept. In my humble opinion, you can see this in many places in the Beit Yosef, where when there is a difficulty on some medieval authority, he strains the language of the Talmud a great deal. By contrast, the Chazon Ish apparently treats the give-and-take of the Talmud with great seriousness, and for him the reasoning is secondary. In one of his letters he even writes that one should not elaborate on reasoning. I understand his intent to be that the main thing is the accounting of the text, and the reasoning can be bent in favor of the text.
Now I thought that apparently this follows from their respective positions on this issue, because it is well known that they disagreed about the reason why the Amoraim do not dispute the Tannaim: according to the Kesef Mishneh, it is because that is what they received, and according to the Chazon Ish, it is because they were lesser in wisdom than the Tannaim. According to this, the Kesef Mishneh is consistent with his view that the Talmud’s reasoning is not necessarily correct, and because what we accepted is only the text; whereas according to the Chazon Ish, who holds that the Talmud is necessarily correct from our perspective, the wording of the text has importance.
What do you think?
By the way, the last lecture with Rabbi Kook’s real and imaginary texts was especially amusing.
Answer
That’s interesting, because I would say exactly the opposite. The Chazon Ish constantly gives very strong weight to reasoning. He even writes that the intellect is the angel that guides us, etc. Indeed, in Yoreh De’ah, section 150 and section 3, among others. And when he says one should not elaborate on reasoning, that is only because in his view it is hard to persuade people that way (everyone has his own reasoning), not because the reasoning is incorrect.
By the way, the Chazon Ish often adopts esoteric explanations—that is, he does not say what he really thinks, as with the made-up idea about the two thousand years of Torah and the like; rather, he invents an explanation that will be accepted, because the principle itself must be right in his eyes. So I am not sure that he really means to say that the authority of the Talmud is due to its immense wisdom. It may be that he thought people would accept it more readily that way, and therefore wrote what he wrote.
As for the Beit Yosef, it is indeed well known what he wrote (as I recall in Yoreh De’ah, section 228), that forcing the language is preferable to forcing the reasoning. But as someone who enters into the authority of the medieval authorities and rules in a highly precedent-based way (unlike the Chazon Ish), I would have expected precisely that he would stick to their wording. When you come to reconcile one of the medieval authorities, you of course have to decide whether to follow the wording or the reasoning, but the very fact that you make the effort to reconcile them all says that you are precedent-based.
Discussion on Answer
Assuming that it really does depend on reality, then clearly the laws of tereifot are different today. But as is known, there are views that it does not depend on reality (Maimonides distinguishes in this matter between a human tereifah and an animal tereifah).
The Sema already wrote that the view of householders is the opposite of the view of the Torah. Like Newton said in his time, I frame no hypotheses?
With God’s help, I’ll think more about these things.
As for the Chazon Ish’s “two thousand years of Torah,” you set me up perfectly there, because I understood (I don’t remember from where) that you do not accept his argument on this point. No surprise—aggadic literature, as we already said? And as I recall, the Chazon Ish’s words were said regarding the non-kosher defects that the Sages enumerated.
According to your view, then, that the Sages have no authority over reality, do the laws of tereifot depend on the reality as known to us today?