Q&A: Reasoning
Reasoning
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’m listening to the lecture series on authority in Jewish law.
It sharpened for me that I don’t understand exactly what reasoning is. I understand its status, that it is equivalent to Torah-level law, but not its essence.
How are lines of reasoning formed? Only through the logical thinking of the sages? Can new ones be formed?
Thank you for the clarification,
Abraham
Answer
I didn’t understand the difficulty. Reasoning describes the products of thought. Where do opinions and values come from? How do we know that the Torah must be observed? As Rabbi Shimon Shkop says at the beginning of Gate 5, even obedience to the Torah is itself grounded in reasoning, so clearly reasoning has no less validity than the command itself.
I also didn’t understand the question of whether new lines of reasoning can be formed. What counts as new reasoning and what counts as old reasoning? Do you mean reasoning nowadays as opposed to the reasoning of the sages of the Talmud? Of course yes. Is there some stage in history at which the mind was sealed off?
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand the question. When something is logical, it’s called reasoning. That’s all. What more do you want? For the angel of intellect to come down from heaven and announce that this is reasoning?
Nice idea, but no. This is mainly my own ignorance, but for example the fact that the Rogatchover made a list of the lines of reasoning makes it sound like people don’t really mean to add more. What’s hard for me to understand is mainly the Torah-level status: that anything logical, in the pure sense of the word, is supposed to be Torah-level, I understand; but the implications of a mechanism that turns a logical product of thought into a Torah-level principle are fascinating.
All right, I probably just don’t understand the language you’re writing in. To me, this is Chinese.
So to sharpen the question: how does a product of thought get stamped as reasoning, at the level of Torah law? Or would you say that reasoning from our day does not have the same Torah-level status?