Q&A: Reasoning Creates Torah-Level Law — Jewish Law or Morality
Reasoning Creates Torah-Level Law — Jewish Law or Morality
Question
I remember that you analyzed that there is a dispute among later authorities regarding the blessing before eating: whether this applies specifically to interpretive reasoning (where the boundary between it and interpretation or exposition is not sharp), or even to creative reasoning.
According to the view that even creative reasoning is Torah-level, how can one know whether the reasoning is halakhic or moral?
If something seems inherently right, independently of verses, how can a person know whether the reason it seems right stems from identifying a halakhic truth or identifying a moral truth? To say that he simply knows or senses the difference, like the difference between sky-blue and leek-green, sounds strange to me.
In what sense is a blessing before eating a matter of Jewish law and not of morality? Morality not only in the narrow sense of pleasure and suffering, but in the broader sense of values (such as obedience to God itself, as you explained).
I also don’t know whether there is any practical difference.
Answer
I didn’t understand. The dispute is about the blessing over benefit before partaking, and there the reasoning is creative. This is a new law, not interpretation or a detail within an existing law.
What I argued is that even the Tzelach, who holds that reasoning there is not Torah-level, agrees that interpretive reasoning is Torah-level. And the Pnei Yehoshua also agrees that this is not something for which one would receive lashes (because there is no explicit prohibition). Search here for my article “The Halakhic Status of Reasoning,” where I explained this in detail.
What emerges from reasoning has exactly the same status as a moral obligation: an obligation without an explicit prohibition. I do indeed think that we have halakhic intuition (that is, intuition for values that are not moral values). Still, regarding the blessing before eating, some would say that it is gratitude, and therefore a moral value. Perhaps.
Ah, thank you very much. Very clear. (Two innovations: one, that there is specifically halakhic intuition that is not only interpretive. The second, that its status is like moral intuition.)