Q&A: The Importance of Understanding the "Environmental Conditions" of Halakhic Decisors
The Importance of Understanding the "Environmental Conditions" of Halakhic Decisors
Question
Hello,
I was at your lecture today, where you argued that although different halakhic decisors were influenced in different ways (environmental and otherwise), it is not important to know those influences; rather, one should evaluate their statements based on the reasoning and not on the causes. Here we need to distinguish between two cases (and you also distinguished between them):
A. The dispute stems from the fact that one is right and one is mistaken (or that both are mistaken).
B. The dispute stems from different environmental conditions in which they lived, and then both can be right at the same time relative to their own environment.
Most likely, the various disputes arise from some combination of these two causes.
My claim is that in the case of a dispute of type 2, it is important to study the background of the halakhic decisors, not as a source of authority ("I live in a period more similar to the period of Maimonides, and therefore I should follow him"), but in order to make it possible to arrive at a more general insight that would be correct for both cases, from which one could derive the case relevant to my own time.
I’ll give an example (a very simplistic one) from the world of science:
Yossi lives in Tel Aviv and measures the boiling temperature of water, reaching the conclusion that it is 100 degrees.
Danny lives in Jerusalem and performs the same experiment, reaching the conclusion that the answer is 97 degrees.
The dispute, of course, stems from the difference in altitude between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (and both are right).
If we ignore the people’s background and only try to analyze the experiment they performed—who measured more precisely, who ran more experiments, and so on—it will be very hard for us to arrive at the general law that boiling temperature depends on elevation above sea level. But if we examine the different environmental conditions and understand that Yossi was in Tel Aviv and Danny was in Jerusalem, it will be easier for us to arrive at the general law.
What do you think about that?
Answer
I agree in principle that studying the context can add something. But usually that is only at the margins.
The example is not really similar to the analogue, because there there really is one law that is applied differently in the two places. In other words, there is no real dispute there. By contrast, my claim is that among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) there is a genuine dispute, except that the circumstances played a role in giving rise to it.