Q&A: Deriving a Kal Va-chomer Nowadays
Deriving a Kal Va-chomer Nowadays
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi, how are you?
I recently came across a responsum of the Avnei Nezer saying that in our generation it is impossible to derive Jewish laws through a fortiori reasoning and binyan av (attached below).
Is the prevalent view really that it is possible, and this is a relatively isolated approach, or is the prevalent view like what the Avnei Nezer wrote?
Thank you very much, and Sabbath peace,
A.
P.S.
I’m updating the Rabbi that the article on my thesis was published in Badad 33 a few weeks ago. Thank you for all the help!
Responsa Avnei Nezer, Yoreh De’ah, part 449:
Concerning your honor’s statement whether nowadays there is an obligation to station guards for the Temple: I will answer him according to the limitations of my understanding, though not as a halakhic ruling nor for practical action, for it is not for me to decide a matter that concerns the entire Jewish people, and thank God Israel is not bereft; rather, I am writing merely as a matter of give-and-take in learning:
And your honor wished to derive this matter from reverence for the Temple by way of an analogy and an a fortiori inference. But we should not enter into this at all, because expounding the Torah through the thirteen hermeneutical principles was entrusted to the sages of the Talmud, and not to the sages after them, all the more so not to us.
Answer
Hello A.,
It is commonly assumed that in the generations after the Talmud, the thirteen hermeneutical principles are not used—not because of a lack of authority, but because of a lack of skill in using those interpretive principles. But in practice people definitely do use them, at least in the case of a fortiori reasoning, since that is a logical principle and its use is fairly straightforward. For example, the Chafetz Chaim on the Torah derives several laws by a fortiori reasoning (for instance, helping a child who is carrying a load, by a fortiori reasoning from “you shall surely help unload” in the case of an animal). A fortiori reasoning is an interpretive method that is used all the time, though in most cases people do so without even noticing.
All the best and much success,
Discussion on Answer
Anything—a decree, an interpretation, exegesis, reasoning—receives binding force only if it is done in the Great Court. There is nothing unique specifically about the thirteen principles. But that is only with regard to others. As for a community, an interpretation made by its rabbi presumably binds them, and an interpretation a person makes for himself binds him. As far as I know, a religious court has no special status specifically regarding interpretations.
Obviously, if I disagree with the interpretation, it does not bind me unless the one expounding it is the Great Court. I am speaking even with regard to the expounder himself, or someone who agrees with him (and certainly regarding a community whose rabbi expounded this way).
I saw this in the book From Sinai to the Chamber of Hewn Stone by Dr. Shlomo Kassirer and Shlomo Glicksberg, p. 41 note 39. I will quote their wording:
“And the Great Court of that generation discussed them according to the principles by which the Torah is expounded, and the elders ruled on them and concluded that the law is thus” — this implies that the Great Court must approve the law that was developed through exegesis. So too in the introduction to Mishneh Torah, p. 2: “And among the matters newly developed in every generation were laws that they did not learn from tradition but rather through one of the thirteen principles, and the Great Court agreed to them”; Laws of Rebels 1:2: “And likewise matters that they derived by their own reasoning through one of the principles by which the Torah is expounded, and it appeared to them that the law in this matter is thus”; and there in halakhah 3: “And matters derived through legal reasoning—if the entire Great Court agreed to them, then they agreed,” etc. The need for the court’s agreement to the exegesis fits well with Maimonides’ general approach, which sees the authority of the sages’ innovations as based on the power of the court. Therefore, the innovations of an individual sage are not binding in themselves, but only if accompanied by the agreement of all the sages. This is apparently not so according to Nachmanides, who sees the authority of exegesis as revealing the meaning of the Torah; according to him, perhaps no institutional agreement on the exegesis is needed.
Where do you see that the expounder himself is not bound? Maimonides is talking about when this becomes a law that binds the public and joins the halakhic corpus. As far as I know, there is no requirement that a religious court agree to an interpretation or exegesis as such. There is no source for that, and Maimonides does not write that either.
Practically speaking, if we restore the use of the thirteen hermeneutical principles, then it will once again make sense to study the Hebrew Bible in order to look for those principles in it, right?
Indeed. I just remembered that this is what they wrote. It really seems they were mistaken.
Aharon, definitely. But in any case this is not the kind of Hebrew Bible study I was discussing in the posts here. In principle, even studying the Talmud is studying the Hebrew Bible (even without Rabbenu Tam’s approach that was brought up here), but that is not what we are dealing with.
I seem to remember that people prove from Maimonides that the thirteen hermeneutical principles receive binding force only when a religious court agrees with the interpretation, and even if a sage thinks that something should be derived via the thirteen hermeneutical principles, it does not bind even him until a religious court agrees to it. Seemingly that should apply to a fortiori reasoning as well, and then the answer is really that there is no authority for this.