Question

The cost of a liter of cold-pressed olive oil with virtually zero acidity, even from a branded company in a pleasant, clean, air-conditioned supermarket with plenty of parking and nice background music, is only a few dozen shekels.
But a liter of cold-pressed oil from a rain-fed field—you won’t get. It simply doesn’t exist.
And if you beg someone who grows olives, maybe he’ll give you some for a few hundred shekels per liter, and even then he’ll have done you a big personal favor. (And you probably don’t have friends like that.)
A simple calculation shows that in an old-fashioned agricultural world—without spraying, without tractors, without calculations, without theft insurance, without fast, efficient, cheap transport, without quick and sophisticated olive presses, efficient bottling and packaging, and all the other cost factors—the cost of cold-pressed oil could easily reach 1,000 NIS or more in today’s values (and I’m being very moderate and cautious).
 
Now let’s turn to the mishnah “With what may one light?” and start to understand Rabbi Tarfon: “One may light only with olive oil…” or those who disagree with him, or the preference for olive oil for Hanukkah candles…
Or even just lighting the house at 1 a.m….
It turns out they had to be fairly well-off relative to us just to merit lighting the Passover Seder table, for example… (which apparently lasted about an hour, give or take, not six hours).
When you dig into many areas of life, the gaps between then and now sometimes surpass all imagination—and this is in the easy area of calculating the production cost of an agricultural product that relatively speaking doesn’t seem (understandably) to have changed all that much…
What about the prioritization of values?
Or even the definition of values in general?
In my humble opinion, all the more so, many times over…
 
And after that premise, I have a question:
People try to issue halakhic rulings with adaptation to changing realities and changing values.
It’s starting to scare me. Why?
Because when you go even a little deeper into the facts and values of the past, you see gaps and prioritization considerations that we never even thought about.
If so, how can we be confident in assuming that a halakhic ruling was said in reality A, and then claim that in reality B the Jewish law itself dictates something different?
After all, our imagined reconstruction of the reality back then, and the glasses we put on now, and the tint of the lenses we choose, are probably so different from what actually was, that this creates a major upheaval in calculating data and facts.
In a situation of upheaval and uncertainty, seemingly it is better to stick to what was, which is relatively secure, than to change—and not to risk making a correct change when perhaps we are actually changing in precisely the opposite direction from what is correct.
 
I kind of feel like throwing up when I realize I’m writing in praise of stagnation and conservatism, but what can I do?
When things aren’t certain, you lean on whatever is somehow stable. You can mock someone clutching at a straw when the ship is sinking, but when as far as the eye can see that’s all there is, then you grab what there is…
 
What does the Rabbi think?