Q&A: The Nature of the Rogatchover’s Torah
The Nature of the Rogatchover’s Torah
Question
The Rogatchover offers meta-halakhic and philosophical explanations as a kind of framework and foundation for the laws and disputes in the Talmud. I wanted to ask: what is his basis for connecting those things? Let me explain my question: suppose there is a dispute about the proper way to destroy leavened food, and the Rogatchover writes that at the root of the dispute are different understandings of the prohibition of leavened food—whether it applies to the substance or to the form. Did he have some way to prove logically that this really was the underlying position of the Tannaim and Amoraim? Is it intuition? [On the face of it, it seems quite clear that the work of abstraction he did on the various Talmudic passages could also have been done in other ways.]
Answer
This question can be raised regarding any conceptual Talmudic analysis. You can always wonder whether there might be another conceptual theory, perhaps even a better one. Such analysis is judged by common sense. There are no measurable objective criteria by which to evaluate it, and therefore there is also no point in looking for a logical proof. Nachmanides already writes in the introduction to Milhamot Hashem that “the wisdom of our Torah is not like astronomy and geometry, whose proofs are decisive.”
Discussion on Answer
It gives the impression that the Brisker innovations try to arrive at a more univocal and necessary result, so I asked specifically about the Rogatchover.
“A Cartesian and a polar system”—ah, I don’t understand what the master is saying… maybe Yehoshua will try to explain to me what you mean in yeshiva terms.
No matter. It’s hard to explain here. But I’m not sure that in Brisk it is more univocal. In any case, even if it is more so, it is certainly not completely univocal. To each his own conceptual framework.
Maybe we’ll merit a column on this sometime. I assume many people would be interested.
And on the difference between this kind of relativity and postmodernism.
Amen.
And perhaps one more comment. There is an implicit assumption in your words that a conceptual analysis is unique, and that it necessarily contradicts another conceptual analysis. But that is not necessary. There can be several analyses and all of them can be correct. Each one places the topic on a different coordinate system, and from each coordinate system it looks in a way that fits that system. Just as you can describe the same structure or point in a Cartesian system and a polar system, or a rotated and shifted Cartesian system, and so on.