Q&A: Jewish Law — Does It Reflect the Truth?
Jewish Law — Does It Reflect the Truth?
Question
In honor of Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham,
I just heard a lecture you gave on the question of whether Jewish law reflects the truth.
You presented two possibilities in explaining the statement in the Babylonian Talmud that “these and those are the words of the living God, but the Jewish law follows Beit Hillel.”
(Either Beit Hillel express the true halakhic ruling and Beit Shammai are merely a legitimate opinion, though not a correct one [as understood by the Beit Yosef], or perhaps there is no single halakhic truth [and that is why “these and those are the words of the living God”]; rather, for other reasons [unrelated to clarifying the truth], the Jewish law was established in accordance with Beit Hillel.
I do not know why you did not use the words of the Talmud on that same page:
“It was revealed and known that in Rabbi Meir’s generation there was none equal to him; so why was the Jewish law not established in accordance with him? Because his colleagues could not get to the depth of his reasoning.”
This statement explicitly expresses the claim that Jewish law does not reflect halakhic logical truth. The fact is that the colleagues understand that Rabbi Meir’s words are more logical, closer to the intellectual truth. But the Jewish law does not follow him, because Jewish law is supposed to express the will of the sages and their understanding (something like what you called a kind of majority, as in the democratic world).
Or is there some reason why you do not see this statement of the Sages as proof for the above understanding of the concept of majority in Jewish law?
Answer
I do see it that way, and I have also written more than once that this can be proven from that Talmudic passage (see, for example, my articles “Is Jewish Law Pluralistic,” “The Price of Tolerance,” and others). But for the matter at hand, this is not proof.
Jewish law reflects the truth, but in addition there are other demands / criteria that affect it. In our case, autonomy is involved (the right and obligation to act in accordance with what you see as the truth). This is not a claim related to the question I was discussing (whether there is halakhic truth or whether this is a matter of “conventional” truth). Jewish law also has rules for cases of doubt—for example, a Torah-level doubt is ruled stringently, or “the burden of proof rests on the one seeking to extract money from another,” and the like—and this is so even though the truth may be otherwise (the lenient side may be correct, the money may really belong to the claimant, and the defendant may be lying).