Q&A: Is the Halakhic System Valid?
Is the Halakhic System Valid?
Question
I recently spoke with a law student who is taking a course in Hebrew law, and we got into a discussion about Jewish law. He said that his main difficulty with Jewish law is that it contains two contradictory assumptions: on the one hand, it assumes that there is a basic set of laws that are a divine command and cannot be challenged. On the other hand, the sages in practice have the authority to completely empty any such command of its content by virtue of their power to interpret it, even when it is explicitly implied that the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself intended otherwise. The example he gave was “an eye for an eye.” I tried to explain that “an eye for an eye” meaning monetary compensation is actually a plausible interpretation, certainly considering methods of exposition that we do not know, but in truth I myself am not entirely convinced of that. I also have a feeling there are other examples of this too (although none come to mind right now).
Has the Rabbi’s view always been that this contradiction really does exist within the halakhic system? If so, is there a way to justify it?
Answer
This is just a demagogic way of presenting the difficulty. The real difficulty is how the sages interpret the Torah in a way that does not fit its plain meaning. And the answer is that exposition is not bound to the plain meaning. The Torah has several parallel interpretations, all of which are true, even when they contradict one another. The plain-sense interpretation and the interpretive exposition are two valid interpretations, and the exposition is not supposed to match the plain meaning of the text.
If the interpretations contradict one another—and there are only a tiny number of such cases—there are several approaches to how to relate to this: 1. The plain meaning indicates what ought to have been done (that they should put out an eye), but in actual practice one pays money instead (the expository interpretation). 2. There is an opinion that one pays the value of the damager’s eye, not the injured party’s. That probably emerges from combining the plain meaning and the exposition: the plain meaning says that the damager’s eye should be put out, and the exposition says that instead we take the monetary value of that eye.
The question of where we derived the methods of exposition from—that is a law given to Moses at Sinai. We received at Sinai that this text is to be interpreted in several ways simultaneously.