Q&A: Qualified for This
Qualified for This
Question
Someone who is qualified for this can rely on himself and conduct himself in Jewish law according to the conclusion he reaches in the passage. How does he know that he is qualified for this? Does it have to come from outside, with the well-known great sages of Israel laying their hands on him and telling him, “May he rule, may he rule; may he judge, may he judge,” or can he rely on himself on the basis that in his own opinion he is qualified for this? (On the question whether he may rely on himself regarding the question whether he is qualified for this, he has no position.) And in your opinion, what are the criteria—that he feels within himself that he understands well what is written, or that in practice he sees that he often arrives at the same difficulties and resolutions as our rabbis and sees that his words make sense to his colleagues? For example, how did the Rabbi himself decide that he was qualified for this? Did you simply one day say to yourself, “In my opinion I’m qualified for this,” and start relying on yourself in halakhic conclusions? With respect, thank you very much.
Answer
There are no sharp halakhic definitions here, because the question is not a halakhic one. As in any field, you have to assess whether you’ve reached understanding or not. I’ve often given the following criterion: when you study a passage and arrive at some conclusion, after you speak with others who hold different views, do you discover lines of reasoning or sources you hadn’t thought of, or in most cases does that not happen? If in most cases it doesn’t happen, then you’re qualified for this.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed.
The fact that someone weighed all the options and is consistent in his view doesn’t mean his judgment is good. To assess how good that judgment is—if that is indeed something worth assessing—you need to compare the conclusions to stable and solid conclusions. No such external measure was offered here. Is that on principle—because the condition for autonomy cannot be subordination or conformity of one’s opinion to other opinions, but only an internal measure?
You’re absolutely right, but not only for your reason. There are no rigid external measures even without assuming autonomy. Both because there are different views and possibilities in Jewish law, so there is no uniform and objective standard, and because not everything has or needs to have a sharp objective standard. Is the quality of literature or art measured by an objective ruler? Our master Rabbi Robert M. Pirsig discussed this at length in his work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Talmud.
Normative conclusions of permitted/forbidden are much easier to measure than literature. If someone disagrees in 90% of the halakhic rulings with 90% of the halakhic decisors, that is pretty strong evidence that he’s traveling in the wrong lane. If the accepted leading sages of the generation say about someone that something basic in his judgment-box is defective, that is pretty strong evidence that he really is defective. That kind of measure is good in literature too: if most of the world’s writers ranked writers, we’d get a ranking that very likely manages to capture Pirsig’s elusive quality. So why not use external measures in Jewish law too? Unless it’s for the reason I wrote—that autonomy cannot depend on something external, meaning that if the person himself thinks he has reached the level that entitles him to autonomy, you can’t tell him he hasn’t earned it, because his autonomous power, which he believes he has, will override that, and that’s how it should be.
So you have an objective standard: 90% on 90%. Nice. Now all that remains is for you to compile the list of halakhic decisors included in that number, gather everything they said on every topic, and feed it into a computer that will check each ruling of the candidate to see whether it meets that criterion.
If you insist on absurd mathematical standards, I don’t see any point in the discussion.
My objective standard is ordination from three halakhic decisors who are accepted as the leading sages of the generation. In my opinion that’s a pretty good approximation of the absurd mathematical standard that seems to you to accept as valid.
But who is the real leading sage of the generation—the one who keeps repeating and chewing over what was said before him, again and again, or the one who dares to confront the challenges of the generation, to deal with the afterbirth and placenta of the generation, and doesn’t retreat into his own four cubits?
You’re the real leading sage of the generation.
You yourself admit my point, since you hang around here on the site and don’t make do with chewed-over claims that merely repeat the accepted wisdom of previous generations. And what is true in philosophy is true in Jewish law as well. In the previous generation, Haredi politics was weaker, so there were leading sages of the generation who innovated without fear and without hesitation, like Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, Igrot Moshe, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and others. Today Haredi politics is stronger, so it’s harder to find real things that come from the heart and enter the heart. But in the final analysis, people won’t remember all those monks sitting in study kollels; they’ll remember those who dared to confront the claims and problems and solve them.
I’ll just note that in the past you gave another criterion as well (really just a different nuance of the same principle): when you learn that same passage again a few years later, do you arrive at the same conclusions, or do you build in a different direction? If it’s the same, then apparently you’re already fairly formed and settled (or you’re a consistently broken clock). That nuance is stage one, and what Michi wrote above is stage two.