Q&A: The Issue of Bereirah
The Issue of Bereirah
Question
Hello Rabbi. How can one understand philosophically the rationale behind the view that “there is bereirah”? Assuming there is free choice, how can one say that the present clarifies the past retroactively? After all, at the time of the action in the past, the future did not yet exist. Could one perhaps say that there is some kind of quantum principle in Jewish law?
Answer
There is an extended discussion of this in the fourth book of the Talmudic Logic series. First of all, this is not connected to free choice. Nachmanides, in Gittin 25, even writes that in matters dependent on a person, there is no bereirah according to all views.
Here I’ll just say briefly that, in the simple understanding, bereirah does not operate through backward causation, unlike a condition, which does. Bereirah only defines the object to which the legal act takes effect. For example, if a bill of divorce was written for whichever woman will go out through the doorway first, it was written from the outset for that woman whose defining feature is that she will go out tomorrow through the doorway first. When that happens tomorrow, it merely becomes clarified who that woman is for whose sake the bill of divorce was written. It is not really retroactive. It’s hard to elaborate here.
Discussion on Answer
The reasoning could be that you cannot apply a legal effect to an object that is not yet identified now—even if the information, in principle, already exists now. If nobody knows it, that is not considered a sufficiently identified object.
Thank you.
Why is this not connected to free choice? After all, if the dispute is not about things that depend on a person, then what is the reasoning of the one who says there is no bereirah? Because if the woman does not really have free choice whether to go out the door or not, then it is determined deterministically on the basis of the circumstances, and in that case the information certainly already exists even before she went out the door; it’s just that we do not know it.