Q&A: Rabbinic Literature
Rabbinic Literature
Question
Hello Honorable Rabbi, what status do you give to the literature of the Sages outside the Talmud (the Tosefta, Sifra, Sifrei, the minor tractates, and so on)?
I haven’t been able to find too much discussion or any clear rules on this topic. I only saw that the halakhic decisors choose certain parts of this literature for Jewish law and certain parts not, and I’d be glad to know whether you are familiar with any rules on the subject.
Answer
There can’t be rules on this topic, and even if you find some, they are themselves inventions. The Talmuds have binding formal authority, and one may not dispute them. With the Jerusalem Talmud there is more of a tendency to depart from this, certainly when the Babylonian Talmud disagrees (Maimonides sometimes rules like the Jerusalem Talmud against the Babylonian Talmud, but he is unusual in this). All the other sources of the Sages are for voluntary use.
Many times halakhot were ruled from there by various halakhic decisors (I’m not talking about a case where they contradict the Talmud). Why did no decisor ever note that this is a good thing but not binding? That seems to imply that halakhic decisors as a whole related to these sources—each decisor to something else—as binding, and that is the basis of my question about whether there are rules on the subject.