Innovation and Authority 15
sheep).” The woman asks where her lover's flock is resting and is advised:“If you do not know, O fairest of women/ Go follow the tracks of the sheep/ and graze your kids/ by the tents of the shepherds.” The title uses the feminine imperative, as if the responsum were addressing the deviants directly. Schachter has selected the eroticized shepherdess of the Song to deliver an admonition to women to follow rather than to lead as the rebels are doing. Nine pages into the response, Schachter cites Seforno’s exegesis on this exhortation. It is obviously this text Schachter had in mind when he chose his title:
Go follow the tracks of the sheep. When the halakhah vacillates in your hand, follow the minhag. And graze your kids,... the students who will teach in the future. By the tents of the shepherds. By the interpretations of the scholars of the generation, according to their reasoning, and they will consider what to approve.
Seforno appears to be quoting Y. Maaser Sheni 5:56b:“If the law vacillates(roffefet) in the courts and you do not know what its nature is, see what the people do.” Schachter understands this passage to mean that halakhic uncertainty is best resolved by following prevailing custom, but rather than seeing what the people are doing as the Palestinian Talmud recommends, Schachter’s reading of Seforno proposes that even minhag is contingent on the approval of the scholars of the generation, among whom he implicitly numbers himself. The allusion in the title, then, is more to Seforno than to Song of Songs directly. It betrays Schachter’s admission that the case he is deciding is halakhically uncertain and that custom is at issue. Lacking hard halakhic evidence (which is why he has had recourse to an exegesis on Song of Songs in a legal argument), Schachter will base the core of his argument On an assertion that poskim, decisors, are the arbiters of custom.
The Introductory Statement