AUTHORITY AND CRITERIA IN LIBERAL HALAKHAH

We shall have to rely on the wisdom and judgement of rabbinic scholars to determine which criteria, if any, are valid in each individual case. Poskim must exercise their judicial discretion wherever appropriate in accordance with the rabbinic dictum: "Everything depends on the judgement of rabbinic decisors."*°

III. Progressive Principles in the Traditional Halakhah

The need for a framework of extra-halakic criteria to allow change has been questioned and even denied. Some scholars claim that all we have to do is to research the traditional halakhah where we can find a myriad of creative and even liberal principles which could enable progress in every generation. The following are but a few of the traditionally tested means of coping with changing reality.

When the sages of Alexandria decided to assign the status of mamzerim to children born of betrothed women(without a get) to other men, Hillel the Elder found a means of purifying these young people. He used the legal fiction of doresh leshon hedyot, giving a forced interpretation of a sentence in their ketubot (marriage contracts) claiming that these woman were not betrothed at all, so therefore their offspring were not mamzerim.*

In this context, almost every scholar makes note of Hillel 's well known prozbol** and of the precept: et laasot ladonai heferu toratekha, which may allow the abrogation of a part of the Torah to save the whole.” We should emphasize an often neglected principle allowing creativity found in the Beth Hillel"Decree for the Repentant" which enabled a repentant thief to make compensation for a stolen house column that he built into his own home rather than fulfilling the Scriptural requirement of destroying his own dwelling and returning the original stolen object, as demanded by Beth Shammai.*

17