MARK WASHOFSKY

Halakhah. Although in forging our response we often have to settle upon one possible answer and reject the others, all of them make a legitimate prima facie claim on our thoughtful attention.

As liberal halakhists, we are committed to the plurality of answers within the Halakhah , and we are rightly suspicious of rab­binic attempts to enforce a supposed unity on the law by asserting that one possible is the only“right” one. The correctness of an answer cannot be declared, announced, or assumed; it must rather be justified, argued for as the better or best one available. This requires an honest and extended conversation among all the plau­sible alternatives. Halakhah , in this conception, is much less a system of organized political authority empowered to declare an­swers than it is a structure of language, a set of texts and traditional responses to them out of which we as a community fashion our continuing discussion of the question: what is it that God and Torah demand of us? A rabbinic teshuvah on any halakhic issue is thus best viewed as an element of that conversation, a response to the arguments of previous speakers, and an invitation to its intended audience—that is, to the set of all Jews who share its author’s commitment to the text-language of Halakhah —to accept a particu­lar view of Torah and of themselves. As an invitation, its aim is to persuade, to convince those to whom it addresses itself that Torah is best understood in this way rather than according to the ways suggested by other speakers. And couched in the language of per­Suasion, a responsum is likewise an invitation to argument, to participation in that centuries-old dialogue by which our commu­nity, giving voice to its texts, has sought to work out its under­standing of itself, its world, and its God .