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older, perhaps forgotten halakhic tradition. In this latter case, the halakhist seeks a theoretical justification to explain the behavior, to reduce or eliminate the gap between what the texts seem to say and what the people are actually doing. To do this, he must recast the apparently plain sense of the texts by means of innovative, unprecedented interpretations of them. Katz recounts innovations by such eminent medieval authorities as R. Ya'akov Tam(Rabbeinu Tam , 12" century France ),®' whose willingness to push the limits of halakhic flexibility to the breaking point led him to decisions that were not infrequently controversial.” And as we have seen, Maimonides introduces a creative reading of the concept of tinok shenishbah that is crucial to his effort to support an accommodating stance toward the Karaites . In other words, innovative(fictional?) readings of the legal sources have always been part and parcel of the halakhic process, and it is at the very least questionable whether the halakhah could have survived over fifteen centuries as the living religious-legal system of the Jews had its sages not been able to utilize such readings in order to respond to the challenge of changing times. If Professor Katz minimizes the halakhic authenticity of R. Ya'akov Ettlinger’s ruling concerning a challenge posed by his changing times, this is likely because, as a social historian, Katz’s primary goal is the search for those“extra-halakhic” factors that influenced the ruling. My primary goal, by contrast, has been to study the nature and substance of thee halakhic arguments as it were from the“inside.” to inquire as to how they work as law, how they function in the construction of an ongoing legal discourse. I wish to understand these texts, in other words, in the way they ask to be understood: as halakhah, as a language and rhetoric of legal analysis and justification, rather than merely as indicators pointing to factors that lie outside that language. And in that language, the creative or innovative—or, for that matter,“fictional”— interpretation of the Sources is as much at home as is the so-called mainstream Interpretation.