132 Mark Washofsky

place in its absence. This, as we have seen, is certainly the case with the halakhic response to the Enlightenment , emancipation, and secularization. The rulings of the poskim would hardly make sense apart from the stories they tell about these social-cultural phenomena and of the Jews caught up in them. From this, it follows that narrative is law, that it has as much claim to the status of“law” as do the black-letter rules and principles that jurists and rabbis customarily cite as part of their discourse. It is fruitless, in other words, to distinguish between“law” and“narrative” as though the latter is a mere“legal fiction” or as though the two are two separate and mutually-exclusive entities.'”

I have also tried to argue that the task of evaluation is a proper focus of the literary study of the law and the halakhah. By this, again, I do not mean primarily the evaluation of the substance of a particular ruling(“do I like what this judge or posek says?”’) but a judgment of a piece of writing as an example of legal performance. The author of a judicial opinion or a responsum creates a particular kind of community through the text the she creates, and the stories he tells work their effects not only upon the textual materials that he interprets and applies but also upon the audience to whom he addresses them. Of course, whether that sort of community and those sorts of effects are“good” is a normative judgment and dependent upon culture-based perspectives; the Hatam Sofer favored a different communal structure for Orthodox Judaism than that contemplated by R. Yaakov Ettlinger, just as today’s haredim have different ideas about the ideal Orthodox community than those that prevail among the“modern” or“centrist” Orthodox . Normative judgment is not an objective thing. But then, /egal judgment is not an objective thing, either. And if legal and halakhic decisions are going to depend quite critically upon“subjective” influences such as the stories that jurists tell, the least we can do as students of the law is to be aware of those influences and to consider what is at stake in the making of one choice or the telling of one story over another.