PETER HAAS

as it were, was legitimately articulated by non-rabbinic community members not acting as a beit din.'"® This introduces a flexibility in making and shaping local halakhah that has rarely been recognized in the recent polemics over what constitutes an halakhic Judaism .

Such courts gradually became an accepted feature of the Jewish legal landscape.” The institution was in fact adopted early in the twentieth century by the Zionist movement in an attempt to establish some kind of Jewish legal autonomy in the Yishuy. The institutional basis was established by the Palestine office of the Zionist Organization in 1909, under the name*Mishpat HaShalom Halvri.” Interestingly its first secretary was S. Y. Agnon.”® This body continued to function into the 1930's.

What this brief survey shows us is that there is a long tradition in rabbinic Judaism of accepting arbitration outside the formal rabbinic beit din and of according those decisions, even if promulgated by lay leaders, halakhic status. The halakhah was not seen to be only the professional legal creation of the rabbinic elite, but just as much the creation of the community in its day-to-day dealings. It offers a perfectly acceptable source of Jewish practice and norms that could exist outside the formal rabbinate. The openness and flexibility represented by this arrangement has unfortunately been totally ignored in the contemporary debate as to the character of the halakhic process. Such panels may offer a productive model for how progressive Judaism might undertake the task of creating its own halakhah.