MARK WASHOFSKY

for the mutual convenience of the parties,’ but it applies as well to some areas of ritual practice, such as liturgical nusah and the selection of haftarot, where no halakhic requirement interferes with the community’s choice.° In some instances where the formal halakhah is either forgotten or disputed, minhag is allowed decisory power.” Again, this power is justified by a theoretical argument: the existence of an established custom is evidence of a halakhah which actually originated in some more formal source(midrash, taganah, etc.,). Even when a minhag appears to contradict the halakhah, rabbinic authorities may not rush to denounce it. At such times integration becomes accommodation, as halakhists seeking to defend the practice of their community reinterpret the formal legal rules so that the practice, hallowed by time and custom, no longer violates halakhic principle. A well-known example concerns yom edeihem shel goyim, the festival days of Gentiles. The prevailing custom of Jewish merchants in medieval Europe was to do business with their Gentile neighbors on these days, even though such was a clear violation of halakhah.® Yet, the rabbis of northern Europe found arguments with which to justify this custom, which at least one of them termed "astonishing." Their willingness to do so, in this and in other cases, has been attributed to a conviction on their part that minhag avoteinu Torah : the ancestral customs of a holy community, customs sanctified by years of usage, cannot truly violate the Torah , even though they seem to do just that.’® Practice, as well as abstract law, is understood as being informative of God ’s will. As God 's will is a unity, so too can there be no essential contradiction between the obligations enunciated in the texts of halakhah and those which have grown up in the dynamic of religious life. If contradictions nonetheless appear, the scholar-rabbis will undertake to harmonize and to accommodate their elite, intellectual halakhah with the folk religion of the Jews , observance born in the laboratory of life.

I want to argue that this aspect of Jewish legal history can serve as guidance for today’s communities struggling with the

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