Taking Precedent Seriously 25

issue that are found in over thirty works of halakhah, so that one who studies the Beit Yosef will possess a virtual library of Jewish law and be able to locate the materials required for legal judg­ment. This judgment, the determination of the halakhah,“is the very purpose(takhlit) of our work: that there should be but one Torah and one law.” But how should this determination be accomplished?

Perhaps, it occurred to me, we ought to decide among the conflict­ing opinions of the poskim on the basis of persuasive Talmudic proofs and evidence. Yet the Tosafot and the novellae(hidushim) of Nachmanides , R. Shelomo b. Adret and R. Nissim Gerondi are filled with evidence and proofs for every one of the conflicting opinions. It is a haughty thing to say that we can add anything of substance to these discussions. And who is arrogant enough to claim that he can intervene into the disputes of the giants of our halakhic past, refuting that which they have made clear or deciding that which they have left in doubt? For on account of our many sins, our mental capacity is insufficient to understand fully the words of our predecessors, let alone to improve upon their find­ings. Moreover, even were we able to take this path, it would not be advisable to do so, since it is an exceedingly long path indeed.

Karo, in this revealing passage, does not deny the existence of judicial discretion in he halakhah. The individual halakhic authority does enjoy the right to study the sources and to arrive at his own carefully-considered decision. It is for that very rea­son that the decisor ought to have at his disposal the vast collec­tion of legal materials that the Beit Yosef makes available. Yet precisely because they are so vast, the individual student of Torah cannot grasp them with the confidence necessary to arrive at a sure decision. And given the multiplicity of opinions and the ubiquity of dispute within the halakhah, the claim that“I can arrive at a clear answer on the basis of my own understanding” is evidence of hubris rather than a healthy self-confidence. Judi­cial discretion, in other words, exists in theory, but in the appli­cation of the halakhah within the context of our real world few can adopt it as a practical means of reaching legal decisions. To resolve this dilemma, Karo declares that the halakhah is to be decided according to the opinions of a“banc” of leading poskim. As a first step, he writes, he will decide the halakhah in accor­dance with the unanimous or majority view among the three great“pillars” of the law(amudey hahora’ah)“upon whom rest