Jewish Law Responds to American Law 137
Time and Dr. Freehof ’s prodigious productivity and his own matchless knowledge of responsa have contraverted his judgment concerning the development of Halakhah in this era.'* In the next thirty years his books on responsa tumbled one after another from the printing press. He has made a lasting contribution in a period of history, which has seen an exponential growth in a new area of halakhic literature, reform responsa. In largest measure, Dr. Freehof responded to the need for new answers to old questions in the area of personal and communal religious observance. 1* While the broad domain of religious observance involves more than ritual, for our purposes I would use that term to catalog the vast majority of issues he addressed.'®
During the four decades since Dr. Freehof essentially pronounced Halakhah to be moribund, there has been a new creative dynamism in the halakhic process in all the movements of Jewish religious life. The Orthodox and Conservative movements have created, as has the Reform movement, a growing body of literature which is focused on questions of Jewish law responding to new realities in our world. In largest measure, the Conservative movement has used the mechanism of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly as its means to address the new ritual and ethical dilemmas.” Orthodoxy has, in largest measure, continued the century-old pattern of turning to individual rabbis who have acquired authority based upon their knowledge of Jewish law and their moral leadership.'®
Not quite tangentially, it must be noted that there has been a constant dynamic tension between halakhah and the law of the alien jurisdiction under which the Jewish people lived at different times and in different lands. The Jewish legal scholars have grappled with the bipolar tautness created when attempting to define Jewish law that was constricted by the requirements and aw. Initially, it was determined that “any condition contrary to what is written in the Torah is void.”1? In the second century, reacting to the authority of Roman law, Rabbi Judah limited the rule.“This is the rule, any condition contrary to what is in the Torah is invalid if relating to the a matter of mamon; if relating to a matter other than mamon, it is void.”2° There has been a further development of this con
cept of the subordination of Jewish law to the prevailing legal system. In the third century CE, Samuel, one
exigencies of the prevailing|
of the two preemi
c: ies i wlnent legal scholars of the Babylonian-Jew ish community, ackno