MARK WASHOFSKY

of unborn children. The times demand a"fence around the Torah, " let alone that we refrain from relaxing the prohibition against murder.

This leads him to critique the ruling of R. Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg(whom he does not mention by name), which permits abortion in cases where amniocentesis reveals that the fetus has contracted Tay-Sachs disease.*® Tay-Sachs, while always fatal to the child within a few years of its birth, poses no threat to the mother's life; Waldenberg allows the abortion in order to spare her emotional trauma. There is certainly no question of danger to the mother’s life here, and Feinstein criticizes Waldenberg for ignoring most of the halakhic sources which would forbid abortion in non-mortal circumstances."We should not make the mistake of relying upon the ruling of this rabbi; may God forgive his error."

This outline of Feinstein's opinion, if sketchy, will nonetheless suffice to highlight the means by which he solves the problem of halakhic plurality. Confronting a mass of texts and precedents which argue on either side of the abortion question, he adopts two decision-making mechanisms which allow him to identify the correct answer. First, he enacts a formal rule of halakhic decision, according to which we may not dissent from the rulings of Maimonides , even when they seem poorly supported by the Talmudic sources, unless that dissent is already registered by early commentators"worthy" enough to disagree with him. Feinstein, to be sure, is not the first to resort to such a rule. Jewish legal history knows of numerous cases in which scholars or communities pledge to follow unstintingly the rulings of a particular sage or group of sages. The method enunciated by R. Yosef Caro , to fix the law in accordance with the majority opinion the three"pillars of halakhic authority" ­Alfasi, Rambam , and R. Asher b. Yehiel- is perhaps the most familiar example of this process.*® Nonetheless, though amply precedented, Feinstein's rule is problematic in two major respects. First, however acceptable it may be in theory, the rule does not correspond to halakhic fact: it does not describe the actual debate over abortion in Jewish law. As Waldenberg notes in his response to Feinstein, rabbinic scholars(including some"early" ones) have

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