MARK WASHOFSKY

oriented. The purely legal reasoning is directed toward ends which, though not demanded by the texts themselves, are informed by the poseq's general religious sensibilities, his deeply-held convictions as to what God and the Torah require of us. To the extent that these commitments are shared by his community, the halakhic reasoning which expresses them will determine its practice. True, since other answers are possible and plausible, this reasoning will never attain the status of objective truth. But the absence of objective truth does not imply that no answer is- correct interpretation of Jewish law, that all conclusions are nothing more than the subjective preferences of rabbis dressed in legal garb. It means that we accept the fact that halakhah is and has always been inescapably rhetorical, the product of an ongoing argument among Jews who structure their religious reality through the medium of text. And that means that"correctness" is a more variegated and complex reality than the advocates of"one right answer" believe.

The conversational model of halakhic reasoning incorporates these insights. It postulates, first of all, that there is no halakhic reasoning in the absence of an halakhic community, a self-identified grouping of Jews who look to the body of rabbinic-legal text and tradition as its linguistic reservoir. An halakhic community, stated metaphorically, uses rabbinic texts as the bricks and mortar with which to structure its religious and moral discourse. The conversational approach denies as a matter of principle that demonstrable logical proof is the goal or even a serious possibility of this activity. The aim, rather, is persuasion, whose achievement is a matter of considerable ambiguity. At times, persuasion is easy. There will be halakhic propositions that are not at all controversial, not necessarily because they are objectively inherent in the texts(inscribed, as it were, in the"fabric of the Toraitic universe") but because the members of the community simply do not derive any other possible meaning from the sources.''® There will be issues on which some controversy exists, at least in theory, because the texts can plausibly be understood in different ways. Nonetheless, these will be"settled" issues because the community has reached, through the historical process of its halakhic discourse, the most persuasive answer, the one which commands general assent as the most coherent interpretation of the texts or the one which

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