ABORTION AND THE HALAKHIC CONVERSATION

yield unified legal truth, one objectively right answer to every legal question. When we think of law rather as a textual discourse, as a literary-rhetorical endeavor, we begin to accept the unreality of such expectations. Our answers, in truth, are almost never"objectively" correct. Again, though, the absence of one indisputably right answer does not mean that there are no right answers at all or that the search for truth must inevitably deteriorate into radical skepticism. On the contrary: it demands that the members of a legal community, aware of the tentative nature of their conclusions, redouble their efforts toward determining the best and most persuasive understanding of their law as it speaks to their lives.

Halakhah , like law, is best understood not as science but as an enterprise in world-construction. When we"do" halakhah, we do not give shape to our religious and moral existence by some coldly rational method of deduction from first principles. Nor do we simply create our truth, making whatever statements we wish to make in the name of religion and then hiding them cynically behind acceptable legal language. Halakhic decision is the provisional result of an ongoing hermeneutic, a communication between "objective" and"subjective", a confrontation between the texts that comprise Jewish legal discourse and the moral and political commitments with which we read those texts and give them voice. It is the world of argument, the process of testing our assumptions against and through a tradition of shared and inherited meaning,

To live in this perpetual dialogue between our sources and ourselves means, of course, that though we keep searching for truth we can never be sure that we possess it in its absolute and final form. Such, however, is our lot: to disguise it, to pretend that we possess some scientific method that can reduce every legal, religious, or moral controversy to a state of plain fact, is to distort the reality in which we find ourselves. In halakhah as in life. indeterminacy is the price we pay for being human. But then, if we are satisfied with that condition, it is a price we are prepared to pay.''