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HALAKHAH AND ULTERIOR MOTIVES

final ruling and which taken together constitute the general perception of the objective halakhah, are acts of rabbinic discretion. No preexisting legal norm, no canon of legal logic forces the poseq to make one choice over its alternative. It is his will rather than his reason, a will presumably informed by his faith, his adherence to standards of reasonability in interpretation, his sense of the purposes of the law, and his assessment of the needs of the community against the backdrop of Jewish history, that determines his choice. All of which suggests that the process of halakhic decision is much more art than it is science.

3. From this point, we may draw a conclusion with special application to liberal halakhah. One of the major objections raised against our enterprise, by critics of the left as well as the right, is that liberal halakhah is unprincipled. That is, liberal(especially Reform) rabbis who write on halakhic subjects lack carefully delineated principles to determine how their decisions ought to be made, to decide which traditional laws to retain and which to abandon. Ultimately, say these critics, Reform responsa writers make their decisions on an ad hoc basis, relying exclusively upon considerations of expediency and personal prejudice. Put differently, they reach the same decisions at which they would have arrived in the absence of their halakhic argumentation and its marshalling of traditional sources. Reform responsa thus lose any claim to the objective validity and the logical consistency which mark the traditional halakhic process.®® There is much of value in this criticism, even if those who raise it are probably averse to the idea of any Reform"halakhic process", principled or otherwise. Liberal halakhah, if it is to be more than an exercise in dredging up sources merely to endorse the preconceived religious sensibilities and biases of liberal Jews , must be prepared to justify its conclusions by means of principles more permanent and general than the need to arrive at an"expedient" decision in the case at hand.* Consistency and objectivity are surely worthy goals for any humanistic endeavor; they are building blocks of intellectual

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