- 106- Walter Jacob

Changing." Halakhah is the normative principle for David Novak. "However, the authority of halakhah as a normative principle cannot be consistently maintained if the principle of change is elevated from a description to a prescription, as some traditionally inclined liberals would like to do."(65)"Thus, if halakhah is to remain law, the unchanging clement must be primary and the changing element must be secondary to it."(66) If this is not so then either there is no authority for halakhah or its former authority is preempted by ethics. This, of course, leads to Judaism as primarily reacting to external sources."Since Judaism is SO elitist, particularistic and heteronomous, such ethical grounding of it clearly leads to the dismantling of almost everything in it which make Judaism unique. Much of Judaism cannot be justified on such ethical grounds, certainly not the halakhic system, as the example of Reform Judaism indicates."(67) Going in this direction leads to a hopeless effort to establish a system of Jewish ethics primarily on the agadah, which the agadah itself cannot sustain.

For Novak a historically oriented approach has become dominant."The halakhic process stand between the revelation of Sinai and the full redemption of the days of the Messiah. The affirmation of revelation(an adequate theory of which is almost always absent from both fundamentalist and liberal rhetoric), as mediated by Jewish history, means that the halakhah is in substance the commandments of God as men and women attempt to fulfill them. Change then, is called for when the stastus quo prevents us from doing a mitzvah as fully and devotedly as we might. This often calls not only for new practical applications, but for new theories as well.

The dynamics of recent history requite more