Woodchopper Revisited 3

the end of a process of logical or scientific reasoning that identifies the one true meaning of the source(s) at hand. The conclusions, rather, cannot be imagined in the absence of the interpretive assumptions the ethicists bring to their reading of the texts.“I would propose that contemporary Jewish ethics be conceived not as an attempt to determine what past authorities would say about contemporary problems if they were alive today, but as a dialectical relation in which finally no sharp distinction can be made between our voices and theirs.... Any reading of the texts that we produce, and any conclusions we draw from them, are as much our work as theirs.”"

Newman's article is important in a number of ways. It is, as I indicated earlier, one of the first efforts to integrate the work of contemporary legal theorists into the study of halakhic texts, an approach that greatly contributes to our understanding of Jewish legal thought and the halakhic process.'* It is also exemplary of the scholarly direction called the“interpretive turn”— the recognition of“the importance of interpretation in all inquiry”'*— that has characterized the humanities and social sciences for more than a generation. Practitioners of a number of disciplines have moved away from the old positivist model of study that idealizes the objective analysis of empirical data and toward an approach that emphasizes that all reason is rooted in history, tradition, and human experience. Hence the observer, even the“hard” scientist,'® cannot know an object or explain his data without interpreting them;“all understanding is interpretation,’ a process that is not wertfrei but always proceeds from a contingent and historical position, the framework of practices, interests, and problems within which one lives, works, and thinks. Newman's presentation helps us to see the activity of Jewish law as an ongoing interpretive(hermeneutical) process that attempts to arrive at a constructive understanding of the halakhah through argument rather than an effort, akin to scientific method, to deduce the single correct answer from the data. Finally, and with specific reference to our topic here, Newman challenges the way in which many thinkers pursue the