Woodchopper Revisited 13

of the law, for were the teacher to consider an actual case rather than to speculate in abstraction, he might well study the issues more carefully and rule differently. The student should also beware of learning from his teacher’s decisions in case, lest he mistake the teacher’s reasoning for the decision and then go on to apply the same ruling, incorrectly, to another case. The student may follow the teacher’s theory or decision only when he has been told that“yes, this is the theory of the law, and you may rely on it in matters of practice.” The baraita’s concluding caveat—“so long as one does not draw an analogy”— puzzles the setam Talmud (i.e., the anonymous editor[s] of the passage), which objects:“We use the entire Torah for the purpose of analogy(veha kol hatorah kulav damo i medaminan lah)!” How can you prohibit the student from drawing analogies from his teacher’s rulings when“the entire Torah”— all our legal learning— is based upon that process of reasoning? To resolve this difficulty, the Talmud quotes Rav Ashi, who emends or reinterprets the baraita as follows: “So long as one does not draw an analogy in matters of tereifot,” those physical injuries that disqualify kosher species of animals from consumption by Jews . In support of this emendation, the Talmud cites another tanaitic passage, which reads:“We do not draw analogies between tereifot. And do not be puzzled by this, for one can cut an animal on one side and it will live and on the other side and it will die.” This second baraita(as well as the first one, under Rav Ashi’s reinterpretation) instructs us not to reason analogically when learning the specific field of animal anatomy. We should not, for example, draw conclusions about injuries to an animal’s liver by comparing them to similar injuries to its lung, because the physiology of each of the bodily organs is unique.” The objection— “so long as one does not draw an analogy”— is thus restricted to a condemnation of analogy when pursued in one particular field of law. This would lead to the inference that, in all other fields, reasoning by analogy is an appropriate method of deriving legal meaning. Various rishonim do make that inference. R. Meir Halevy Abulafiah (13th-century Spain) writes:“But in all other matters of Torah we do