Against Method 19

This criticism, which goes to the heart of our enterprise, rests upon the assumption that it is possible to determine the objectively correct answers to all or most questions of Jewish law, so that answers that differ are by definition incorrect or deviant. And if it is possible to determine objectively correct answers to questions of Jewish law, there must be a proper method by which to make that determination. After all, halakhic decisions are based upon the interpretation of the literary texts and sources of Jewish law, the Talmud and the vast corpus of commentaries, codes, and responsa devoted to the Talmud ’s elucidation. Since legal sources are famously open to differing readings and understandings, there must be some procedure by which to weed out those interpretations that are incorrect. That procedure is the“halakhic method” of Orthodox pesak, a set of rigorous techniques of textual interpretation that, when applied to the literary sources of Jewish law, distinguish objectively “right” understandings from“wrong” ones. The belief in the existence of such a method and its identification with Orthodox pesak allows our critics on both the left and the right to identify that pesak as“the” halakhah and our own interpretations, which deviate from it, as incorrect, as wrong, as non-halakhah.

I want to offer a challenge to this assumption. I argue that there is no such thing as the one objectively correct answer to a question of halakhah. 1 argue this because I do not believe in the existence of some procedure or set of techniques called the“halakhic method” that works as a formula to produce the right interpretations of Jewish legal texts. The appeal to such a method allows for the claim that halakhah is like mathematics or the hard sciences, a discipline governed by fixed and rationally discoverable rules of procedure that, if properly applied, do yield objectively correct answers. The resort to “method” as a way of explaining the halakhic process resembles nothing so much as the doctrine of legal formalism,* once the reigning theory of law the“orthodoxy” of jurisprudence—in the United States .’ By now, however, generations of scholars have dismantled that