A gainst Method 27

nature of halakhic decision: The judge or the posek must not say to himself, or to those who seek his guidance on any question,“bring the book, let us look up the law, let me decide the halakhah automatically, in accordance with the written word.” Such is not the path that halakhic authorities should tread. It is their duty rather to study carefully the sources of the law and to subject them to thorough analysis, to test them in the crucible of their training, knowledge, and reason, and to arrive thereby at the correct determination of the law. Whoever decides the halakhah simply by citing the written sources without such a process of analysis and without an effort to truly understand the law is one to whom our Sages refer as“a destroyer of the world.> Those who understand halakhah as the rote, mechanical application of black-letter rules are in serious error. For Ouziel, traditional halakhic argument(masa umatan) is a flexible and dynamic intellectual activity, capable. of meeting new challenges and accommodating changing insights. This process, which in a midrashic metaphor he likens to the dew that refreshes and reinvigorates the grass,’ demands independence of legal thought. The halakhist must be prepared to slip the stifling bonds of precedent. He may not defer to the authority of codes and compilations. Instead, he must claim for himself the freedom of judgment that belongs to all knowledgeable students of Jewish law, the freedom to arrive at one’s own conclusions based upon one’s own reading of the sources, no matter how innovative, even if those conclusions disagree with the conclusions of other rabbis.* It is vital that the contemporary posek proceed in this way, because circumstances of life, transformations in culture, scientific and technological developments in each and every generation create halakhic problems that demand resolution. We are not entitled to ignore these questions by invoking the slogan hadash asur min hatorah, i.e., anything that our predecessors have not already permitted must by that light be forbidden.... It is rather our duty to[find answers] through the time-honored path of legal analogy (lilmod satum min hameforash). Hadash asur min hatorah literally,“everything new is forbidden by the Torah ”— was, of course, the polemical watchword of Rabbi