Mark Washofsky

trying, for the Zionist rabbis were nothing if not“methodological.” They described their work, remember, as berur or masa umatan, terms that denote the thoroughly traditional approach to halakhic reasoning and pesak. They insisted that they were doing nothing “new.” Safely and surely“Orthodox, ” they denied any revolutionary tendencies in their legal thinking and conclusions.*® The whole point of their enterprise was to demonstrate that Jewish law in its accepted, existing(i.e.,“Orthodox ”) manifestation could accommodate the establishment of a sovereign state and support the institutions necessary to its survival and function. Yet for all their faithfulness to traditional halakhic“method,” the Zionist rabbis did not succeed in persuading other Jewish legal authorities, who were surely no less “Orthodox ” than they, that their conclusions were correct readings of the halakhah. Each of the Orthodox camps, one Zionist and the other anti-Zionist , observing the requirements of the halakhic process in all its appropriate stringency, arrived at a set of decisions and understandings that differed radically from those of the other.

The same holds, I contend, across the board, for all questions of Jewish law, regardless of subject. Halakhic method does not produce the correct pesak because, to repeat, there is no such thing as the one objectively correct answer to a question of halakhah. An “objectively correct” answer is correct in a formal and systemic way, an answer the correctness of which cannot be doubted by any serious practitioner of the halakhah. Objective correctness is not established through argument and persuasion; it is a matter of definition rather than debate. Much like a mathematical equation, the objectively correct answer to a halakhic question would be dictated by the inherent logic of the system and its decision-making rules. To doubt the correctness of such a conclusion is to violate the system’s integrity, to damage and diminish the system as a whole. Such formal correctness does not obtain in halakhic reasoning, and no“method,” however diligently followed, can achieve it.