36 Mark Washofsky —_— Makhashopsy 000 weddings on precisely these grounds. On the other hand, a 1946 ruling by the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Eretz Yisrael accepts the testimony of nonobservant Jews and therefore recognizes the halakhic validity of weddings at which they served as witnesses. The judges reason that the prohibition is rooted in the concern that one who violates any of the Torah ’s commandments is likely to bear false witness before the court: this concern, they say, does not apply in an age of widespread nonobservance of Jewish ritual law. In this nonreligious age we can easily conceive of the possibility that a Jew might violate the laws of Shabbat or kashrut and yet be an honest person who would tell the truth as a matter of ethical behavior. A nonobservant Jew is therefore not necessarily“wicked” in the Torah ’s definition; thus, courts may decide on a case-by-case basis whether he is sufficiently trustworthy to accept his testimony. Our purpose here is not to consider the extent to which this decision, which departs from the conventional approach to the question among most Orthodox poskim, might influence the actual course of development of Jewish law.® It suffices to point out that although a clear rule of Jewish law prohibits a“wicked” person from serving as a witness, the two trends of pesak- to accept or reject the testimony of a ritually nonobservant Jew - divide sharply over the very meaning of the word rasha, over the application of that legal category to the circumstances of contemporary Jewish life. That application requires a judgment about the nature and purpose of the rule, a judgment that, although necessary to decide the law, is not itself dictated by the law. To put this differently, no rule or text can control its own interpretation;“the language of a rule does not itself determine whether many particular cases come within the class of cases designated by the rule.”® The judge has no recourse but to choose an interpretation from among the available alternatives, and that choice, because it is absolutely essential

to the process of legal decision, is as much a part of the law as is the rule the judge must interpret.