Against Method 41

located in discourse— to be supplied with history and destiny, explanation

and purpose....(Prescription, even when embodied in a legal text,

[cannot] escape its origin and its end in experience, in the narratives that are

the trajectories plotted upon material reality by our imaginations. Our normative commitments determine how we interpret and apply law’s“rules and formal institutions”; the narratives that supply law’s purpose tell us what the law is. In this sense, it is futile to draw firm methodical boundaries between law and meta-law. These insights speak just as directly to the Jewish legal process. All the elements cited in a rabbinical responsum, the“nonlegal” as well as the“legal,” are“halakhic” in that they function to support and justify the halakhic conclusion. Both are integral and essential to the process of pesak, because pesak does not and cannot take place without them. A judgment of“which view will better serve the community” may in fact be a subject of controversy, but take away that meta-halakhic judgment and you knock the legs out from under the legal decision itself.

This point is as crucial as it is banal: halakhic decision does not take place in an ideological vacuum. The point is crucial in that, as I have argued, one cannot account for the halakhic decision of a posek without taking into account the fundamental value commitments that constitute his religious, intellectual, and cultural worldview. The point is banal in that it has been made by many others, many times.®! With respect to our own subject, at any rate, Mizrachi activists®* clearly and openly recognized that the halakhic differences between them and their opponents resulted from the ideological divide that separated the two camps. The“correct” halakhic decision on matters of hilkhot medinah depends in large part upon the rabbi’s normative commitments and their supporting“narrative,” his sympathy for Zionism or his rejection of it. The Zionist halakhists and their opponents read the same Talmudic and halakhic sources that speak to issues of politics, government, and national economy, but they approach these legal texts on the basis of very different narrative structures that each group applies to the facts of contemporary Jewish