42 Mark Washofsky

history. One group sees in the progress of the Zionist movement the beginning of the fulfillment of God ’s promise of redemption to the Jewish people.” The other group tells a very different story about the work of the Zionist activists and settlers, a story that stigmatizes their efforts as an arrogant forcing of God ’s hand, an unwarranted hastening of the divine timetable of salvation.*® These narratives do differ in form from the formal halakhic citations— the rules, principles, and precedents— that fill the writings of these rabbis.“Narrative” is the translation we often give to the term aggadah, which we tend to distinguish from halakhah. Yet the halakhic conclusions that these writings advance would be incoherent(if they could be formulated at all) in the absence of the normative commitments that the agadic narratives express. Call those normative commitments by any other name: ideology, theology, politics; they are necessarily and inescapably halakhic all the same.

Responsa are for that reason halakhic, not“ideological” documents, even when the motivating factor behind the rabbinical decision seems to be something other than law in the pure and narrow sense. As against Shapiro, I would view rabbinical legal discourse as an integrated experience of language and argument, a way of thinking and of talking that comprises any and all intellectual elements that rabbis utilize in their journey toward pesak. Since the ruling ultimately rests upon all these elements, the meta-halakhic as well as the halakhic, no essential distinction can be drawn between them. True, Shapiro’s“outside observer” might perceive such a distinction. To such a reader, rabbinical disputes over governmental and political issues might better be classified as examples of da at torah, expressions of the rabbis’ social and political ideology, rather than as instances of pesak halakhah.* Yet responsa are written not by outside observers but by scholars who stand within the conceptual world of halakhah. And in our case, those insiders, those practitioners of rabbinical legal discourse, present their work as berur halakhah, Jewish legal analysis, they do not refer to what they are doing as

A hii ih

i | : i 3 | i 4 4 : : i i Fl 2