Against Method 51

members of a profession who must account for their views before an audience of fellow practitioners. They are the participants in a tradition of craft and techniques such as practical reasoning'> that, learned and internalized by lawyers, teach them how to approach the rules and principles in a manner recognizable to their fellow practitioners and guide their understanding of doctrine and of the “leeways” it permits. In this way,“law” does constrain the freedom of decision makers: not through any restrictive power of its rules and principles but through its embodiment as a social practice that guarantees the predictability of legal decision.’

Like law in general, halakhah is a species of practice, an endeavor that is always situated within a particular community of legal interpretation. Pesak is therefore not a science but a craft, the conversation of a self-identified community of practitioners, the accumulated set of interpretive techniques and assumptions that allow each practitioner to gain a“situation sense”'** of what sorts of rulings and claims of meaning will be acceptable or unacceptable in the eyes of his colleagues. It is useless to speak of a halakhic“method” if by that we mean a set of rules or criteria to evaluate in an objective way the correctness of a particular halakhic decision or line of decisions. To perform that function, any such rule would have to exist separate and apart from the practice of halakhah itself in a noninterpreted fashion: that is, all practitioners of halakhah would have to agree upon its precise meaning, and circumference. Yet as we have seen, rules do not work this way in law and in halakhah. Rules are constantly being interpreted by lawyers and judges in the course of their work. Rules do not“mean” anything until they are applied to the facts and circumstances of the particular question, and every act of application reshapes, modifies, and transforms the meaning of the rule; thus, the language of a rule does not define its own application.” In short, there is no objective methodological basis on which to judge the work of a practice; any and all standards of judgment are exercised by the practitioners themselves in the course of their work.