Mark Washofsky

What precisely are those standards? Well, there’s the rub. If I am“against method” as an objective index of halakhic correctness, I cannot offer a set of rules or criteria by which to evaluate the objective correctness of any particular piece of liberal halakhic writing. I do have my own ideas as to what constitutes liberal halakhah at its best,"* but I cannot impose these as a formulaic definition of our practice or as a kind of calculus by which to evaluate“right” and “wrong” decisions. The best we can do is to say that our standards must emerge from our practice itself, the day-to-day functioning of liberal halakhic conversation by which we analyze, challenge, and ultimately strengthen each other’s work. Standards of excellence or “correctness” in liberal halakhah, like the standards of any other rhetorical practice, are therefore fixed not by method or formula but through argument. Again, there is no method that allows us to distinguish in objective fashion between good and bad arguments." The standards we apply are therefore the ones that we have, the ones that we as a community of practice determine to insist upon as the yardsticks by which to evaluate our efforts. Accordingly, a“good” example of liberal halakhic practice is a piece of writing to which we resonate and around which we coalesce as a community. An example of liberal halakhic practice can be a good one even if we do not adopt the proposal it advocates or the solution it offers. After all, machloket, principled disagreement, has always been a central feature of halakhic discourse." The point is that a good liberal responsum makes a case that our community must take seriously, presents an argument that we as liberals could find convincing. A successful essay in liberal halakhah is one that frames and supports its conclusion whether we happen to agree with it or not— in the language of our community, that raises the intellectual and moral level of our discourse, and that speaks to us in a voice that we can recognize or wish to recognize as our own." In other words, the standards by which we evaluate the quality of liberal halakhic thought and writing are the same sort of standards by which we evaluate the work of any other intellectual

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