The Responsa of Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof

Jewish intellectual effort. I do not mean that we are alienated from the entire rabbinic literature. We have always used the Haggadah and the Midrash .

But the real intellectuality of our people, their real brilliance, their full sounding of the depths of human ability to think and to reason, is in the halacha. It is not an exaggeration to say that never in the story of mankind's intellectual effort has so large a proportion of one people produced so brilliant a succession of intellectual works. Among what other people would some little man in a little village devote his whole life to producing a book of brilliant hiddushim, legal ideas which demand our best brains to understand and to follow? Such achievements by minor scholars were created by the thousands in every generation and in every land of Jewish residence! How can we be integrated as a Jewish movement, if we remain permanently alien from the great, creative Jewish legal tradition? We declared our independence and are independent. Now we must find a way, as a son finds his way, to remain independent, to remain free, and yet to be understanding and to get the benefit of whatever will be helpful to us in the legal tradition.

In general I have arrived... at a rule-of-thumb rather than a doctrine of legal authority. We make our contact with the great rabbinic intellectual tradition, see wherein it can help us. If we find cases in which the rabbinic tradition does not fit with life, then those cases will have to take their chances with life as everything else does. 1 follow the tentative formula that the halacha is our guidance and not our governance.[ do not claim this as an adequate principle. I claim itasa rule-of-thumb, useful as we go along."

A year earlier, Freehof explained the Reform attitude towards

halakhah and his rationale for writing responsa in his Introduction to

Reform Responsa:: It is clear why halachic questions come up, but it is not clear what, In Reform, should be the basis of the answers.... Of this much we are sur e, that whatever authority the Halacha has for us 1s certainly only a selective authority. There are vast sections of law about which we are never

questioned....[such as] the mixing of meat and milk, mechirat hametz,

:; 1 or the construction of the ritual bath.

Later on, Rabbi Freehof asks: if rabbinic law does not have God -given authority, what does it mean to us? He replies:

To us the law is human, but nobly human, developed by devoted minds who

dedicated their best efforts to answering the question:“What doth the Lord

require of thee?” Therefore, we respect it and seek its guidance. Some of