Halacha is real
It just don't care about ontology
I did have more grandiose plans for my first post but I also realised that I must capitalise on my recent surge in subs …. And then I had this exchange here following shulman’s post. So this is what my mind was full of when my chavrusa deserted me one afternoon and I was left alone with a laptop but no WiFi1
To start with , there is the torah and than there is halacha
Torah is the law: a set of Oughts.
Thou shall not murder!
The problem, as articulated by Jordan Peterson is, “what do you mean by kill? What do you mean by not? What do you mean by though?”
May I kill a baby? A Neanderthal? A brain dead human? An embryo?
All these are questions of definition. How do we define ‘human’, how do we define ‘life’?
Are these halachic questions?
No.
Do they have halachic ramifications? Absolutely. But so does the question of “what time is it?”
Allow me to illustrate.
Reuven invites Shimon to come over anytime Tuesday night to pick up his snowblower. Shimon - being neurodivergent - checks the dictionary for a definition of night, finds it stated as “
the time from sunset to sunrise
”, now he checks his almanac or refers to the zmanim magnet hanging about among shana tova cards and tefillas haderech taxi ads on his fridge
For what time is sundown on tuesday and knocks on reuvens door at 448 pm tuesday.
What do you think happens next?
Reuven’s wife answers the door “Reuven isn’t home now”
“When will he be?”
“Not for another two hours.”
“But he told me anytime Tuesday night.”
“He never comes home before seven on weekdays”
“But night begann at 4:38?!”
Shimon is a smart man who learns from his mistakes. He realises that when someone tells you to do something “at night” you might want to know what he means by that.
Next day, Shimon goes to the doctor and is prescribed anti-anxiety meds to be taken every night. Shimon has learned his lesson so he asks the pharmacist. “What time do you get home from work?”
“What!?”
“I have to know what you mean when you say ‘night so I can take this medicine properly”
Now Shimon is beginning to lose trust in the system.
Eventually he learns to differentiate. Sometimes, to obey someone you need their definition, sometimes you need the objective dictionary definition and sometimes your own definition is the pertinent one.
When do you need which?
The basic answer is, if someone tells you to do something for or involving them, you need theirs, and if they tell you to do something for yourself, you need your own.
In classical jewish thinking God doesn’t need anything. If he gave us mitzvos they’re for us. [what for - is beyond the scope of this article] ergo the definitions for mitzvos should be our own.
(this theological point is not critical to the argument but feel free to attack it nonetheless if you disagree)
In the winter it gets dark mid-afternoon.
Realise that the above sentence was literally nonsensical to anyone from the beginning of time until about 5 minutes ago.
Nowadays it is self-understood that afternoon includes time from 12 -7 pm regardless of solar and lunar relative positions.
The definition of times like morning, noon and night have shifted in recent history.
Analysing the first daf of shas, the question is how to define night in relation to shma. There are 5 answers given, none of them even attempt to make an “objective” definition.
Descending to the gemara we get one star, two stars, three stars heading down to the rishonim we get 18 minutes, 13.5 minutes from sundown. Culminating in myzmanim giving us exact times down to the second
The definitions are not only getting more and more precise they are getting more and more objective and removed from the social behavorial idea they intially defined.
While we started off defining a basic idea [bedtime] we ended up arguing intricacies of that definition centuries after it ceased to reflect the original idea.
Now ask Reb DYK to define night and he’ll probably say something like “in halcha…… in regular life….”
“But halacha is full of astronomical definitions of time”
That is perfectly understandable being that for the first three thousand years of halacha the regular “layman’s” definition of night and that of halacha were consistent.
Not by some lucky accident, by design.
If we want to fulfill what we were commanded by Moshe thirty four hundred years ago we must make halachic time consistent with ours again.
Deriving thus that torah requires an iron age lifestyle is again incongruent with its eternal nature. Hence shifting the halachaic definition to match the people’s is our only recourse.
For those who think all this means that the Torah changes or evolves, I have a story.
A little boy was asked “what parsha is it?”
“I don’t know”
“Didn’t your rebbi tell you?”
“Rebbi doesn’t know either, every weeks he says a different one”
The alternative explanation is this: torah shebichsav tells us to read shma when lying down but god told moses off camera “I really mean when to sun is at 42.5 degrees ofek I’m just saying bedtime because that’s the language these semi-nomadic tribes understand”
If you believe that to have happened I won’t argue.
My argument is not about krias shma2, I hope I have illustrated that definitions aren’t halacha they are human, and when humans change so does [the application of] halacha.
In the above example, definitions change for historical reasons, in other cases they may be due to scientific discovery. The classic example for this is lice being seen as lesser life forms due to not reproducing. When microscopes came around and showed us tiny shadchanim dates and weddings our definition of life shifted to include lice. Though it is trivially true that chazal (and the Greeks, and Persians, and Babylonians) were mistaken in their science about lice. They nonetheless - having arrived at their definition - the halacha derived from this is true.
Understood correctly, those prohibiting killing of lice these days aren’t the ones changing the ancient halacha. To the contrary those who allow it are the reformers.3
Altough it does explain why it’s one of the only instances in shas that we get דעביד כמר עבד” "ודעביד כמר עבד
Unless they are sufficiently [..I just don’t know how to say this nicely] and sincerely don’t believe all this evil goyishe science.
Solid point, lavish delivery.
If I understood correctly this article is basically “דיברה תורה בלשון בני אדם (בזמנם)