Rabbi Yisrael Choleva - Introduction to the Oral Law: The History of the Oral Law - Part 3

okay so we're at the final class in our section on the history of the oral law and his transmission over the generations and we spoken at length about the process of how the Torah was given on Mount Sinai to Moshe and then it was transmitted through the different periods all the way up to the present day and when we left off last time was the question of okay so very nice we got a nice history lesson for last three last two classes but the question is now in the year 2014 or 5774 so what am I supposed to do when I have a question I want to know what Jewish law says about it i wonder what I'm supposed to do and they have all these different opinions so how am I supposed to decide what to do so we're going to address that a little bit today then we're going to speak a little bit about this idea of having different opinions and then we'll open up the floor for any questions because it's our last class together okay so the first thing is what do I do with all these opinions how am I supposed to possibly figure out what is the law for me today so if we go a little bit back to classes ago we spoke about how there were three different approaches to dealing with this issue back in the 16th century right the first approach was that of the hsf review of coral d'avion spot in israel and he said take the three most important opinions and let's make a vote to add three okay and now we'll decide what the halacha should be okay that was what the sephardic did and that formed the basis of the book known as the chicana roof which is the code of Jewish law the second approach was that of rabbi moshe is a list who lived in Cracow Poland I same time period and he said no we don't take the three greatest opinions because we don't even know what they are but we follow tell music dictum that you take the most recent opinions that the later generation is always considered the most closest the most in touch with what's going on today and they also have the accessibility to see all the other previous opinions and therefore we follow what we call the most recent approaches hey but we also thought there was a third approach and that third approach was very popular with the rabbi's not so much with the lady and that approach was there's nothing different today and yesterday go read a Gomorrah learn what the opinions are give you a brain and you should use it to figure out what is best for me what's best for you every individual has to use their brain and figure out what they think is the approach which best fits in with the text that we've been given okay so when we look to today so a lot of that stays true so therefore the first word person that you should look at for deciding what the whole awful should be is yourself so ideally we should all if we have a question we should open up our tomorrows right learn through the commentaries on the kumara all the way up to modern day and we should be able to figure out for ourselves which opinion makes the most sense in our scenario problem number one is that not all of us are qualified to do that right problem number two even if you are qualified to do that maybe you don't have the time to do that okay again somebody who's qualified to do this basically has to know all of the tone mode right because you can't just know that one page because it could be all sorts of places another in other gorras that you haven't even seen that relate to that I don't know if I mentioned this story once before but one of the I won't mention who it is but one of the leading tourist colors of the generation today so he likes to tell the story that when he was younger so he learned through one entire track date on one specific topic and he decided he wanted to know how well he learned it so the way he tested himself as he took out a book of questions and answers on the same topic by the undisputed leading Torah scholar generation when he did he read the questions and then he figured out okay so I've learned the same material I'm gonna write an answer and after I've written my answer let's see what this great rabbi when his answer was so he said he went through i found the question closed off the answer wrote down his own answer went to the next question same thing and he found that even though he learned through the entire track take that deals with his topic but since that was really all of what he'd learned again he'd learned other things but he hadn't learned the entire tomlin his answers were radically different than the great sages answer right the great sage said in the kamara that talks about this topic it says XYZ but in a different place that you never would have thought to look at unless you've seen it already it says something else and in a third place in a fourth light he's bringing all these different sources from all over the place which related to hear and if you only learned a limited section you're not going to have that breath in order to give a proper answer which reflects the gamar isn't tired okay now today that that same young rabbi is now an old Arab and he has learned everything so now he knows his earlier Arison he's very qualified to give he doesn't need my opinion but he's very qualified to give answers like that today so ideally that's what you do right you learned through the Gomorrah right you learn through the sources and you yourself right are the best person for deciding what you feel fits in with the text and what fits in with your scenario your question that you have right now but again at least in this room none of us are qualified for that okay that's very difficult to do so we go to the next step right so if you can't just something yourself so what do you do in any field of anything find an expert very good okay so choice number two is if you yourself aren't able to do it so you ask your rabba ok so a person ideally should have a one specific rabbi ok to whom they ask their questions because different rabbis have different approaches and different opinions hey so therefore a person should have a rabbi user that's the rabbi of their synagogue could be the rabbi of their yeshiva could be simply somebody that they've met somewhere right but it should be someone who they have a personal connection with right if you ask right a lot of people they like to say I have a question let me go to the most famous rabbi in the world i'm going to ask him my question the problem is the most famous rabbi in the world might live in bnei brak he might speak three words of English and you're trying to describe to him some social situation as going on in New York or Philadelphia or LA or Sao Paulo wherever we're from right and he doesn't really get the context right because he never been in that context and therefore the problem is that wait when you're communicating the question he's hearing a different question than what you're asking so ideally you should really have a rabbi who's more of a local someone who understands you understand where you're coming from and can then give you an answer that's really tailored for your specific personality in your specific scenario so ideally a person should have a rabbi ok and again there has to be a rabbi who's qualified okay not every rabbis qualified to answer questions in every topic hey so you have to have a rabbi and you'd ask him your questions so let's see a person doesn't have a rabbi you don't have one you go to write your the 21st century Jew and you go for shop if you go to one tool and mentally get a different one invited to go to a third one and on shabbat you and to choose your own adventure depending on how your feeling on the week or depending on who's giving a better talk alright so you don't have one specific person that you go to ok so then what do you do so then what the next step is step three is what we call the rabbi's of the Jewish people the leading sages of the generation so even though you may not have a personal connection with that person okay and ideally you should go to someone you do have a personal connection with the next step is to go to the leaders of the generation okay and asked the leaders of the generation okay very similar but not the same as the Sanhedrin night least have a high court which was the leading scholars okay and they would deliberate so today we don't have a son Henry we don't have a high court but we do have leading rabbits and you ask those leading rabbis okay what their opinion is and these specific topics the difficulty with this is who decides who's a leading rabbi who's not a leading rabbi right my leading ramp I might not be your leading rabbit right depending on what he's wearing or not wearing on his head right so how do you decide who is a leading rabbi who is not a leading rabbi so that can be very difficult there are some people who are universally accepted but there are other people who might be a dispute right for different reasons so that's also can be difficult but if that's available so you look to the leading scholars let's say the leading scholars don't discuss it or you don't have access to them what's the next step so go through all the opinions that you can find ok and go by the majority ok so again both the rabbi yosef Carl Andrew Moshe is Alice felt that you should go by the majority again because the Torah tells us that when you have a court you have a decision to make then the follow the majority of the judges okay so therefore we treat the opinions as if they're judges so to say and therefore we go by the majority of the different opinions so if you have 30 different opinions and 20 of them say it's permissible in 10 say is prohibited so then go by the majority that this particular thing is permissible okay and let's say you don't have a majority right it's equal or you don't have access to all the opinions you're not sure how to get to them you don't understand them all okay so then we have a general rule that if you're really in a doubt so if the question you're dealing with is a biblical question okay it's a question about a law that has biblical ramifications then you have to always go with the stricter side hey but if you're going with a rabbinical opinion then you always go with a more lenient side okay so there's a very famous case of two leading scholars in North America I two of the leading rabbis in the last generation and someone went and said I don't know what to do because I asked rabbi a aah is permissible and I asked her right be arriv says is prohibited so what am I supposed to do so the first thing is you should pull him to go to one of them right but he went to both of them already so he asked one of them you know used to always say you say yes to this question and the other one says no so which were my supposed to follow so he said it's very simple if we're talking about a biblical mitzvah so then whichever one of us is strict you have to go with the one who's strict but if we're talking about a rabbinic mitzvah then whichever one of us is lenient so you're you should follow the lenient opinion ok so the ladder again just very quickly is you yourself should figure out what it is go through all the opinions if you're not able to do that you should have a rabbi that is qualified that you're able to ask all your questions so if you don't have a rabbi then you go to the leading scholars of the Jewish people okay if they're not accessible to you or if they don't discuss this issue then you go the majority of the opinions that are available and if you are unable to do that then the last is you're simply in a doubt if we're talking about a biblical idea then you would have to restrict it was being about a rabbinic idea then you would be lenient okay and that's basically the process that everybody follows today okay so in general usually people have a rabbi but people generally belong to a community you belong to a shul you live in a neighborhood where there's a rabbi right who's generally leading the community and therefore usually we can ask one particular rabbi that question but if not we go to the you know the lower down on the list you go by what the majority says right or if you'd available your strict if it's rebenok then you are lenient okay now what about okay going back to our friend over here who asked two rabbis right am I allowed to shop around right I have a certain question right and I want to know what the halacha is but you know i'm looking for a certain answer right IIIi know what the different opinions are and I'm not qualified to give an answer myself but I kind of know where I wanted to go so am I allowed to go you know ask a whole bunch of people and then you know okay well rabbi exid can't do it rather be said i can i'm gonna go with her of ID right am I allowed to arbitrarily do that so the answer is no you can't just you know shop around and what you can do is you can say rabbi be seems to be more in line with my way of thinking right although he spent many years learning and therefore he's much more knowledgeable than i am but he tends to think generally along the lines that I that I you know I'd relate to him better so I'm gonna point rabbi be he's now my rabbi hey and I can now ask all my questions to Rabbi be but if I might be turns around and starts telling you all these things that he thinks you should be strict on you can't just jump ship and go back to rabbi it is you have to be consistent and pick one ok so I have a very good friend ok who was a former roommate of mine and he was Kim to Sukkot okay and he went to buy a net rope right so if you know about a little bit of a net row so it's very difficult often to tell the Ettrick is kosher if it's not kosher it is considered a very good one or it's not a very good one so what you do is you go you buy your head rogue okay you get a receipt for it and then you take it around to different rabbis who will examine it for you and tell you whether it's okay it's not okay and usually the the merchants are very good if the rabbit is not okay he just signs a paper for you saying I rabbi so-and-so say that this Petrov is no good and they'll give you a refund and let you exchange rate so a friend of mine went to one rabbi and he showed him the Arab and the ex rogue he said it was good it was a nice etro you pay the right price it was very nice of a nice to quote so at that point he should have just gone home but my friend didn't just go home instead he went as he was walking towards home he went to the next store where there's another rabbi there who was examining at jokes and said let me ask him also so the first mistake was he shouldn't have done and now he went in and he entered the second rabbi you showed him the answer again what do you think of SAC around I said no good so then he came back and he said well I went to Rabbi a and relay said it was fine but then i went to rob i bein ravi said it wasn't fun she wanted to know what to do so really my a's opinion should carry the weight because he asked her about eight o'clock rev I'd be had known that someone had already ruled on this etro if he probably wouldn't have said anything he would have said someone's already given the opinion and that's the end of the discussion the problem is and I asked my friend who rabbi a was who arrived ID was so rabbi a I'd never heard of him remember before everybody is one of the leading Torah scholars in the world so rabbi a said it was ok but we don't really know who he is a rabbi be is a very very famous he's passed away since then it was a very very famous rabbi who sits on the baton on the religious court of one of the most famous Bateson's in the whole world she's a very very famous person remember lady said it wasn't good she wanted to know what to do so there he's in a dilemma because he shouldn't have asked the second person he should have start with the first person but now it's clear that rev ID is much more qualified than rabbi a to answer the question so in short he when he got anyone but you should always you know you should know what you're supposed to do what you're not supposed to do so that way you can avoid these types of these types of problems ok any questions on what we do today you have a question no you can call me you can call me with your questions I can answer some questions on all questions ok so what does it spend a few minutes examining a very famous Gomorrah okay and how it plays in sort of school so wrapping up a lot of what we was speaking about okay the Kimura in eruvin few other places mentioned describes a dispute between the school of bait Hillel and the school of bait shaman right hill and Shammai were some of the leading Torah scholars okay and then they each had their schools so we had baked he'll out at the house of hill in Beit Shean by the house of Shammai and they had different debates back and forth it'll Sean my head to Bates and their school that differing debates for a long period of time and we're trying to figure out what the halacha should follow so there was a dispute between the rage for several years and then a voice came out from heaven and said the very famous words a luva a loo diray elohim came right both these opinion and that opinion both opinions are both the words of Living God the halacha conveyed halo but the halacha follows this opinion right follows halo okay so the first question is what do you mean both opinions are the opinion of the Living God right first of all you just told me that the halacha follows this opinion so that one's got to be wrong second of all how can both opinions be right and if I take a look at this piece of food I want to know is this kosher or is it not kosher it's not sort of kosher and sort of not kosher you either allowed to have it for lunch or you have to you know give it to your non Jewish friend right yeah the pic you can't say well it's kind of kosher there's a kind of kosher either is or isn't right most things in life are gray but some things are black and white okay so how can we say no it's both kosher and not kosher at the same time okay so it's a very famous Gomorrah and it's dealt with by this the scholars which you mentioned known as the rezoning roughly from the 11th to the 15th or 16th century can they have different approaches okay so one of the approaches is that if I were to take a let's pick another let's pick this book now let's take this book okay what color is this book okay blue or black ok now what colors the book ten yellow yellowish 10 okay so some understand that what the way we have different opinions is simply that there are different perspectives of viewing the same object so just like with this book if I view it from the top it looks blue if I view it on the edges it's black if I view it from the inside it's yellow so all those descriptions are true but you're only describing a part of the totality of what makes up this book okay so so too when you look at a question in Halawa so it could be it's kosher could be it's not kosher right from one perspective it looks like it's kosher for another perspective it looks like it's not kosher okay everything in the whole world is a compound of many different ways you can describe it many different things right that's why the world is made up of you know the atoms and molecules and everything to show that everything is made up of little pieces and there's different ways of looking at things ok so I can look at the same problem I khalidiyah the same piece of meat and I can give you well according to these reasons it should be kosher and I'm going to that those reasons it should be not kosher but at the end of the day I have to decide so both opinions can be accurately describing the problem the scenario or the object but at the end of the day I have to decide which opinion to follow right I can't say well on the left side it's kosher on the right side is not kosher right from this if you look at it this way it's kosher look at it that way it's not kosher ok that's true but at the end of the day you have to have a consistent you know one liner is a kosher is in our culture and at the end of the day we all just want to know can I eat it for lunch right so I have to be able to answer that question but that doesn't negate the fact that the non-kosher perspective is still true about a limited aspect of this object okay so that's that's one opinion okay another similar approach is that when the Torah was given okay the Torah is an infinite it's the toy itself is infinite right an infinite work it's an infinite gift of God to mankind and no one person is able to fully grasp the entirety of the Torah except maybe for motion and therefore when we all come up with different perspectives of different opinions where each see an aspect of the Torah but because we're limited because we're human beings so we're not able to view the entire picture by ourselves and therefore only when we bring together the Jewish people so then can we have a full picture of exactly what's going on and therefore I might see this thing is kosher you might see it as not kosher right both are true we're each seeing a partial picture and that also helps to explain why we follow the majority of opinion right because if I have a whole bunch of different views of the same object if the majority see it one way so we're getting more of the picture of what exactly this object is and that's one of the reasons that when we have a dispute we tend to follow the majority because they have a larger view of this object okay okay another approach ok as we spoke about earlier okay the 13 rules with which we explain the Torah hey this is again following the approach that it's an evolution of the oral law okay and we can have different opinions because as long as I take the tour attacks and as long as I apply these 13 rules appropriately okay and I don't just sort of make up what i want to say but I'm following exactly instructions that God gave to Moshe how to analyze the tour text anything that I use by definition because i use the process that is a truth of the Torah the Torah was written in such a way that if you use these 13 different rules you can you will come up with something that is part of the tour and therefore as long as I kept my methodology everything I come up with is considered to be tore up even though it looks like it's divulge and opinions it's all based on the same root source and therefore that's what makes it true okay the last point ok I want to make is that there is a very important Gomorrah which is cited in the above and Matija we could have a whole class just on this tomorrow itself okay and they're gamarra describes a dispute between two of the ten IM k regarding a specific oven right the cases an important for our purposes right now okay about whether this oven was pure weather was impure okay and one of the tonight says it's pure one of this this is impure so one of them says if it's true there should be a miracle and miracle happens and then the other one says you know there's a miracle where I think a tree up roots itself and runs across the field and plants itself down alright so if any of us were there would say yeah I go with him he's good he made the tribute all right let's go with that but the other ever says no no trees trees don't have a vote in the baton right trees tree doesn't count so then here's another one I forget exactly what it is right but there's another miracle in phys whatever it is and he says no no we don't take proofs from that either and the third one is the walls of the Batemans rush ready they start falling he says if I'm right the wall should fall down the wall start falling down the other I said hey walls get out of here all right it's not your business stay up so the walls are sort of saying there you know we can't go down because he told us not to if we can't go up cuz of them tools to go down so they're sitting there going slanted right and then a voice comes out from heaven right so if the tree and the other miracle and the walls aren't enough for you a voice comes out from heaven and says that rabbis right and we would all say okay we may not believe trees but usually if you know if there's a voice from heaven telling us what to do so either we're crazy even if we are crazy we're gonna follow it anyways right so the voice command says rabbi this rabbi's right and the other have I says hey you you don't have a vote either so obviously that presents a bit of a question all right what do you mean you don't have a vote either shouldn't that be the supreme vote right we're all arguing back and forth what does God want from us and he sends a direct email to Oliver accounts this high signed by God this is what you should be doing today and we say no no we don't listen to you it sounds like we should you know take this guy out and stole him or something so no and why is that because the Torah tells us a very important principle which we call low b'shem I'm he write the Torah originally was in heaven and then the Torah was brought down into this world it was given by God to mankind and along with just the rules of the Torah itself is the methodology for understanding the Torah the methodology for deciding what the Jewish law should say at the end of the day and that methodology says that you go by the majority the Torah scholars use these 13 tools to derive the hollow saw and we follow the majority and the Halawa is decided in this world and therefore even if God comes down and tells us this is what the halacha should be the Halawa that we follow is the left of the Torah and the Torah tells us we follow what the majority of our sages tell us to do hey and the Gomorrah continues and says you know what was God's reaction when they told God you know your opinion doesn't count so we would have imagined you know God he gets pretty angry since what's with these Jewish people sonu nigam r says no God was laughing and guys that my children have beaten me my children of beating me and he went on laughing so you see that God approved of what of what the sages were doing okay so you see the whole office decided here and that's really our mission our mission is that we have to use our heads we have to figure out what the halacha wants from us we have to follow the methodology that's given by the tour on how we should decide the Jewish law if they ask our rabbis with the acid leading sages we have to follow the majority follow the rules and as long as we keep with that methodology then we're following what she wants for us and we're doing the best we can do in order to fulfill his will and fulfill the will of the tour there any questions we've got eight minutes there anything else you know if we're going to study yep start getting into the even if I get a book that is it's still a isolated learning environment but I don't have the one-on-one session with a hooker suppose what is a good Avenue I mean I know it could always just go last my rabbi but no I can't where they don't remember right I can't just easily just like wake up in the morning and then go down to breakfast and say hey rabbi because not there at all saying for a learning schedule everything for if you have a question I was off yeah for questions already or learning environment there so they're different because if you have a question often you can just call someone i know in israel does a there's a very well-known rabbi here you can text him he'll text you back within a half hour oh alright so i don't know if they have that in America sure somebody has that but you just send him a text message but your question is and then he'll as long as it's simple enough question and then till protects you back an answer is there is there some kind of video environment or will there be some kind of video environment or the wheatley so absolutely so so there's a few a few things you can do first of all you can as you said yourself or you can ask your local rabbi PS time if you know someone in the community has time but there's another institution called partners in Torah okay which is designed exactly for this right that they match up somebody who has a limited learning background or someone has a more extensive learning background and they basically set up their schedule as to what's convenient for them so once a week twice a week a half hour week an hour a week whatever it is and they choose you know whatever topic you want and you have you get your own colusa right and you can learn in person you can learn it over the phone you can learn it over skype whichever way you want and they set that up for you it's called partners in torah and a whole bunch of friends who actually work for them and they can get you in touch with that alternatively you can actually set up here with the achieva so we do offer that you can set that up as well that you can just email the office and say I'm looking for a Bruce again here we have to contend with the time difference so it might be easier to do it you know for someone who's more local we do have ongoing some of the rabbi's learn one-on-one over skype with some of the alumni or students or people have been on different trips and stuff so we can set that up here as well I think your best bet for these partners in Torah and I'm be happy to get you in touch with them I don't know anyone in philly who does it but i'm sure they have a big big set up over there they have it in I think I mean first of all even if someone's not in philly you can you know you can skype the matter where they're definitely something can be set up and that that's it tends to it from what I've seen it works very well because it's you learn what you want when you want it works for your schedule and you can always change meaning you're not set into an environment so if you want you know if you want to do we know thursdays at 9pm the vistors that you have a meeting so you you can't make it so you can say that you know this we can't do can we do wednesday you can just you can work it around again you should try to keep is a very big you no merit to having a set time that you don't move but sometimes it doesn't always work and it makes a customizable just remember to try and set up with there you go there you go thanks got it and the questions Craig you had a question yeah I'll do the ride he's only from per hour from new Inca to him also write all of this enough primarily from just the Torah but but from all all three works yeah good question well here would you recommend you certain hierarchy of hills for each delve into Gomorrah like I'm like you know should you had basic competency how much should you had should you be familiar with you know the whole to knock before you play ok good question so the mission in pirkei avot gives you a whole sort of curriculum and how to study it says first you learn all turn off then you learn all the Mishnah and then you're all the gamarra right and the Gomorrah itself discusses this issue how should you divide up right we all have and even if you learn full time there's only 24 hours in a day now you got to even sleep and right other things you have to do right so how do you how do you balance that right how are you supposed to work out your schedule so the gamarra says that you should divide up into threes right there you're you're learning right the toast vote over there has a very interesting comment right until so it says over there that if you learn Gomorrah so good morning includes everything within because when you learn Kamara we have Torah versus and again this if you learn tomorrow properly right if you learn gemara properly means I've learned through Gomorrah and then I have a verse but she's the comfort of a temp of left to cover their I have my verse so what did we do we say okay we have a verse that's nice to read those tours and keep going what you really should do is you should open up right and again these newer tomorrow's sort of cheap for us you don't have to do it at all but the older comoros that don't have the verse right next to it you just have two words and a citation so open up your turn off and read the chapter or at least the paragraph that that verse is from and then you get the whole context of it so as you're learning through the Gomorrah you're also learning through tonight you're also learning through mission because again Nick Amaro is based on a mission so Tulsa says if you learn Gomorrah as long as you learn it properly by delving into all the cited sources so that way you're learning through all the material at the same time so by learning tomorrow you can go through you really can go through everything as long as you do it that way but i'd only you need a you know prerequisite you have to learn through all if not first it definitely be nice right but i don't think you have to do it but certainly something like 10 oz if you want to do it quickly so to read it in English and I did that many years ago you read it in English I did it you know if you have the time for this but i did a book a day right so you read you know for joshua sunday monday judges tuesday samuel one wednesday samuel to write Kings 1 Kings to buy Shabbat I've already read happeneth or not it's ok i was on vacation so I had time but it's good just to read through so you have a general overview what's going on and you can read it in English right because even if you're fluent in Hebrew the he was difficult but that way just to get an overview if you want to go through see exactly who's who what's going on what are the things that are mentioned but it's definitely not a prerequisite you can definitely open a gamarra before doing that but it definitely helped ok ok you