{"id":4319,"date":"2020-08-27T14:29:05","date_gmt":"2020-08-27T14:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/?p=4319"},"modified":"2020-08-27T14:42:56","modified_gmt":"2020-08-27T14:42:56","slug":"pilpul-as-jewish-casuistry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthcounts.com\/blogtraducciones\/2020\/08\/27\/pilpul-as-jewish-casuistry\/","title":{"rendered":"Pilpul as Jewish casuistry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Taken from here<\/a><\/p>\n

What Is Pilpul , And Why On Earth Should I Care About It?<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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David Shasha<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Contributor<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Director, Center for Sephardic Heritage<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For those who have any concern with the Middle East conflict or with Judaism, what you know \u2014 or do not know \u2014 about pilpul is something upon which your well-being could depend. Ignorance of pilpul is a very dangerous thing, something that would allow your interlocutor to have the upper hand in ways that you could not begin to even imagine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pilpul is the Talmudic term used to describe a rhetorical process that the Sages used to formulate their legal decisions. The word is used as a verb: one engages in the process of pilpul in order to formulate a legal point. It marks the process of understanding legal ideas, texts, and interpretations. It is a catch-all term that in English is translated as \u201cCasuistry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In order to better understand the term pilpul as it functions today, we must define the way in which that term has been understood in the classical Sephardic tradition and how that understanding has been transformed by the Ashkenazi tradition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As I was taught by my Rabbi Jose Faur, the Sephardic tradition, emerging out of the Babylonian academies and finding its definitive form in the many legal works of Moses Maimonides, held the Talmudic texts to be oral literature. Using mnemonics, technical terms, and other rhetorical devices to aid memorization and transmission, Sephardim understood the Talmud to be a colloquy of discussions that were drawn from the proceedings of the great rabbinical Academies of Babylonia. The Babylonian Talmud became the basis upon which the Jewish law would be constructed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was a process grounded, as it was in the Muslim Hadith and Shari\u2019a, in tradition and the chain of transmission. Laws were transmitted in the name of rabbinical authorities. It was this chain of tradition, known to Muslims by the Arabic term Isnad, that drew clear lines between the formal authority of what has been passed down to us and the process of codifying these laws. The ultimate purpose of the legal process was to elevate the Law above personal and political concerns so that members of the community would be completely equal and not live at the whim of arbitrary judges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In order to maintain the distinction between the Written Torah \u2014 the Hebrew Bible \u2014 and the Oral Law, the Talmudic Sages conceived of the idea of pilpul as a means to join each Law to its Biblical prooftext. Rabbis would debate what in legal terms would be the formal \u201ctitle\u201d of each law. Differences would arise regarding these legal titles that a court must use in a criminal charge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Talmudic formalism of Maimonides in his encyclopedic legal compendium, the Mishneh Torah, was strongly contested by the Ashkenazi rabbis of France and Germany. In the Mishneh Torah Maimonides famously eliminated the rhetorical discussions of the Talmud and simply presented the final ruling \u2014 a process that replicated the methodology of Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides\u2019 precursor in Lucena.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Ashkenazi rabbis saw pilpul as a substantive debate over the content of the Law rather than as a simple rhetorical matter. Their understanding of Talmudic pilpul took the form of a radical reinterpretation of the Law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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