עקרונות מטא הלכתיים במשנתו של הרב מאיר שמחה הכהן מדוינסק

תקציר

English Abstract:R. Meir Simcha Hacohen (henceforth RMS) was born in 1843 in the village of Butrimonys, in the Vilnius district. Having gained renown as one of his generation’s leading scholars, in 1888 he was appointed rabbi of Daugavpils (Dvinsk), a post he held until his death in 1926. RMS’ lifetime coincided with the period in which Lithuanian yeshivot were ascendant in Eastern Europe. His literary output was varied and unique, for despite having spent most of his life writing a book on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (henceforth, Code), titled Or Sameaḥ (henceforth, OS), he also authored the outstanding Meshekh Hokhmah (henceforth, MH), a Torah commentary that was published about a year after his death in Riga. OS, which many regarded as analytical-scholarly interpretation of the Code, also manifests many typical characteristics of a practical-adjudicatory work. Elsewhere I have shown that the primary goal of this composition was to refine the first codification of Jewish law, Maimonides’ Code. OS primarily focuses on adjudication, and even if such rulings rank lower on the normative scale than those of the responsa literature, this work still plays a crucial and central role in halakhic adjudication. Therefore, OS may be classified as belonging to the genre of Jewish law and adjudication, not to that of the novellae and commentaries, and not even to that of Maimonides’ commentators (often called his “armor bearers”). Its goals are practical, not merely intellectual or theoretical. RMS refined the Code in three main ways: First, he asked questions that served as straw men in order to probe borderline cases. In these, he used inductive reasoning to expand Maimonides’ legal rulings and determine whether they also applied to cases beyond their explicit, factual parameters. Second, but also inductively, he added elements to the law itself, not to the facts of the case at hand. Third, he revealed the underlying rationale of the law and rendered it in consonance with its own abstract level by reformulating casuistic phraseology in a normative form. In this article, I will investigate whether there are broad-based juridical principles underlying RMS’ legal decisions and approach to Jewish law; whether certain metahalakhic principles affect RMS’ legal creativity, and to what extent; whether there are certain metahalakhic principles that guide RMS in addressing changing historical and social realities; and whether the same juridical principles affect the adjudication of laws that seem completely unrelated.