Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua; Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets and the prophets passed it on to the Members of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be moderate in judgement, Create many students, and Make a fence around the Torah.
36:
Before we leave the matter of being 'moderate in judgement' I would like to add a further consideration. Possibly Rambam and Rabbi Ovadya of Bertinoro are right in seeing this statement of the Members of the Great Assembly as being addressed primarily to rabbis and 'dayyanim' (judges). But also, perhaps Rabbi Natan is correct when he sees it as warning us against being pedantic. I rather think that the Members of the Great Assembly would have approved the general approach of Conservative Judaism to halakhah. Sometimes it takes the bodies that guide us in this matter a long while to decide how to guide us: they are being 'moderate' lest they 'rush to judgement' as Rambam warns. Also, they often see more than one aspect of the same issue, and decide that there is justification for more than one answer to a halakhic question. This, too, is 'moderation'. All too often 'sages' from other denominations make hasty, ill-considered and halakhically inappropriate pronouncements that later prove to be unnecessary or even unfounded.
37:
The following may serve as an example of the last comment in the previous paragraph. Those who consider my remarks here to be polemical can skip them. In recent years the government of Israel stopped pumping water from the Sea of Galilee into the National Water Carrier for the whole of Passover, making the country rely on other meagre water resources for that week at an incredible cost to the national finances and thus, also, to the taxpayer. The reason for this was because a prominent and respected orthodox rabbi, Ovadya Yosef, had decreed that water in the Sea of Galilee (Israel's 'national reservoir') might be contaminated with Ĥametz (leaven) which is forbidden during Pesaĥ and his followers had the political power to enforce his ruling on the whole population. This year Rabbi Yoséf does not have political clout and the present administration has decided not to waste the money involved and to continue pumping water from the Sea of Galilee into the National Water Carrier during Pesaĥ. Rabbi Yoséf has now made a new pronouncement that it is permitted to drink the water from the Sea of Galilee during Passover. I recall that some years ago there was an issue that the ink used to stamp eggs was Ĥametz. Rabbi Yoséf at that time instructed his followers that it was permitted to buy and consume these eggs, and he based himself on the consideration that 'one must have pity on the money of the Jewish people'. This is a most admirable halakhic consideration, one with which most Conservative rabbis would agree. Where was this consideration during all those years that he required the country to spend trillions of shekels in the matter of drinking water on Pesaĥ – which he himself, by his new pronouncement, teaches was unnecessary and ill-considered. He had completely ignored the admonition of our mishnah: "be moderate in judgement".
To be continued.
Shlomo Sokol writes:
I have read from several sources … that there is a widely-accepted transliteration of the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The eighth letter cannot be written in Latin letters as "chet" because this is pronounced properly only by speakers of French. Speakers of English, who predominate, pronounce it as "tchet", as in "church". Similarly, the eighth letter cannot be written in Latin letters as "khet" because English speakers pronounce it with a gurgle, as in the name of the Russian city of Kharkov. It is usually used for the eleventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, that is, "khaf". The eighth letter is not voiced but is
rather breathed out unvoiced, as when you exhale onto the lenses of your eyeglasses to moisten them for cleaning. So what I have called so far "the eighth letter" is now usually written as the letter "h" with a dot after it. If you accept this, then your discussion of the sages would not include a word such as $akhamim (as copied from your message) but rather h.akhamim. Please think about it.
I respond:
Shlomo is referring to the manner in which I have chosen to present the letter under discussion using HTML. The method used to indicate the letter "chet" by most modern learned institutions (such as the quarterly magazine "Conservative Judaism" published jointly by the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Rabbinical Assembly) is the letter "h" with a dot underneath it (and not after it, as Shlomo indicates).
I certainly think that we must do our best to indicate to those reading these shiurim in English how to distinguish between "ĥet" and "khaf", and I chose to use the HTML sign of "h" with a circumflex sign above it to indicate the letter "chet". If your browser does not show this representation this is a sign that you must update your browser! If anyone who is html savvy can teach me how to indicate "h with a dot underneath" I will gladly adopt that method. "H with a dot after it" does not seem to me to be a solution that is any more aesthetic than "h with a circumflex" and certainly less confusing for the non-academic reader.
