This Method as a Paradigm Shift

This Method as a Paradigm Shift

To reiterate, this is a paradigm shift – on the one hand a return to the classic method of pesak and on the other hand a willingness to apply the method to a varied range of Jewish (and other human) groups.  Thus I am aware of Thomas Kuhn’s point that “the transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion process that cannot be forced” and so I have written this book accordingly, that the reader may be drawn into its mindset.  After all, “the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience.  Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.”  It does not suffice to point out that a new paradigm may “be ‘neater’, ‘more suitable,’ or ‘simpler’ than the old…  The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must… have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few….  That is one of the reasons why prior crisis proves so important.”   In fact, even “the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm… that they can solve the problems that have led the old one to a crisis… [which] is often the most effective one possible … is… rarely sufficient by itself.”  Thus, I understand that “at the start a new candidate for paradigm may have few supporters….  Nevertheless, if they are competent, they will improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it.”[1] 

In other words, the proponents of this paradigm will eventually resolve the modernist’s and even post-modernist’s fear that a turn to traditional wisdom must inherently limit people’s ability to respond to the present or to the oppressed.  They will resolve the traditionalists’ fear that this paradigm will lead to the loss of traditional Halakhic values - the fear that caused traditionalists to champion a legalist paradigm in response to hegemonic Enlightenment.  More importantly, however, the proponents of this paradigm will meet the contemporary challenge of a more individualistic society – not to preserve the Torah as law nor to preserve the independence of human voices that cannot communicate but rather to motivate people to fulfill the classic Torah demand to live responsibly to and with each other.  This paradigm will need to meet both needs in order to be accepted since “interpreters’ efforts to persuade us are successful if we come to see or understand what is at issue as they do” (Stern 2002, 80).   Inasmuch, “as the classical anthropologist Jane Harrison once expressed it, a myth… expresses a need, a longing… [that] is always… weathered by changes in the external conditions” (Rich 1976, 92), this paradigm will need to meet both the human myth of a messianic world of absolute truth via Torah and the myth of a messianic world in which all silenced voices are heard against the grain of dominant ideology since myths do not die. 

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[1] These are all quotations from Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.