well, a last posting before hadlakas ner chanukkah–
notpashut- The reason why you think that “we are making a lot of forward progress” is not that I have suddenly changed how I think. it is because ,ALL ALONG, I was who I was. You may have gotten a different idea from our discussions, but I know the ‘chareidi” world very well and even if I may disagree on some key issues (eretz yisroel primarily) I can understand the reasoning behind some of the halachic issues.
I have always respected the gedolim of all “machanos’ and I fully understand how halocho is arrived at. Where I differ from you is in declaring the fact that a Klal has to be treated differently than an individual. And – the way I see it – some poskim have eschewed that basic idea today.
This does not make them wrong , just that I think the “kulloh” is more appropriate for the “zibbur” ,regardless of whether we are richer or better today. BTW- I don’t remember saying that “the yeshivishe oilam is looking for chumros”. They are fully entitled to do this but I do not have to accept this view.
On many ,many issues contemporary Poskim have not tried to find a way out for some very serious problems. I will only quote one issue -one that has scarcely been talked about on this website- and this is the question of agunos.
There are hundreds-maybe thousands- of women who cannot receive a ‘get’ because of the intransigeance of their husbands. Now- in the past ,when divorce was rare, this was an isolated case and it would have been difficult to make special provisions.
Today, unfortunately, modern society is different and so ,some years ago, the Union of Orthodox Congr. came out with a “pre-nuptial’ agreement, that was fully halachically correct according to their Poskim. The proverbial all h-ll broke loose. From Israel
(beshem Rav Elyashiv, if I remember correctly),dire warnings that these gittin were not valid and the children of later marriages were mamzerim…”Kheruzim” were issued in Israel and on and on it went…
Till….it was explained to these Poskim what was really in these agreements and the whole matter went quiet.
Now, my point is not that ,ironically, Rav Elyashiv and others came to accept the halachic decision of the O-U rabbonim,but to ask, why the chareidi Poskim in Israel (and the US) did not come up with a good , or better, version of this agreement much earlier, so as to spare thousands of women terrible ‘agmas nefesh”.
And it is here that I question the logic of today’s Poskim. Because, as I see it, they did not want to look for an acceptable way for solving this problem as it would have entailed some kullos and possibly, even some ‘daas jochid”. SO -they did nothing. This is what I mean by a tendency today not to look for kullos.I can point to issues in past centuries where the Poskim did make very special provisions when the Klal was involved.
You are free to comment on this and till then- a freilichne chanukka!
(I will respond to your understanding of koach dehetaira later)