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Regarding Howie Jachter's pitch for Deconstruction:
R. Amital often complained to the boys in his "chaburah", "You bring up
this possibility, that possibility - as if you don't care which one is
right! Decide!" I don't think he was denying the importance of lomdus or
the possibility of multiple interpretations of a text; but a desire to find
the "right" interpretation goads the student to the highest levels of
effort and of intellectual honesty.
Howie's philosophy, if put into practice, will no doubt lead to a decline
in Torah scholarship to match the decline that our postmodern world has
seen in secular scholarship.
That is, of course, if that's what he was really saying. Myself, I think
his whole posting was allegorical.</HTML>
