On One Foot
MAIMONIDES, MISHNEH TORAH: “LAWS OF THE SANHEDRIN” 2:7
2 HERE WE SEE a second major litmus test: trust. If we think of authority as akin to a credential—proof that someone has attained a certain level of learning— then we can think of trust as the continu- ing reliability of their judgment. A religious leader is authorized to rule on something because they are ordained; they are trust- ed to rule on something because their ordination hasn’t been revoked, their past rulings have been accepted as sound and not overturned, and their reputation remains untarnished. Here, Maimonides sums up the position of many earlier sources about what constitutes trust in a halakhic author- ity. These traits are hallmarks of someone who will offer a sound judgment of a case or a clear reading of the texts.
[A judge] must…possess seven attributes: wisdom, humil- ity, the fear of God, a loathing for money, a love for truth; he must be a person who is beloved by people at large, and must have a good reputation. All of these qualities are mentioned explicitly in the Torah. 2
RABBI YEHUDA HERZL HENKIN: “QERI’AT HA-TORAH BY WOMEN: WHERE WE STAND TODAY,” EDAH JOURNAL 1:2 (2001) Where does all this leave us? Re- gardless of the arguments that can be proffered to permit women’s aliyyot today — that kevod ha- tsibbur can be waived, that it does not apply today when everyone is literate, that it does not apply when the olim rely on the (male) ba`al qeri’ah and do not themselves read—women’s aliyyot remain out- side the consensus, and a congrega- tion that institutes them is not Or- thodox in name and will not long remain Orthodox in practice. In my judgement, this is an accurate state- ment now and for the foreseeable future, and I see no point in argu- ing about it. 3
3 HERE WE SEE a real-world example of the dynamics of trustworthiness and authority, and of how they play out in a halakhic framework. This is an excerpt from a response to Rabbi Mendel Shapiro, who published a responsa ruling that, even using exclusively traditional sources, a woman may read from the Torah in a regular Orthodox service. Henkin’s reply: even if Shapiro were interpreting all the sources he cited cor- rectly (which he doesn’t think was the case), no one person can establish a communal halakhic practice on the basis of an untested theory that is not accepted by the majority of rab- bis or practitioners. This has real value for our topic in two ways. It confirms that a responsa isn’t useful unless it is well supported by ac- cepted authorities: don’t think that because you’re brilliant, the rest of the rabbinic community will automatically accept your ideas. And it shows that, even if an LLM were to demon- strate that it did not hallucinate and always provided proper responses that conformed with accepted law, unless the gen- eral consensus of authoritative sources accepted that this LLM could be trusted, it would remain a suspect source of wisdom.
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