While many people respect and even venerate their physicians, they do not always unquestioningly accept their word. When the prognosis is unfavourable or the treatment is unpleasant, they can seek a second opinion which, they hope, is more favourable or congenial to them. The second opinion may be better than the first, or it may not. It may even corroborate it. Until you receive it, you never know.
As the
world has become increasingly complex, specialisation has become the norm. We
never expect a single medical practitioner to be expert in every branch of
medical science. Rabbis too frequently acquire halachic expertise in
specialisms that were unrecognised in past generations. Advances in science and
technology now demand a high level of detailed knowledge before a rabbi can
give a ruling in many areas today. Food production, electronics, communications
technologies, hydraulics and in vitro fertilisation are obvious
examples.
Just as a
family doctor will refer complex issues up the line, sending it to a consultant
who possesses the knowledge and experience to understand the true nature of a
problem and ideally resolve it, so too do many communal rabbis increasingly
refer questions to colleagues who have made a particular study of Jewish law in
fields that are technologically advanced, obscure or recondite. But the
situations of the family doctor and the communal rabbi are not entirely the
same.
In most
areas of medicine, what is treated is the condition itself and the
applicability of the expert’s answer does not depend on the nature of the
individual patient (though psychiatry is an obvious exception). When a rabbi
sends a question up the line for an expert opinion, the expert may not have in
front of him the person who seeks the answer—and this factor can be of critical
importance where there is a spiritual or social dimension to the question
itself. Is the person asking the advice someone who is moving towards religious
observance or struggling with it? Does he or she have a strong or supportive
family? Will a strict ruling strengthen that person’s Jewish commitment or
drive them away from it? These are side issues when viewed in terms of pure
halachah, but they are in practice vital.
Rabbi
Yaakov Hillel (Eternal Ethics from Sinai) observes this problem from
another angle, finding a novel interpretation of Hillel’s teaching at Avot 2:5:
“אַל תָּדִין אֶת
חֲבֵרָךְ עַד שֶׁתַּגִּֽיעַ לִמְקוֹמוֹ”
(“Do not judge your fellow until you reach his place”). He writes:
If we always consult the same rabbi, we will eventually develop a
personal connection, enabling him to better answer our questions. Because he
knows us and is familiar with our circumstances, he knows if it is appropriate
to rule leniently or strictly … We find allusion to this principle later in
Avot: Do not judge your fellow man until you reach his place”. … I often
explain these words differently: a man should not judge—or in other words,
issue a halachic ruling—until he is aware of the questioner’s “place”—his
spiritual standing. Only then can he know whether the questioner can handle a
stricter ruling, or whether it is ultimately better to provide a more lenient,
yet still halachically acceptable answer.
There are a couple of things we can extract from this. One is that a communal rabbi who passes a question on to a halachic expert should always take care to communicate not only the question itself but as much relevant information as may be relevant. The other is that, when we help ourselves to halachic rulings that we find online, we should remind ourselves that these rulings were not necessarily given with us in mind and we should exercise prudent caution before treating them as our “second opinions”.
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