In a recent Q&A session Rav Schachter stated that the Mishna Brura is hard. complicated and not the psak hamkubal. It’s also full of contradictions because sections were written by different members of Chafetz Chaim’s family. It did not represent practice even in the Chafetz Chaim’s area.
Given this understanding. how is it that many of Rav Schachter’s students, especially those who don’t consider themselves full-blown poskim, do not follow his lead in this area?
KT
Joel Rich
Funny thing about “pesaq hamequbal”. In RMF says in OC 2:100 that we should hold like the AhS on the matter in question, because he was the poseiq. The teshuvos in that volume were all written some time after the Holocaust through the early 1960s. However, in OC vol 5, the ps questions in the late 1970s or '80s, RMF wrote a teshuvah found in OC 5:13.9 that ruled like the MB “since these later generations accepted the MB as Maran on matters of OC.”
Sounds to me like RMF originally considered the AhS the more authoritative of the two, until he felt Kelal Yisrael spoke, and he had to change his position. Which is the way things look on the street. For example, there are two editions of the AhS with footnotes describing pisqei MB. I have never seen the reverse on the bottom of a MB.
So my impression is more like tRMF’s more like that piece of the description of RHS’s position.
But RHS isn’t a fan of the AhS either.
I don’t think his position is maintainable by his students. This is the same gadol who said one cannot pasqen on one matter without having broad knowledge of all of halakhah. Because it’s all interconnected. (Ask RJR, not me, where he says this – I heard it in a shiur on a link in Audio Roundup.)
There would be no LORs that way.
As noted in the past, there are many cases where the CC didn’t hold like the Mishnah Berurah. And RSM z"l argued (v9n55, only on the original archive) that it wasn’t even meant as a code to begin with, but as a collection of acharonim that post-date the nosei keilim in the SA, to help the LOR work through pesaqim using sources that then weren’t in most rabbi’s libraries.
See Textualism and the Mishnah Berurah for my summary of his position. There are embellishments of my own, but RSM agreed with them.
Interesting. I’ve seen the MB annotated with the חזון איש and with the שולחן ערוך הרב.
Annotating it with the ערוך השולחן could be a fun and interesting project.
-Danny, who began underlining in red in his MB everything people don’t do, until he ran out of red ink, rather quickly.
I haven’t learned much Mishnah Berurah (I spend my time on Kaf HaHayyim), but two things confuse me about this description of what the CC was trying to accomplish.
I wonder what the halachic world would look like if the CC had endorsed the KhH instaed of writing the MB, and the Ashkenazic velt had listened. The KhH definitely gives a fair hearing to Ashkenazi poskim, and comprehensive treatment Rema even where he disagrees with the Mechaber, so I don’t think this is so far-fetched a question.
I can’t answer this question fully. And RSM is no longer with us, that we could ask him. Just pointing out that this means dismissing what the haqdamah says. As well as the testimony from numerous sources that the CC lived the AhS’s pesaq more often than the MB’s. (The CC put up an eiruv in Radun, tucked in his tzitzis, left his daughter a kos that was smaller than his own shiur… That last one has a funny story, if you didn’t hear it, read here.)
But I can talk to the AhS. The MB and AhS OC came out at about the same time. The MB came out from 1884-1907, the AhS had vol 1 came out in 1907 and v. 3 in 1907. It led to the ofdd result that the MB sometimes cites the AhS, and the AhS at times cites the MB.
When the CC started the MB, the AhS was only on Choshein Mishpat.
But the truth is, the AhS doesn’t solve the MB’s stated mission in the haqdamah. RYME focuses on Rishonim through the Nosei Keilim on the SA page. The SA haRav (referred to as רש"ז) gets some, but rare, coverage. But altogether, he is more about the origin of the accepted pesaq or his preferred pesaq if he can’t back the accepted one. Documenting that pesaq with later authorities would be an exception to his usual style.
That’s true, but when you listen to Rav Schachter giving a Shiur on Mishna Berura, it becomes pretty clear. As he reads the Mechaber and the Ramoh, you can hear him seeing the Gemoras behind it and the Rishonim. As he continues reading the Mishna Berura he sees issues which don’t abide by his sense of the Rishonim etc. Rav Schachter is someone who sees it all clearly as he reads primary texts. What he does often prefer, especially for those who want to know what to do, is that people learn Kitzur Shulchan Aruch and with the She’arim Metzyonim BeHalacha (but that may be because he had one of these etc). Of course, the Kitzur now has editions with all manner of Acharonim, including the Shulchan Aruch HaRav, Mishna Berura and Chazon Ish. If someone needs to see the range of views on a more “modern” issue, then the Piskei Teshuvos, in my opinion gives a great summary and claims “this is the accepted minhag” on Psak. (I dislike the word Minhag in many instances when people want to say “we accept this Psak in practice” — that doesn’t make it a Minhag, surely!