Moshe Shmuel Glasner - Method of Study

Method of Study

A profound and innovative scholar, he was noted for his independence as a halakhic authority. He advocated a return to the method of study of the Rishonim (pre-1500 CE rabbinic scholars) "whose way was to explain with crystal clearness, to examine, to search for truth without any respect for any person" (introduction to the Dor Revi'i); he opposed the method of pilpul (casuistry) that arose during the era of the Acharonim (post-1500 CE scholars), saying pilpul is "as far from the path of wisdom as East is from West" (id.) and "a weakness developed in the Galut during whose millennia of persecutions and migrations our capacity for straight thinking had been wellnigh destroyed". Similarly, in his monograph "Ohr Bahir" (on the laws of mikva'ot), he rejected halakhic reasoning based on esoteric sources or divine inspiration, arguing that only arguments that can be subjected to rational criticism and evaluated in terms of halakhic sources known to halakhic experts at large carry weight in arriving at halakhic decisions.

His work also developed an innovative method in understanding and applying the code of Maimonides (Rambam). Many of codifications of the Rambam had perplexed commentators because they seemed to be at odds with the relevant Talmudic sources. These seemingly anomalous rulings have led to numerous attempts at rationalization by later scholars. Rabbi Glasner suggested that the source of the difficulty was often that the scholars had assumed that the Rambam had interpreted the problematic Talmudic sources for the codification in the same way that the Franco-German school of Rashi and Tosafot had understood those sources. However, Rabbi Glasner maintained, there was usually another approach to understanding the Talmudic sources than that followed by Rashi and Tosafot (often stemming from the Babylonian Geonic school which the Rambam had followed in reaching his codification. Once one correctly determined how the Rambam understood the Talmudic sources, his codifications follow directly from the sources, and the elaborate rationalizations for his rulings proposed by later authorities and commentators can be seen as redundant. Rabbi Glasner's methods coincided remarkably with those of Lithuanian Rabbi Haim Soloveichik. When Rabbi Glasner's major work, Dor Revi'i came to the attention of the Lithuanian yeshivot in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it produced astonishment among many Lithuanian scholars that a rabbi from Hungary (where theoretical acuity was generally less emphasized than breadth of knowledge of the sources) had independently formulated a method of study so similar to the method of Rabbi Soloveichik