Works
Rabbi Weiss authored an important nine-volume set of responsa, entitled Minchas Yitzchak, discussing many contemporary technological, social, and economic issues. In a special section therein entitled Pirsumei Nissa ("publicising of the miracle") Rabbi Weiss recorded the harrowing ordeals that he experienced in the Second World War, and his miraculous survival.
Dayan Weiss reached his decisions by the classic "Hungarian" method of consulting recent Halachic authorities and then tracing the principles thus established back to the more basic sources of the Talmud and Codes. His fellow sage, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein of New York, worked in the opposite direction, going straight to the Talmud and especially Rambam in a search for precedents, and then applying the relevant reasoning directly to the question at hand, often without reference to any intermediate views.
Though Rabbi Weiss was often uncompromising and quite severe in his rulings, he was extremely kind by disposition and was always anxious to avoid conflicts, often in the face of severe provocation. In the modern age, there is no rabbinic court and no legal work which does not quote or rely on Rabbi Weiss's verdicts in applying Jewish law to modern conditions, particularly in the field of medical ethics.
Read more about this topic: Yitzchok Yaakov Weiss
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In all Works of This, and of the Dramatic Kind, STORY, or AMUSEMENT, should be considered as little more than the Vehicle to the more necessary INSTRUCTION.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately, we had no business in this country.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)