Dear Rav Gotlib - thank you for your post. Regarding the possible breakdown in mesorah, taking a daily mitzva such as tefilin for example, how can one say that there was not a breakdown, given the machlokes about the order of the parshios? If Jews are doing this every day since Sinai, why is there a machlokes? Or when shkiah is? Or what a shevarim sounds like?
Thanks for your comment and sorry for my delay in responding! I was travelling for the past week. If we use the approach put forward by Rabbi Phillips, each of these examples could be split into their Divine Core and their human-influenced performance. Rabbi Phillips would argue that these debates are only about the latter. Rav Schachter's position compliments that. His argument (at least as I understand it) is that assuming these little details were given directly from Hashem on Har Sinai and that the resulting debates must be because the Jewish people simply forgot what He told them lands one in much hotter water than simply saying that many particular aspects of these mitzvot are rabbinic in origin and therefore of course can be argued over time. So the simple answer is to say that the assumption that "Jews are doing this every day since Sinai" is a false one. Jews were commanded at Sinai, but those commands developing into the way we practice them today didn't happen overnight.
Dear Rav Gotlib - thank you for your post. Regarding the possible breakdown in mesorah, taking a daily mitzva such as tefilin for example, how can one say that there was not a breakdown, given the machlokes about the order of the parshios? If Jews are doing this every day since Sinai, why is there a machlokes? Or when shkiah is? Or what a shevarim sounds like?
Thanks for your comment and sorry for my delay in responding! I was travelling for the past week. If we use the approach put forward by Rabbi Phillips, each of these examples could be split into their Divine Core and their human-influenced performance. Rabbi Phillips would argue that these debates are only about the latter. Rav Schachter's position compliments that. His argument (at least as I understand it) is that assuming these little details were given directly from Hashem on Har Sinai and that the resulting debates must be because the Jewish people simply forgot what He told them lands one in much hotter water than simply saying that many particular aspects of these mitzvot are rabbinic in origin and therefore of course can be argued over time. So the simple answer is to say that the assumption that "Jews are doing this every day since Sinai" is a false one. Jews were commanded at Sinai, but those commands developing into the way we practice them today didn't happen overnight.