When new issues arise, popular consensus often precedes rabbinic consensus.

American Orthodox Judaism, which for Shimen is nothing but a vulgar and superficial shadow of the authentic Yiddishkeit that he recalls with love and anguish.

articulated principles of halakha serve us when we don’t have clear intuitions on the matter at hand.

Both his religious beliefs and his family memories are true for him not because of historical research but regardless of it.

The principle is the same each time: expertise, not tradition, is the key to a flourishing society.

while a messianic era will come one day, we must wait for it patiently.

the lesson is that particular social norms proliferate and survive within a society because, as we saw earlier, they contribute to the society’s survival, even if no member of that society actually understands exactly how they do so.

We can’t default to the belief that the society we belong to is a link in a directed process that connects our past with our future unless we have a very strong sense of which society we belong to: Gerer Hasidim, committed Jews, all Jews, educated Westerners, human beings, sentient beings?

in an ideal world, halakha is meant to be uncodified, like the rules of grammar, precisely so that its practice remain fluid much the way a native language is spoken. In the real world, codification is often necessary to prevent too much drift during times when collective intuition is compromised;