386 A History of Judaism
the pupil. It was intended to encourage logical reasoning and an ability
to differentiate through casuistic argument even the most minute details
in the Talmud. Pilpul assumed that every sentence in the Talmud must
contain some special meaning which just needed to be teased out by
imagination, perception, intuition and hard work, even if this required
the splitting of hairs and the subversion of the plain meaning of the text.
It is hard to capture the flavour of such teaching from surviving texts
without very extended citation precisely because it is characteristic of
the method to pursue every possible trail leading from the original text.
One example may suffice. Aryeh Leib b. Asher Gunzberg, head of a
yeshivah in Metz in Lithuania from 1765 to his death in 1785 after
posts in Minsk and Volozhin, and author of a number of works which
have shaped Lithuanian approaches to the study of the Talmud to the
present day, proved the correctness of one view of earlier commentaries
on the Talmud, and the incorrectness of another, by analysis of two
talmudic passages, as follows:
The Talmud says that the search for and removal of leavened matter on the
eve of the Passover is merely a rabbinical prescription; for it is sufficient,
according to the commands of the Torah, if merely in words or in thought
the owner declares it to be destroyed and equal to the dust. Rashi says that
the fact that such a declaration of the owner is sufficient is derived from an
expression in Scripture. The tosafot, however, claim that this cannot be
derived from the particular expression in Scripture, since the word there
means ‘to remove’ and not ‘to declare destroyed’. The mere declaration
that it is destroyed is sufficient for the reason that thereby the owner gives
up his rights of ownership, and the leavened matter is regarded as having
no owner, and as food for which no one is responsible, since at Passover
only one’s own leavened food may not be kept, while that of strangers may
be kept. Although the formula which is sufficient to declare the leavened
matter as destroyed is not sufficient to declare one’s property as having no
owner, yet, as R. Nissim Gerondi, adopting the view of the tosafot,
explains, the right of ownership which one has in leavened matter on the
eve of Passover, even in the forenoon, is a very slight one; for, beginning
with noon, such food may not be enjoyed; hence all rights of ownership
become illusory, and, in view of such slight right of ownership, a mere
mental renunciation of this right suffices in order that the leavened matter
be considered as without an owner. R. Aryeh Leib attempts to prove the
correctness of this tosafistic opinion as elaborated by R. Nissim, and to
prove at the same time the incorrectness of Rashi’s view, from a later