Mar 04 2024 12 mins
For nearly a thousand years, students of the Mishneh Torah, Rambam's great code of halakhah, have sought to identify the Talmudic sources of his rulings. Sometimes, he appears to have no source whatsoever. When this happens, we have to ask: is Rambam just making this up? Is it permissible even for a great posek to derive a rule of halakhah on the basis of common sense or of his personal judgment? In this installment, we look at two outstanding commentators with two very different answers to that question.
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