Not how halakhic texts tell stories about other things, but how they tell stories about themselves is our concern here. Confronting us is not the problem of extracting evidence regarding trade or communal organization from law, but the question of how one cracks the colorless and highly impersonal mold into which the thought of the medieval period was cast to reveal a world of individuality, development, and ambivalence. Can the fragmentary and recalcitrant halakhic texts be made to talk history?Attempting to argue for the affirmative, I would like to trace the origin and fate of one doctrine over the course of some two centuries. Instead of a running account, it seems wisest for our purposes to interrogate each piece of evidence separately, hoping to see if a continuous narrative emerges from the cross-examination, and whether parts of the story are of wider significance. (The importance of the story as a whole would emerge only in the framework of a much larger study.) In brief, I should like to try to reconstruct step by step a small chapter in the history of the halakhah.As the technique employed is that of piecemeal analysis, I hope that the reader will forgive the temporary lapse from brevity. NOTE: Most of the sources, both in print and in manuscript, cited in this essay have been collected by the author in a lithographed volume entitled Yafias ha-gomelin bein ha-halakhah ve-hamefi'ut published by the Akademon of the Hebrew University. Armed with it, the reader can stalk the errors with ease. 153 154 HAYM SOLOVEITCHIK The topic chosen is an aspect of yein nesekh (henceforth y.n.); the time and place-Ashkenaz in the high Middle Ages.The Talmud had imposed a severe ban on drinking and trading in Gentile wine or wine that a non-Jew had so much as touched. The social difficulties that this injunction entailed are common knowledge; the economic burdens, though less known, were no less great.Wine played a far greater role in the Middle Ages than it does now. Water was not generally drunk, and tea and coffee had not yet come to Europe. Fresh fruits were unavailable for a good part of the year, and whiskey was still undiscovered. Thus thirst could be quenched only by beer and wine. And the thirst was great; partly because the meats were heavily spiced (no other method of food preservation was available), partly because drink was the only escape for the poor and the major entertainment of the wealthy. So drink people did, and on a heroic scale. Indeed the quantities consumed stagger the imagination.The importance of wine in the daily fare gave to it a role in the economic life of the period that we would scarcely dream of. How were the men of the North, England and Scandinavia-great drinkers all-to quench their thirst? Mead and beer were available-indeed, in England a full third of the grain crop at the time of the Conquest was used for beer production-but these were looked upon as lower class drinks. The well-to-do drank wine, and wine was to be had primarily by import. So as Pirenne first perceived and Dion then ...

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This chapter discusses the developments that have occurred within the Modern Orthodox community. What had been a stringency in religious observance peculiar to the right in 1960, such as the augmented shi'urim (minimal requisite quantities), had become, in the 1990s, a widespread practice in Modern Orthodox circles, and, among their younger members, an axiomatic one. The phenomena were, indeed, most advanced among the haredim and were to be found there in a more intensive form; however, most of these developments swiftly manifested themselves among their co-religionists to their left. The chapter claims that what had changed radically was the very texture of religious life and the entire religious atmosphere. Put differently, the nature of contemporary spirituality had undergone a transformation. The chapter then looks at the new and controlling role that texts now play in contemporary religious life. As the halakhah is a sweepingly comprehensive regula of daily life, it constitutes a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed.