fe practice. Jewish law traces itself back to the halakhah or "the way." The halakhah can be understood as those social codes which are to be seen as enforceable in the courts. The halakhah stands in contrast to agadah or haggadah which is to be scripted as "the lore." According to Jewish custom, all actions which are not to be guided formally by halakhah are to be prescribed by the dictums of agadah which allows for greater individual freedom. In attempting to pinpoint exactly what the Jewish position on abortion should be and in explaining how it is achieved sometimes an overemphasis upon Jewish law or Halacha has been used. David Kraemer, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, indicates that to equate Halacha and ethics reveals an unacceptably sloppy sociological and theological framework. Kraemer indicates that there are actually four crucial differences between Halacha and ethics: first, Halacha defines a narrow canon while ethics must be much broader in its scope; second, the tradition of Halacha contend that the Torah as it is broadly defined must be viewed as eternal and even contemporary whereas ethicists assert that its tradition must be hermeneutically understood, that is, within its specific context; third, "Halachists submit to the final authority of their sources" while ethicists assert that they must exercise their judgment; four, Halachists desire that clear, definitive conclusions be reached while ethicists hold that complex situations cannot always be neatly packaged into "univocal, overarching answers." This distinction between the Halachists' strict adherence to the Torah and Jewish ethicists desire to wrangle with a disputable social issue's full complexity helps to account for some of the variance among Orthodox, Reform and Conservative Jewish thought on this highly disputed abortion issue.
Historically, during the Jewish biblical period, local laws suggested that if ...