Works
Rabbi Weiss authored an important nine-volume set of responsa, entitled Minchas Yitzchak, discussing many contemporary technological, social, and economic issues. In a special section therein entitled Pirsumei Nissa ("publicising of the miracle") Rabbi Weiss recorded the harrowing ordeals that he experienced in the Second World War, and his miraculous survival.
Dayan Weiss reached his decisions by the classic "Hungarian" method of consulting recent Halachic authorities and then tracing the principles thus established back to the more basic sources of the Talmud and Codes. His fellow sage, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein of New York, worked in the opposite direction, going straight to the Talmud and especially Rambam in a search for precedents, and then applying the relevant reasoning directly to the question at hand, often without reference to any intermediate views.
Though Rabbi Weiss was often uncompromising and quite severe in his rulings, he was extremely kind by disposition and was always anxious to avoid conflicts, often in the face of severe provocation. In the modern age, there is no rabbinic court and no legal work which does not quote or rely on Rabbi Weiss's verdicts in applying Jewish law to modern conditions, particularly in the field of medical ethics.
Read more about this topic: Yitzchok Yaakov Weiss
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute..”
—Edmund Burke (1729–97)