Rulings

RASHI'S SURVIVING OEUVRE offers no evidence that he himself wrote any comprehensive halakhic works. Lipschuetz attributes this to his extreme humility and fear of issuing halakhic rulings:

I cannot accept this explanation. As I have already suggested, Rashi was not one who feared to issue rulings. Nor is there any basis for the conclusion that ‘all of Rashi's teachers were fearful of issuing rulings’. That is not true of Rabbi Isaac Halevi and certainly not of Rabbenu Gershom (though he, too, wrote no general halakhic works). Books of halakhic rulings simply were not an accepted literary genre in eleventh-century Germany and northern France. Except for collections of customs or brief monographs, there is no evidence of any comprehensive halakhic work being written in Ashkenaz at that time—a state of affairs quite different from that among the Babylonian geonimor Spanish sages. Like the French sages who preceded him, Rashi couched his halakhic decision-making primarily in the form of responsa.

Rashi, however, can be seen as one who inspired and contributed to the development of another important branch of the tree of halakhic creativity: the writing of halakhic monographs. These monographs were not written by Rashi himself; rather, they were collected, organized, and committed to writing by his students, some of them during his lifetime and under his direction. Some of them state explicitly that they were directly influenced by Rashi's teachings, and hemay have played an active part in their writing.