long time no "see", and the shofar on Shabbat

[cellio]

Neat. I've bumped into Micha again.

Micha was a regular on the Usenet group soc.culture.jewish[.moderated]. For all I know he still is; my feed for this group is highly flaky and I don't read it any more. We got into some interesting discussions back then (we're talking four year ago now), and this resulted in my flying out to spend a Shabbat with his (Orthodox) family. It was a fascinating experience in many ways. (I wrote a huge journal entry about it. I wrote lots of huge entries back then...)

But then my feed got flaky, and Usenet continued to descend to new depths, and we lost touch. Recently some of the "old regulars" started a mailing list for discussions among members of different movements, and when I heard about it I signed up. I noticed that Micha was there but didn't make direct contact.

After I posted something last week he sent me mail saying, basically, "long time no see". So we've been catching up. Nifty. I wasn't really even sure he would even remember me. I get the impression that he does a lot of what I call "Orthodox outreach", and I figured I was just another person passing through to him. (For all that we exchanged long, deep email for a while.)

So now we're arguing (on the list) about the ban on blowing the shofar if Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat. Ah, it feels good to be home. :-)

(The issue is that we are commanded to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashana, except the rabbis ruled that if RH is on Shabbat we don't do this. Why? Because of the prohibition on carrying things in the public domain on Shabbat -- if we blow shofar on Shabbat, then someone might be tempted to carry one and that would be bad, and even having one that lives at the synagogue is not adequate. My counter-argument: if it's about carrying, then why do we permit the use of any object during Shabbat services? We read from a Torah scroll, make kiddush with a kiddush cup, use siddurim (prayer books), etc, and someone could be tempted to carry these items from outside the building. Yet it is sufficient to set items aside that belong to the synagogue and live there, so why not also the shofar?)

Comments

Re: kiddush in shul

[cellio]

Aw, you're just doing that for the spectators. :-)

Yes, I know that Shulchan Aruch is late by us. It still seems to carry some ambiguous level of authority, though, and I figured that a 500-year-old tradition of permission to say kiddush over challah could be relevant.

Re: kiddush in shul

[goljerp]

Aw, you're just doing that for the spectators. :-)

Guilty as charged. :-)

I wouldn't have been able to pull out the dates off the top of my head, but I did mention I was looking stuff up... but then I couldn't stop!