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

Context request

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

So, yeah. I'm also impressed that you know all this stuff to such depth, I'm just wishing I could follow it a little better. Could someone please explain something of these for me, like what they are? :)

kiddush
minyan
davening (this seems to be a noun; is there a verb "to daven"?)
Mishnah

Re: Context request

[cellio]

Oops, I'm sorry about that. Here, let me clarify:

Kiddush: a blessing that we say (over wine) to sanctify Shabbat or a holiday. This is called "making kiddush". We are required to do this at home, at the beginning of meals on those days (once in the evening and once in the morning). It is often also recited in the synagogue as part of services, but that doesn't excuse you from the requirement to do it at home.

Minyan: technically, the group of 10 men (if you're Orthodox) or 10 men and/or women (if you're Reform -- Conservative is split) that is required in order to hold certain parts of a service. Colloquially, "minyan" also refers to the service, as in "minyan tonight is at 7:30".

Observant (male) Jews (female too in liberal Judaism) are expected to pray a fixed liturgy three times a day. These services are called "ma'ariv" (evening), "shacharit" (morning), and "mincha" (the afternoon service; the word "mincha" actually means something different, but it's come to mean this as well). The first service is the evening one because the day begins at sundown. (Because "and it was evening and morning, the Nth day".)

Davening: saying the (fixed) service. Often equated with "praying", but one can pray "from the heart" and privately, and "davening" refers to the fixed liturgy (the three services I mentioned above).

Mishnah: the earliest part of the Talmud; the written form of the oral law. There are two types of law, written law (Torah) and oral law. Around the year 200 CE there was a real danger that the oral law would be lost, due to persecution (mainly from Rome), so the sages of the time wrote it down. Later sages augmented it; the earlier part is called the Mishnah and the later part is called the Gemara, collectively the Talmud.

The shofar, by the way, is the ram's horn. It is sounded almost every morning during the month before Rosh Hashana, and during Rosh Hashana services as well. However, this is omitted on Shabbat because carrying things from a private place into the public space (or back) is one of the forbidden types of labor on Shabbat, and the sages worried that if someone forgot to take the shofar to the synagogue before Shabbat he might carry it on Shabbat. Rather than risking that sin, they banned blowing the shofar on Shabbat. (A secondary concern is the prohibition of playing musical instruments on Shabbat.)

The argument I brought up is that if we worry about someone carrying a shofar on Shabbat, why don't we worry about him carrying the kiddush cup (the cup that holds the wine)? Others commenting here have pointed out some reasons that this is a different case.