a man with one watch knows what time it is

[cellio]

My congregation tries to have recent b'nei mitzvah do the torah readings on the high holy days, but they sometimes need adults to fill in and I usually get tapped for this. So it was no surprise to get a piece of mail on Thursday with a portion. They don't need to mail me the portion (just telling me the verses would be fine), but it's easier on the office to mail things out to everybody, I'm told. So now I have another piece of paper that I can't recycle because it contains the divine name; into the stack it goes, and someday I'll make that stack someone else's problem. So far so good.

Then today came the audio CD, which I also don't need, but it's easier on the office... But what I am to make of the one-verse offset between the written passage and what's on the CD? Oops. (It's written on the CD, else I never would have noticed because I never would have played it.)

I can handle it either way (in fact, I've already negotiated the boundary with the person before me, whose CD was also off by one), but I hope this doesn't mess anyone else up. Or rather, I hope the other readers are also observant enough to notice the problem before they get too far. Maybe I better call the office on Tuesday.

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

What do you eventually do with the papers with the divine name? Do you burn them, ritually, like one would a retired flag?

[cellio]

They get buried. Same for prayer books and torah scrolls that can no longer be used. I have never actually witnessed this; some synagogues have a box where you can deposit loose papers and someone takes care of it from there.

[richardf8]

What movement are you in? The CCAR released a responsum with some bearing on this. See http://data.ccarnet.org/cgi-bin/respdisp.pl?file=1&year=5762.

[cellio]

Interesting! Thank you for pointing that out. I'm going to ask my rabbi if he has any reason not to hold by that. (Yes, I'm Reform.)

[dringle.livejournal.com]

I buried books/papers once with a congregation. It's a lot of work and energy. A lot of people help out and somehow it gets done.

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

Skimming it at not quite 6 AM. :P Back to bed soon.

What would be the implications of having a special recycling business, Jewish-run and Rabbi-supervised, that takes such texts and recycles them specifically for the purpose of creating more such texts? Would that be erasure, or repair?

[lucretia-borgia.livejournal.com]

While our rabbi emeritus holds that even notes not containing the divine name but which I take in a Torah-learning class should be genizah'd, our new rabbi holds that photocopied sheets even containing yud-kei-vav-kei (not just yud-yud or similar) may be recycled as long as it's done respectfully, i.e. they don't go in with rotting food or suchlike.
Siddurim still get genizah'd, though. That's two Ortho opinions, the latter being a more strict constructionist when it comes to halacha.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

So now I have another piece of paper that I can't recycle because it contains the divine name

Huh. I did not know of that restriction. That sounds tricky, and susceptible to a mild physical DOS attack (I keep shoving sheets of paper under your door that you can't get rid of).

Does it apply to the name as presented in any form of media? I don't think many people would deluge you with stone tablets or metal sculptures, but what if the name is in electronic format?

[cellio]

That would be an interesting way to bring some holiness to the task. I doubt there's enough of a market to make it anything more than a labor of love, but it's an interesting idea.

[cellio]

Thanks for the information. Those two opinions straddle the line of where I thought Orthodox consensus would fall.

[cellio]

I don't think there is a problem with digital representations; enough people use digital prayer books on their PDAs that I think I would have heard if there were a general objection there. I mean, I'm sure there's someone in Mea Shearim who objects, but I'm not aware of a mainstream objection.

So now I wonder what the understanding of the digital case is: is it that the name was never "written" in the first place if it's only digital so it can't be "erased"? That's the best I can do right now, but it's purely a guess.

As for the DOS attack, I remember some concern a few years ago when someone (forget who, forget context) ran an ad in a major newspaper (NYT?) that contained the tetragramaton. I remember discussion about people trying to collect those pages so they wouldn't go into the trash. (I didn't get the relevant newspaper so I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the details.) So for your DOS attack you don't even need to come to my door, it sounds like, though I hope you will use this new knowledge only for good.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I wouldn't think there would be a mainstream objection to deleting digital versions because it would be crippling: you could not use spam filters just in case something was accidentally deleted. That's one of the things I enjoy about your posts about religion, though: rules should (in my opinion) be discussed and evolve in interpretation as the world changes around them. That's something that is missing from many branches of Christianity.

And of course I only use knowledge for good purposes. Mwa ha ha... ;-)

[geekosaur]

My understanding is that digital reproduction is ephemeral (both CRT and LCD screens need to be "refreshed" multiple times per second to retain their contents) so it doesn't apply.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that the Kindle would fall somewhere in between a printed page and a CRT / LCD (as I understand it, once the image is presented, it remains until explicitly erased - doesn't use any energy to maintain ... kind of like "etch-a-sketch" - the image stays until shaken)?

[richardf8]

I have downloaded Mechon Mamre's bible onto my PDA. It contains Names. Their counsel is don't bring it up on the screen in the privy. From this I would infer that stored digital representations don't count and that what appears on the computer screen isn't really writing, and therefore is not susceptible to erasure but respect due a Name should be afforded it while it is up.

[(Anonymous)]

In Anchorage, there are less than 20 copies of the Chumash and/or TaNaKh in the synagogue, so most fridays there is a 1 page photocopy of the part the rabbi is going to talk about. I had always collected them and left them in a pile for the rabbi. Then one week we had our annual "Teacher Appreciation" Shabbat and two of the Christian teachers from our preschool attended. They thought to ask the rabbi what happened to the paper. He actually usually cuts it in quarters and uses it for note paper. Since we found that out, we often collect it and use it from drawing paper in the preschool. Our rabbi maintains that it is a photocopy of a Chumash and there for does not need genizah treatment and it is better to reuse it anyway. Formal recycling is limited up here, so I imagine that after it is used for note paper or art paper, most of the time it then goes in the garbage. (from Carrie)