[Avodah] Microphones on Shabbos

[Micha Berger]

>From Areivim, so I'm quoting in full.

On Fri, March 16, 2007 6:22 am, D&E-H Bannett wrote:
: Re: <<R. Menachem Mendel Poliakoff of Pikesville, MD
: published a teshuva many years ago concluding speaking into
: a microphone on Shabbos is permissible>> and the later
: comment <<The flickering of the vacuum tubes is not a real
: credible issue - if the tubes flickered they were worn out
: and not useable.>>
:
: I will not comment on the halakhic aspect of the teshuva and
: the rebuttals.
:
: When the teshuva was published (IIRC, in Tradition) I
: remember that, as an electronics engineer, was very
: impressed by its technical accuracy.  I was much more
: impressed, however, by the replies to that teshuva whose
: explanations of the technology were, to be polite, absolute
: nonsense.
:
: As to the flickering comment: Vacuum tubes IIRC, do not
: usually flicker, even when worn out.They have a constant
: non-changing glow because of the heating element inside.  In
: some types of final power amplifiers, the high currents,
: caused by speech might overheat the anode and cause it to
: glow, this glow directly connected to the speech. Amplifiers
: could be easily designed not to have the anode reach a
: temperature where speech can cause glow.
:
: Although it was very long ago, I always remember the
: teshuvot and my sympathy for Rabbi Poliakoff whose arguments
: made sense while the "gedolim mimmennu", like Don Quixote
: tilting with the windmills, based issurim on postulated but
: non-existent problems.
:
: That some teshuvot are based on problems that do not exist
: does not mean that there might be other problems that do
: exist. I repeat, I am not commenting on the halakhic
: conclusions in the teshuvot but only on the explanations of
: technical metziut.
:
: No question in my mind:  On the technical front, Rabbi
: Poliakoff won by a knock out.

I do not believe the teshuvos are *based* on the problems. Rather, there was a
gut instinct that it doesn't fit with the gestalt of hilkhos Shabbos. Then it
was a matter of reasoning through why that is.

The same gut instinct some acharonim talk about WRT the Rambam, that some
things have specific meqoros and the others are products of his absorption of
the full picture. I believe this is "da'as Torah" as RYSalanter used the term,
before it evolved to go beyond asking where the unknowns are of halakhah and
mussar.

Which would explain why so many poseqim reached the same conclusion through
such different means -- hav'arah, bishul, makeh bepatish, boneh... The
reasoning is actually ex post facto, justifying something they knew to be true
in some ineffable way, the gefeel of din.

Something we have not resolved to my satisfaction in earlier iterations is how
this doesn't devolve into C-style process -- getting to the desired ends is a
very slippery slope. OTOH, there is precedent to talking about halachic
conclusions from gestalt, from the da'as Torah of someone immersed in the
halachic weltenschaung.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             Spirituality is like a bird: if you tighten
micha at aishdas.org        your grip on it, it chokes; slacken your grip,
http://www.aishdas.org   and it flies away.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter