[Avodah] YT Sheini Shell Golah and the Internet

[Zev Sero]

rabbirichwolpoe at gmail.com wrote:

> I am saying that if qiddush hachodesh were al pi reiya tomorrow morning,
> every YT - except RH itself - would revert to a single day. Why? The new
> Beth Din would notify the entire world - password protected if need be -
> within seconds.
> 
> So as it stands NOW, Qiddush al pi reiya would drop YT sheini universally
> - except RH.
> 
> So kal vachomer with a fixed calendar this need is obsolete - except RH.

And that exact same argument was just as valid ~1650 years ago when
the fixed calendar was first established.  Once there is no longer
KhChAPhR, once we know exactly when RCh is, why keep two days?  And
yet the Sanhedrin sent a letter ordering everybody who had been keeping
two days to continue doing so.  We keep two days today because of that
letter, and for no other reason.  So what has changed now?  Why should
that letter have less force now than it did then? 




> [NB: RH would not necessarily afford time to notify the planet before
> the onset of YT with a Qiddush al pi reiya]

"Not necessarily"??  How could the world outside Y'm *ever* be notified?
Unless you have a "yomtov goy" in Y'm who will post the news, and a
network of goyim in every other city who will look up the news and
then go around all the shuls to notify people.  Would such a network
of yomtov goyim have enough ne'emanut that if they tell us there isn't
a second day we can believe them long enough to go online and verify
for ourselves that it's so?



> Zev Sero:
>> "What difference can it possibly make how far the news could
>> spread, were there any news *to* spread?"

> All the difference in the world! Literally! Our minhag avos is
> highly suspect considering that we don't live in Baghdad or Iraq!
> Having moved, the whole idea of living in a maqqom that shluchim
> were not magia is suspect.

Huh?  Did shluchim ever reach New York?  No!  So how can you claim
that the Sanhedrin's decree does not apply here?



> Now granted - It could be that the minhag avos is the sole reason for
> continuing this observance

No! The reason is *not* minhag avot, but the Sanhedrin's decree that
we continue that minhag.  "Hachaziku minhag avoteichem biydeichem".
It's not a matter of "tradition", but of a specific order to keep
doing whatever we had already been doing, even though the reason we'd
been doing it no longer applied, because there was now a new reason:
perhaps we will make a mistake in the calculations.  That new reason
wasn't strong enough for the Sanhedrin to make YT Sheni a universal
practise even in EY; but where it had already been the practise, the
new reason was enough for them to order it continued.


> - but I don't think it is a slam dunk and
> this answer needs more work. The Sanhedrin that issued that answer was
> dealing with a far different realia

What difference?  What has changed since then?


> - and it is reasonable to see that
> the inability of shluchim to reach certain places was axiomatic to the
> Taqqana- Gzeira

Huh?  What could that have to do with it, since there were no longer
to be any shluchim?


-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher