[Avodah] R' Nissim Karelitz's Beis Din: Kohanim cannot fly from Ben Gurion

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 01:32:37PM -0400, RnTK wrote:
: At any given point in the universe, what do the words "above" and "below"  
: even /mean/?

Well, if the meis was buried on earth, this question is relatively easily
answered. Lemaalah appears to be defined relative to the center of the
earth, so above and below desribe a wedge that is a point at the center
of the planet, has a cross-section that is the neis, and gets wider as
it goes up, to stay a constant fraction of an ever larger oblate spheroid.

IOW, all points in lines that run from the center of the earth through the
meis and are beyond the meis on that line segment would be lemaalah of it.

But what if the person were buried on Mars. Would "above" be a wedge
starting at the center of Mars? Or would it be defined by the rapidly
changing line from the middle of the earth? How geocentric are we?

: The curvature of the earth may not be relevant but the earth's rotation  
: around its axis surely is.  Our planet is rotating at a rate of  about a 
: thousand miles an hour.  It's also moving around the sun at about  66,000 miles 
: an hour..


So what's releavant is the airplane's location relative to the meis.

...
: But how far out in space is this true?  If you were standing in a  
: graveyard and you looked up and saw, say, Orion's belt, would that mean that a  
: kohen could not travel to one of Orion's stars because the tumah from the  
: cemetery extends all the way UP to those stars?  But no, in the course of  the 
: night, Orion moves!  (Well, our planet moves.)  So now where is  "up"?  Where 
: is "above"?

So then a kohein couldn't be on any planetary body that passes a point
over a meis while the kohein is there. Yes, that would be tough.

More likely RET is correct, and someone so far above the source of tum'ah
that the human eye can't see it isn't tamei. Just because that seems
consistent to me with halakhah in general. But we would need proof;
my personal preferences are unsupported.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The trick is learning to be passionate in one's
micha at aishdas.org        ideals, but compassionate to one's peers.
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