[Avodah] Realities of Times Past (Was: Latecomers to shul on Friday night)

Joseph Kaplan jkaplan at tenzerlunin.com
Thu Jul 2 17:02:12 PDT 2020


R’Akiva Miller asks (38/54) a typically thoughtful question about adding Magen Avot on Friday night. The reasoning and realities are difficult to understand, he notes, and so he asks, “There's something that I'm missing about the realities of how those
minyanim were organized, the speed they davened at, and/or the dangers
lurking about. Can anyone explain the story better?”

I don’t have any answers for him but I have similar questions about reasons given for other changes in halacha. For example, we don’t blow shofar on RH that falls on Shabbat (thus missing out on a Biblical commandment) because of three maybes: (a) maybe someone will be blowing who doesn’t know how to do do properly, (b) maybe that will happen on a Shabbat RH, and (c) maybe that person will carry the shofar in a reshut harabim to an expert for instruction. 

Well, how often would that occur? Was this common in those days? And if so, why? It’s not common today for shofar blowers to go to experts on RH to give them instruction. And equally difficult fir me to understand, wasn’t there some other way to prevent the triple maybe sin of carrying other than making all the Jewish people for generations on end miss out on a once a year biblical commandment.? Was society so different that this was really an otherwise unmanageable problem at the time the ruling was put into effect? To paraphrase Akiva, there’s something that I'm missing about the realities of that time; can anyone explain the reasoning better?

Joseph
Sent from my iPhone


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