Rabbi Michi, but according to Maimonides’ view as well, even a practice whose reason is no longer relevant is not annulled until a religious court greater in wisdom and number comes along, no?

You mean an enactment, not a custom. Indeed, that’s correct, but as I wrote in my book, in a case where it is clear that the reason no longer exists, it can be annulled — and certainly when it causes harm, making Jewish law into a laughingstock. I brought many examples there of enactments that were annulled. Beyond that, the Rif’s view is that there is no such enactment. And if you mean the custom not to rule like the Rif, then that is a custom of halakhic ruling, not an enactment, and there is no obligation to rule that way if one concludes that it is mistaken.

Yes, I meant an enactment. That sounds like a very interesting novelty.

You wrote that they would announce the sanctification of the month by WhatsApp or email.

If sanctifying the month establishes Rosh Hashanah, on which labor is forbidden, how can they use those tools to announce the sanctification of the month?
Does the announcement override Sabbath and the festival?

Obviously. Both because the two come into effect simultaneously, and because of the permission given to the messengers to desecrate the Sabbath. Besides, here we are simply dealing with a rabbinic prohibition.

A few questions. A. Does the sending of the message by the messengers actually sanctify it? Isn’t it rather the declaration in the religious court, or the arrival of the message at its destination? B. Is there an explicit example of permitting an act that itself creates a status that then forbids that very act? On the face of it, this is not similar to things that take effect simultaneously, where the two outcomes join forces, or to the rotating wheel where one is built from the destruction of the other. C. What about the possibility that the religious court says: I intend within the next minute to definitively sanctify the month; they send a WhatsApp message; and then immediately afterward the religious court sanctifies it. The chance that the religious court would reverse itself in such a case is presumably negligible. Would such a message be enough, like “a bite had come up on his back”?

Continuation of C: perhaps the very lack of notification is itself a notification that it was sanctified, because otherwise it would be a weekday and they would have notified by WhatsApp within a second?

I didn’t understand the distinction among enactments whose reason has lapsed. You wrote, “when it is clear that the reason no longer exists,” but that is true of all enactments whose reason has lapsed… So according to Maimonides, when can the enactment be annulled and when not?

I don’t understand how, in the future, the head of the Sanhedrin will be able to notify the Diaspora about the sanctification of the month via WhatsApp.

Do you think the “Rabbinic Committee for Communications Matters” will allow him to have a phone that isn’t kosher?

I hope I’ll be forgiven if I stop the discussion here. This business is starting to look uncomfortably close to Purim Torah.
As for changing enactments, I referred to the relevant sources, and there you can find additional mechanisms.
The Rosh distinguishes between a case where the reason for the enactment is clear and a case where we merely have a good conjecture about it. By the way, that is in the responsa of the Rosh. Tosafot HaRosh on Bava Metzia 90 makes a similar distinction regarding the reason for a verse.

Hello Rabbi Michi. What is preventing you from stopping your observance of the second day of Rosh Hashanah if you think it is nonsense? I’m asking because you’re not someone who’s afraid to follow your truth at the price of conservatism.

A real shame, because I heard from behind the curtain that if the discussion had continued for just one more message, even one more letter, our righteous Messiah would immediately have arrived and the leopard would lie down with the kid. Sadly, the moment was missed, and alas for what is lost.

At the moment, what prevents me is the prevailing custom. I really am conflicted about this. There are laws that I think ought to be changed, but because of their public character it is proper to do so only when there is a reasonable consensus around the change — similar to my claim against Rabbi Druckman regarding conversion. True, one could discuss whether this question is a public one, but it seems to me that anything touching the calendar, and of course also the prayers and the blowing of the shofar, which are done openly, is a public matter. For now, this still requires further consideration.

Thank you, Rabbi Michi. It seems that even you have a conservative soul — it just needs to be uncovered 🙂

A surprising expansion from conversion to “public,” because a decision in conversion really does affect many others in one way or another for generations. My Purim-like heart tells me that “public character” is a pen name for unreasoned public emotion (aside from the famous subterranean sense of smell), and people don’t want to stir up hostility until it jumps the shark.

I’m not so well-versed in the laws relating to sanctifying the month, but how does the religious court notify countries that are east of it about the sanctification of the month?
After all, when the religious court sanctifies the month, some of them are already deep into the night, and it is already too late to notify them.

It’s not only eastward. The notification does not always arrive at the beginning of the relevant time, and the day would apply retroactively. Even when they sanctified the month based on sighting, it became clear retroactively that it had been Rosh Chodesh.

Changing the subject. Is there any scholarly reason, beyond what is written in the Talmud, for the fact that when Rosh Hashanah falls on the Sabbath they do not blow the shofar? It sounds like a code for something else. There is almost no logic to canceling a Torah commandment because of such a concern that maybe someone will carry the shofar four cubits. I thought that perhaps there is some issue here connected to the laws of domains, which, as appears in tractate Shabbat and Eruvin, were the core essence of rabbinic Sabbath observance, and apparently this was a very serious issue — and in order to illustrate how essential the issue of carrying is, the Sages conspicuously canceled the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, which is sensational and, in the eyes of the masses, an actual danger because of nullifying the main instrument for confusing Satan — all in order to publicize to the many the importance of keeping the prohibition on carrying between domains. In this way, this practice is very similar to the commandment to reap the omer publicly and to ask almost provocatively: “Shall I reap?” and they say to him, “Reap, reap, reap.” Has anyone written about this? It’s just a gut feeling. In any case, nowadays, when it is possible to carry by means of an eruv established by the majority in number and importance of Israel (for somehow they nullified all of tractate Shabbat by the unconvincing license that nowadays there is no public domain because 600,000 people don’t walk in the street, etc.), one could seemingly expect that the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah that falls on the Sabbath should be restored. And now that I’ve come to this, perhaps this is the reason they observe Rosh Hashanah for two days — because if they observed only one day, then when it fell on the Sabbath the blowing of the shofar would not apply at all that year. And because of the preciousness of the commandment, they left Rosh Hashanah as two days, even in other years when it falls on a weekday, on the principle of no distinctions — and all, as stated, because of the reason that we refrain from blowing on Rosh Hashanah that falls on the Sabbath. The practical conclusion — though not for actual practice: to return to blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah even when it falls on the Sabbath, and to abolish the second festival day. (I wrote all this in a spirit of dialectical analysis, since I do not agree with canceling Jewish customs according to your approach, for reasons I don’t have the ability to explain here, and there is no point anyway. That was not the question. The question I asked is just for the sake of broadening the matter, though it may also be useful for those who seek to change Jewish law. And regarding WhatsApp in the messianic era: if there is a digital coronavirus that damages the internet network, then it is far from certain that all this technology will remain in the days of the Messiah. As Einstein predicted regarding World War III. He said he did not know what it would look like, but the war that comes after it would already be fought with stones and sticks.)

See my article on Rosh Hashanah that falls on the Sabbath: https://mikyab.net/%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%AA%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%A4%D7%A8

It seems far-fetched to me that this is why they established two days. It also isn’t written anywhere. What I really thought this year was whether one could say that when the first day falls on the Sabbath, the blowing on the second day is Torah-level and not merely rabbinic. I have a bit of dialectical analysis on this that came to me over the holiday and I have not yet put it in writing.

As an aside: we are not talking here about abolishing a custom. This is law, not custom. Law, unlike custom, is a matter for halakhic ruling — meaning right and wrong. For a custom to be abolished, it has to be nonsense; but regarding law, it is enough that in our view it is not correct.