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From: wkp@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish
Subject: Re: When is the Sabbath?--or--the TOTAL prayer experience: CONSTANTLY!
Message-ID: <21390@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 10-Feb-85 11:32:45 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.21390
Posted: Sun Feb 10 11:32:45 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Feb-85 07:56:35 EST
References: <310@mhuxm.UUCP>
Sender: newsreader@lanl.ARPA
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 45

In article <310@mhuxm.UUCP> J. Abeles writes:

> If a person were to keep local time in space, a day (where the term day
> means the period of time from one sunrise or sunset to another) could
> be shorter than 3 minutes.
> 
> The point is that in such a situation, Eliyahu Teitz would have an orthodox
> Jew daven shachris, mincha, and maariv in well under 5 minutes.  What happens
> to kavannah (intention to pray;i.e., concentration) under these circumstances?
> 
> Or maybe halacha (only according to the Teitz point of view, of course)
> actually forbids space travel for Jews altogether!


There is an even more ludicrous scenario if the spaceship is moving with a   
velocity of 0.999993 the speed of light.  In that case, in the reference
frame of the spaceship, clocks in Israel are moving very fast:  in fact,
fast enough such that a day aboard the spaceship would see Israel
celebrate an entire year of Jewish holidays.

Since one is obligated to celebrate the Haggim according to the
time in Israel, not only would our busy Yeshiva bocher astronaut be
davening like mad because sunrise-to-sunset is only three minutes,
but he would have to keep track of moosaf, ya'aleh v'yavoh, hallel,
moreed ha'tal, etc., etc., on a daily basis!

In other words, every day aboard the spaceship, our astronaut
would be celebrating Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipppur!  What's worse
is that every day he would have to search for Chametz, and change
tableware, and throw all his bread out the vacuum chute!  Imagine 
lighting eight different sets of Cahnukah candles in a time span
of half-an-hour!

Now imagine the even crazier situation in which the spaceship moves even   
faster! In this way, we would have solved the problem of conversion (at
least in space) since no one would want to be Jewish anyway.

---

bill peter                         {ihnp4,seismo}!cmcl2!lanl!wkp

"Ben Azzai said, 'Do not be scornful of any person and do not be
 disdainful of anything, for there is no person without his hour
 and no thing without its place.'"
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