The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Kibitzing on a Worldwide Scale

So it’s almost Hanukkah already. While you’re thinking potato pancakes, Festival of Lights and so forth, those of a more Talmudic bent are wondering: May snowshoes be worn on the Sabbath in order to get to synagogue? Can you combine an interest in Torah with an interest in martial arts? What on earth is the Book of Job getting at? Do we encourage gambling by giving kids dreidels? And where can I find a 9-foot menorah in a hurry?

These are the sorts of thing you can find out by hanging around the Jewish precincts of the Internet, my favorite one of which is the newsgroup soc.culture.jewish, a raucous and learned place where kibitzing is taken to international heights thanks to the global nature of the medium.

The question of snowshoes on the Sabbath, for instance, generated 22 comments on s.c.j., as it is affectionately known, and the other day there was a tongue-in-cheek discussion of “rabbi linens” for kids--you know, sheets with pictures of famous Talmudic scholars on them. “Can you imagine the guilt poor shloime will have the night he goes from pre-pubescent to pubescent?,” one poster wondered.

S.c.j. has its share of wise guys. “Just minutes ago, I was driving home from work,” one somber denizen reported last year. “A cat ran out of the shoulder of the road, right under the front wheel of my truck. I don’t feel culpable, but I felt a brucha [blessing] was in order. Which?”

The answer was unerring: “Why do you want to make a brucha? Was this the first time you didn’t feel guilty about something?”

More recent message threads have dealt with kosher food in New Mexico, Hanukkah and Santa (‘Do you folks allow your kids to visit Santa?’), tefillin (prayer boxes) and vegetarians, Louis Farrakhan and intermarriage. There’s often talk of who’s Jewish; a list of Jews in the National Football League was posted last year. And, of course, the inevitable “Wiener Don’t Know Beans” should alert newcomers that debate on s.c.j is not for the faint-hearted. Name-calling and insults are not infrequent, especially when Middle Eastern politics comes up, and the tone of the place is such that one tends to keep looking around for a rude waiter who never quite appears or notices you.

There is no shortage of hairsplitting questions on Jewish law, but if you want a genuine rabbinical response, you might try the Ask the Rabbi mailing list. Just send your question to newman@jer1.co.il. The list operators have rabbis in Israel standing by, so to speak, and will even try to answer private questions privately. (To subscribe to this list, send the command SUB Chaim Grade to listproc@jer1.co.il. Of course, if you’re not Chaim Grade, use your own name instead.) Previous questions have ranged from euthanasia to whether opening a book with writing on the side of the pages violates the Sabbath taboo against erasing.

Regrettably, s.c.j. has also been the site of some vicious anti-Semitic graffiti, as well as quite a few nutty ravings unrelated to anything much Jewish. (There are also Jewish-related ravings, but these, of course, are at least on topic.) Regular readers of s.c.j. learn to use their newsreaders’ killfile function to block out some of the worst offenders.

As befits the subject matter, there is a massive 11-part FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document) covering everything from conversion to child rearing, as well as a seven-part Judaism reading list.

But s.c.j makes up just a fraction of the Jewish resources available on the Internet, which are so extraordinarily manifold that they are far beyond the scope of this column. Staying just with newsgroups, for instance, there are alt.music.jewish, soc.culture.israel, and soc.genealogy.jewish, where there are some fascinating stories of Jews trying to find distant relatives in family trees devastated by the Holocaust. (Those interested in the topic might also want to visit the JewishGen Web Site at https://www.jewishgen.org/.)

There are also Jewish gopher sites, Jewish shopping online centers and Jewish-oriented mailing lists. Observant Jews can get Jewish calendars, sundown data, Jewish texts and access to Jewish libraries. Hebrew software abounds. Those who follow what happens in Israel can visit the well-designed Internet edition of the English-language Jerusalem Post, at https://www.jpost.co.il/.

That the Net should deal in Jewishness on a large scale shouldn’t be surprising: What better medium for a highly educated worldwide diaspora to share news, information, software, diatribes, jokes, religious items and so forth?

As you might imagine, the World Wide Web offers plenty of Jewish interest. For a really cool menorah, for instance, point your World Wide Web browser at Zachary Oxman’s lovely Festival of Lights, in the White House Collection of American Crafts at https://www.nmaa.si.edu/whc/objectshtml/oxmazobject.html/. Need Hanukkah candles? You can get smokeless, dripless ones at Big Dipper Candles (https://main.street.net/annex/62.html/) in sets of 44 to cover all eight nights.

Probably the single best starting place for matters Jewish on the Internet is Andrew Tannenbaum’s remarkable Judaism and Jewish Resources home page (https://shamash.nysernet.org/trb/judaism.html/). It contains enough links to keep Net surfers going right through to Passover. It also features Tannenbaum’s own J&JR; Scavenger Hunt, which challenges you to answer some Jewish-oriented questions (Where can I get a kosher meal in Montreal? Who writes the divrei torah--weekly Torah commentaries--at Oxford University? In what city do the Abayudaya Jews live?) using only the Internet.

Finding kosher restaurants is the easy part. JewishNet, at https://jewishnet.net/, is a good gateway to a lot of neat stuff, including a global searchable database of kosher restaurants. I turned up 29 in Los Angeles, and pressing my luck, was even able to find kosher Tex-Mex in Paris.

Fans of Yiddish culture won’t want to miss the Virtual Shtetl Yiddish Language and Culture Home Page at https://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/. If your visit makes you hungry, you might want to e-mail deliman@interaccess.com, where Lloyd H. Weston promises next-day delivery of latkes, chocolate Hanukkah gelt, a dreidel and a box of Israeli Hanukkah candles.

As for the burning questions with which we began this column, the consensus on snowshoes was that they’re probably OK, but some people think skis might pose a problem, perhaps because of the need to carry poles. Martial arts and Torah coexist at an outfit in New York called Torah Dojo, where lethal rabbinical scholars evidently gather. I never saw an answer to the dreidels-and-gambling question. The Book of Job resulted in a discussion I can’t summarize here. If you’re a parent, dreidels are the least of your worries.

And as for that 9-foot menorah, head for https://www.armory.com/peterr/menorah.html/where a firm called Alum-in-8 appears to have them. What you’re going to do about candles, I can’t imagine.

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BTW: Last week I suggested that using your credit card on the Internet was OK if you had telnetted to another computer. Well, I was wrong. Frederick B. Cohen, author of “Protection and Security on the Information Superhighway” (Wiley), says telnet is really little better than sending your credit card number by e-mail. Both are susceptible to snoops.

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Daniel Akst welcomes messages at Dan.Akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.caprica.com/~akst/.