Given the digital age, Hanukkah will likely begin tonight with gift-giving that includes cutting-edge technology never dreamed of by Moses and Jewish sages who codified the Torah and the rest of Jewish law.
Such technological advances have spawned a specialty in the art of interpreting "Halakha," the Hebrew word for the laws that govern daily life of observant Jews.
Today's rabbis are being peppered with queries about using the Internet, properly disposing of CD-ROMs containing Scripture, observing e-mail etiquette and the ethics of copying software.
Some Orthodox rabbis have shunned the Internet altogether, banning its presence from homes and its use by children, who might be exposed to the evils of the outside world.
And then there are the hypotheticals posed by the Palm Pilot, the increasingly popular pocket-sized computer.
"You can download huge amounts of Jewish information on a Palm Pilot," said Rabbi Reuven Lauffer, the Web adviser for Jerusalem's Ohr Somayach Institution, a yeshiva for Jews finding their way back to Judaism. "I've seen people praying the afternoon and evening services using a Palm Pilot. They'll learn the Torah portion of the week using a Palm Pilot."
Which prompts the following question to Ohr Somayach's "Ask the Rabbi" Web site (www.ohr. org.il/ask/):
"Can I have a siddur [prayer book] that's loaded into my Palm Pilot and be able to take it into the bathroom without any problems?" asks an anonymous e-mailer. The question is not so far-fetched, since it is forbidden to take sacred texts into the bathroom.
"You can take the Palm Pilot into the bathroom," replied Ohr Somayach's cyber-rabbis, who added "that it would be inappropriate to actually have the text on the screen at the time."
Earlier this year, IsraelNews, an Internet news service, reported that a rabbi in Israel issued a Halakha ruling that dropping a Palm Pilot with "holy" software installed is essentially the same as dropping a siddur. One must therefore pick it up, as with a prayer book, and kiss it.
But such rulings are not unanimous or globally enforceable, and rabbis can disagree. Rabbi Israel Pesach Feinhandler of Jerusalem, who is frequently consulted on Halakha issues, said that since the prayers in a Palm Pilot consist of letters that aren't printed, but are instead representations stored in a memory, holiness is not an issue.
"It's hard to say it has any holiness. I think some of the people saying these things don't realize what's going on inside the Palm Pilot," said Feinhandler, who will soon launch his own advice-dispensing Web site, hellorabbi.org. "It's like a dropped cassette or diskette. No one would imagine a cassette or diskette has holiness. It doesn't make sense."
It may seem strange to apply legal principles dating back some 3,500 years to such 20th-century cutting-edge scenarios. But that, say learned rabbis, is the nature of Jewish law.
"The basic philosophy is a very simple one: that Jewish law has always been dynamic, pragmatically dealing with the realities of time," said Ezra Rosenfeld, executive director of the Zomet Institute, a nonprofit organization about 12 miles south of Jerusalem that seeks to reconcile modern technology with the demands of Halakha. Their inventions include a modified telephone and an electric wheelchair that don't violate the prohibition on creative activity on the Sabbath.
"We've always taken nonchanging principles and reapplied them to changing realities," Rosenfeld said. "That is the only reason that this legal system that is 3,500 years old continues to be relevant and continues to exist. Otherwise, it would have died centuries or millennia ago."
The numbers of questions about Scripture and Halakha reflect how advances, such as CD- ROMs and Web sites, have revolutionized the study of the Torah and other Jewish texts. The gold standard is Bar-Ilan University's Judaic Library, Version 8.0, which contains the Torah, the Talmud (a compilation of oral law) and about 200 other Jewish texts, all on one CD-ROM, which retails at $800. It can replace a whole bookshelf of tomes and, with its hypertext capabilities, facilitates the cross-referencing that is at the heart of Jewish religious study.
"A lot of rabbis who wouldn't dream of having a television, all of a sudden have become technologically adept, because it's in their best interests," said Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg of Beth Tfiloh Congregation in Pikesville. "The disadvantage for an observant Jew is that you can't use it on Saturday. But you can read books."
But it is still the brilliant human rabbinical mind that makes intuitive links between texts that computer cross-referencing would miss.
"That level of intellect, you still need a human being," said Shlomo Porter, director of Etz Chaim Center in Upper Park Heights. "It doesn't surpass the rabbi, but it does help."
