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From: sher@rochester.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish
Subject: Re: Re: moderated halachic mailing list (In defense of)
Message-ID: <16323@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Mar-86 21:20:17 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.16323
Posted: Tue Mar 18 21:20:17 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Mar-86 23:04:47 EST
References: <1696@mtgzz.UUCP> <660@moscom.UUCP> <2318@aecom.UUCP>
Reply-To: sher@rochester.UUCP (David Sher)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 59

<I've lost the name of the original poster sorry!>
> 
> So, there are people who have questions that they would like to discuss,
> but they are afraid of being ridiculed?  I do not think that any of hte
> discussions that I have seen in more that 2.5 years on this net qualify
> to be called ridicule.  There have been some very heated debates that
> touched on sensitive issues, but beside the jabs over Sphard/Ashkenaz
> traditions, none that I would call ridicule.
> 
> But, you have chosen to abandon the open net, and go into your moderated
> super-frum ghetto, where you, the great Sage of our time, will decide
> which article shall live and which article shall die.  You will also
> abandon those Jews who do not subscribe to your theories of Judaism
> and those who are using this net to increase their knowledge of Judaism.
> 

I am not sure why the suggestion of a moderated mailing list should
provoke such a strong response, who does it threaten?  It was not my
suggestion but I suggested something similar some time back.  There are
good reasons why a jewish mailing list would make sense independent of
religious controversy.  Some that occur to me are:

Many sites that do not receive news can recieve mail.  My site has
already cut off many nonessential groups and is expiring several
others immediately.  It is something of a struggle to get 
net.religion.jewish described as essential.  If this place was larger
or had no Jewish faculty I might have been cut off.

And talking about that, their are Jews who might not want to advertize
their jewishness due to possibilities of persecution.  Posting to
net.religion.jewish is considerably more public than mailing to a
mailing list.  Admittedly if someone was really interested in finding
out who read a mailing list they probably could get it.  There aint no
perfect security.

Finally their are people who find any public forum intimidating. Of
course people who regularly post don't!  But people have come to me
(in the mistaken belief that I knew something) who would not be
willing to broadcast their ignorance on some issue.  

Now my credentials:
I am a nonobservant Jewish son of nonobservant conservative Jewish
parents.  I have had the standard conservative Jewish training so I
know the rules of kashrut and most of the simpler rules.  I have been
on the net from before the existence of net.religion.  It was my
original message that helped create the controversy that caused the net to
acquire net.religion and net.politics and so on.  Before net.misc used
to do that stuff.  I know something thus about how the net works.
(Not everything though by any means).

-David Sher
sher@rochester
seismo!rochester!sher

Ps: Keep those D'varim Torah (did I get that right?) coming! They're great!
-- 
-David Sher
sher@rochester
seismo!rochester!sher