Did Noah's Ark travel on Shabbat? Is wheat still kosher if rat droppings are found in it? An earthquake destroyed a village synagogue - what should the congregants do? What blessing does one make upon seeing an elephant in a dream? Is a man whose wife died in a bus fire allowed to marry her sister? And is a female hospital patient allowed to hear the havdala service, concluding Shabbat, over the telephone?

These are just a few of the 80,000 questions in Bar-Ilan University's Responsa Project (Global Jewish Database), one of the largest computerized databases of Judaic literature. After about 15 years, during which the database was available on CD alone, it has now been launched as a paid subscriber Internet Web site, at www.responsa.co.il.

Responsa throughout the ages

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In the changing day-to-day reality, countless questions arise concerning the fulfillment of Jewish religious precepts in various situations; sometimes halakhic (Jewish legal) texts do not offer specific answers to these questions. Throughout the generations, Jews used to send such questions to well-known rabbis, who often lived far away. Many of these rabbis collected the questions and their answers in responsa books, which themselves became authoritative texts for rabbis of later generations.

Reading the problems and dilemmas that faced the questioners provides a glimpse of the changing world of Jews in various eras and in different parts of the world. This is also one of the ways, in which the Hebrew language was preserved and updated over the generations. Some estimates put the number of responsa books published over the centuries at over 8,000, with hundreds of thousands of rulings - from the responsa of 10th Century Rabbi Hai Gaon of the Yeshiva of Pumpedita in Babylon, to "Yabia Omer," the book of responsa written by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef just a few years ago. Since rabbinical authority is not based on hierarchy, various halakhists have differing opinions and offer varying rulings on each and every subject.

A few decades ago, when data retrieval technology was still in its infancy, a few Judaica researchers in Israel initiated the idea of creating a computerized database of responsa books and other halakhic texts. The project was launched in 1963, under the sponsorship of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and was later moved to Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

The search interface was upgraded as computer technology advanced: In the 1960s and '70s, the program was run on huge mainframe computers, and in the 1980s was available at university computer terminals. In 1992, the database was CD-formatted, and since then has been distributed in updated versions. Now the database contains not only responsa, but also works from the entire expanse of Judaic literature - the Bible, Mishna, Talmud, Zohar, works by medieval Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the Shulkan Aruch Code of Jewish law and more.

Until now the database was sold on CD sets for NIS 2,500, quite a high price. Bar-Ilan's spokesman says that the online version is designed to make the information more readily available. Even so, subscriber fees are not cheap either: NIS 97 for a monthly subscription and NIS 529 for an entire year. Gabi Keinan, CEO of Bar-Ilan's commercial company, stresses the project's information retrieval technology, and the meticulous academic proofreading invested in the project over the years.

Paying the price for answers

The service's subscribers include universities from around the world, as well as rabbinical court judges, rabbinical institutions and civil courts. Private individuals who cannot afford the subscription can avail themselves of the extensive database of Judaic literature offered free of charge on the Internet, even if these are less exacting than the Responsa Project.

The largest free online library is www.hebrewbooks.org, a kind of Jewish Gutenberg project, based in Brooklyn, New York, which offers the downloading of books from its catalog of 11,000 titles. Another project is Daat, which encompasses some 400,000 articles and essays on various Jewish topics (www.daat.ac.il).

In the past few years, the Internet has become a medium that rabbis use to communicate with their communities, mainly in religious Zionist circles. Religious portals such as www.kipa.co.il and www.moreshet.co.il include "Ask the Rabbi" sections, which receive thousands of questions a month. A few rabbis also answer questions via SMS. The anonymity of the Internet has resulted in a particularly high number of questions on matters of modesty, mainly the issues of premarital physical relationships and the "spilling of the seed" - questions that in many cases the questioners would never dream of asking a rabbi face-to-face, or even in writing, whose source can be traced.

Prof. Yehuda Eisenberg, who manages Daat, says the digital medium has recently led to a significant change in the relationship between rabbis and their communities.

"The traditional structure of halakhic literature is an oral dialogue," explains Eisenberg. "For this reason, the Oral Law, too, was not written down for a long time. Today, however, halakhic texts are so available that people can read the text and find the solutions to their questions on their own."

Eisenberg says that not all rabbis are happy with the democratic change produced by the information revolution: "Just as doctors do not like people checking on the Internet and challenging the tests and treatments administered by physicians, rabbis don't like it either. They say that the halakhic texts are sometimes written in an unclear manner and people cannot make rulings for themselves just from reading. Just as the courts would not operate an automatic legal system, based on previous rulings. Human judgment is required to weigh all the considerations."