Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Its curious that with the all day additions and removals it still doesn't correct more accurately to the drift. 1 day for 217 years might not be huge, but still feels significant, especially when considering that the julian calendars 1 day per 128 years was deemed unacceptable already back in 16th century. Although I suppose correcting might be tricky without compromising on the lunar cycle accuracy?

View on HN

There is no Sanhedrin, the only body that could correct this without a schism. As for making the correction a slight mucking about with the molead rules could do it.

There is also the internet. Maybe everybody agrees and there is no objection to a correction?

It could be as easy as creating a Mastodon instance to find out.

Pan-Jewish changes to Halakha (orthodox law) are still theoretically possible. The last significant such occurrence was the ban on polygamy in Judaism about a millennium ago. It's just a question of how many rabbis, across how many streams of Judaism, would need to reach a consensus, in order for it to be reasonable to consider an amendment as "widely accepted".

In terms of changing the calendar rules, I doubt that there would be any chance of pan-Jewish consensus for quite a few more millennia, that is, not until the dates of major festivals get significantly more out of whack than they are now.

hey, some (major) rabbis believe that sabbath in japan should be on sunday. (and others believe that in western alaskan islands, it be friday, i.e. if there's a concept of a "date line" in halacha, than the area between the international date line and the halacha date line would be offset by a day depending on which side it is).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com