The Torah mandates (Exodus 25:15) that the staves used to carry the Ark in the Beit Hamikdash never be removed. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch explains that we must not allow the Torah and its mission to become place-bound and stationary. We must be perpetually ready to transport them, to carry them to whatever destination Divine Providence indicates.
I do not mean to equate the sublime mission of Torah with cyberspace. But as more of us find our daily connection (bad pun intended!) to Torah study through the internet, accessing it while away from home is a growing concern. We will examine ways to connect while in the location that most of us hopefully visit more often than any other destination — Eretz Yisrael.
Connecting On The Road
Staying connected while in Israel is easier than you might suppose. You will need a computer and modem, of course, and an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to patch your machine into the net.
The simplest way is to directly dial into your American ISP, straight from your Israeli location. While the cost of this might have been prohibitive a year ago, the precipitous decline in long-distance tariffs to the U.S. now makes this a real possibility. You can call the U.S. from Israel for 20 cents a minute or less.
If you are staying with friends or relatives, you may not require anything more. If this is not the case, and you are looking at running up charges on a much higher-priced American calling card, you will want to consider the possibility of an Israeli ISP.
Better yet, consider an account with an American ISP that has a local dial-up in Israel. You can open an account with such an ISP in addition to whomever provides access to you now, or you can move all your internet activity to a global carrier that will allow you access both at home and abroad.
We will consider two such services here: America Online (AOL; http://www.aol.com/tryaol) and IBM Global (http://ibm.net). Both of them offer reliable service, both throughout the United States and abroad. Both use software packages that make installation and setup easy. For $22, AOL will give you unlimited monthly access, which is a tad more than the $20 or less that some of the smaller competitors take. IBM used to offer the best deal around, by offering a 30-day free trial that included all their global access numbers without additional surcharges abroad. (AOL is famous for throwing their free trials at you wherever you look. Theirs, however, never included foreign service.) This has changed recently, and $20 will now get you only 100 hours a month with IBM, after which you pay a hefty $2 for each additional hour. (This is meant to punish internet road-hogs like yours truly, who leave their computers connected to the net all their waking hours. IBM’s rep told me that they are betting that their stinginess is the wave of the future, as the larger ISP’s simply cannot afford to keep their clients on-line around the clock.)
Connect abroad, and charges start to resemble those of a cellular phone. Since your primary location is New York or Los Angeles or somewhere between, the connection to the local dial-up in Tel Aviv is subject to those familiar “roaming” charges — 10 cents/min. for AOL, and 15 cents for IBM.
Does that make AOL the better buy? Not necessarily. AOL has only one access number in Israel, and it is in Tel Aviv. If you are calling from Jerusalem, you are looking at long-distance charges imposed by the phone company of 20-25 cents a minute during daytime hours. (This goes down to 10 cents per half hour after 10 p.m..) IBM, on the other hand, has five local numbers, including Jerusalem and Haifa. AOL’s access is a stodgy 28K, while some of IBM’s are 56K, which means you need stay connected less of the time with IBM if you have a faster modem, and decrease your bill that way. In calculating your costs with either provider, remember, too, that local calls in Israel are not unlimited, and cost about 10 cents for every five minutes.
AOL is still the undisputed master in roping in novices and making them feel at home on the net. It’s very structured and guided browser takes much of the guesswork out of the net, and most people like it that way. If you are an AOL subscriber already, go to the toolbar, click “keyword,” and then enter “international access.” You will get several screens of information on service, pricing, and local numbers. You can also go directly to http://intlaccess.web.aol.com/.
Looking at global coverage, however, IBM is the hands-down winner, with 1328 POPS in 52 countries, 972 of which are 56K. ISDN is available in 17 countries. By contrast, AOL has only 660 POPS around the world.
Torah For The Unconnected
What if you can do without email while in Israel, but you miss your favorite Torah personalities on the Web? For a pittance, you can take whole Torah tape libraries with you as you travel, through the CD-ROM offerings of 613.org, a Real Audio Torah site on the Web.
We’ve mentioned 613.org before in these pages. It is an address that a host of organizations go to “park” audio and video materials they want broadcast on the net. (While server space for conventional data is relatively inexpensive, you need special apparatus to handle audio-visual data, and not everyone has the funding or expertise. The OU is a fortunate exception, and maintains a huge audio collection at its site, www.ou.org. If your synagogue has good quality material that they want to place on the net, 613.org will often do it, free!)
A happy consequence is that the site’s owner, Rabbi Feivel Smiles, has compiled literally hundreds of hours of tapes. Every now and then, he gathers them on to a CD-ROM which he sells to the public at an extremely low price. Mention this column, and he will send you all three CD’s for $25, or $10 for any one. Schools get them for free! Order on-line at http://www.613.org , or contact him at 607 N. Orange Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90036.
You need the Real Audio software to run the CD. It is available as a free download, and also comes packaged on the third CD (which is also the only one with video shiurim as well.) Once RA is installed, running the CD is a joy. The output of the CD is instantaneous, and free of the frequent “net congestion” messages you get when downloading directly from the Web.
The collection is an incredible potpourri of Jewish life. There are songs, and stories, and lectures, and parenting classes. There are halachah classes, short musar talks, and long shiurim. There are contributions of enduring, as well as of dubious, importance. They feature a rich collection of presenters from across the spectrum of Torah life, from the Novominsker Rebbe to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, from Rabbi Zev Leff to OU President Dr. Mandell I. Ganchrow.
The CDs would be worth the price merely as a snapshot of contemporary Orthodoxy, even if you weren’t going to learn anything from its offerings. But that is extremely unlikely.
Love At First Cite
Several issues ago, I predicted that hypertext would be the wave of the Torah software future.
Big deal. Anyone could have seen that! Outside of the Torah world, everyone was using those blue-hued phrases which instantly transport you to other places, documents, or locations on the Web. They were such a convenience.
The latest upgrade in the unique collection of Torah responsa takes hypertext to the next level. Bar-Ilan’s Responsa Project Version 6.0 (TES, $698 for full product; $99 for upgrade from Version 5) goes beyond convenience, and gives you information you would not have if you were looking at printed text instead.
For instance, if you open Shu”t Chatam Sofer, Orach Chaim #65 you will find a button on the toolbar that is now marked active where it ordinarily was grayed out. Depressing this button will open a window showing you where this responsum is cited elsewhere. Clicking on this hypertexted citation will, as expected, take you directly there.
Bar-Ilan claims 100,000 new hyperlinks in this version! Truth be told, most of them are quite useful, but not as formidable as that of the precious example. Mostly, they link Shas and psukim, psukim with midrashim, and Yoreh Deah with the Shach. Only a small number of responsa works are linked to a limited number of other works. But the work has begun, and it is impressive. And it shows, once again, the commitment of the Bar-Ilan people to excellence.
This commitment manifests itself in many ways. A new interface makes navigating and searching easier, more responsive, and more esthetically attractive than ever. Twenty-seven new volumes have been added to their already enormous database. The addition of Shach on Yoreh Deah shows that they intend to make a serious effort not only in the area of responsa, but to address the whole arena of halachic literature.
Actually, they are attempting much more. I had earlier written that BI seemed content to corner the halachah market. No longer. Clearly, they are also sneaking up on the competitors by adding more of the non-halachic sources, in an effort to make BI an all-purpose, general Torah database, which will obviate the need to buy any other.
It has a while to go to meet that goal. The competition still has strengths in areas of machshavah [Jewish thought and philosophy] that BI doesn’t touch.
But this is no reason to dampen your enthusiasm. BI is a sheer delight to use, and TES has proven itself friendly to the consumer with a liberal upgrade policy. It will set you back only $99 to upgrade from Version 5. There is no reason to wait for future upgrades. The modest price of the upgrade makes it worthwhile to buy early and pay the difference later.
One word of warning. At least to my test, there is a serious bug in this release. Cutting and pasting text from BI to Dagesh just doesn’t work. The text arrives backwards. Both of these products are distributed by TES, and the problem has been brought to their attention. (Problems like this are fairly common in the first release of a new version of many software products.) It is inconceivable that they will not develop a fix for this soon, probably before this column appears in print. But check before you buy. Nothing should mar the user’s enjoyment of this wonderful product.