Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz

So this became a matter of a lot of discussion in the post.

Rav Moshe happens to say...

That 600,000 people does not mean you need 600,000 people to go down the street.

I should add that an area that has two walls, which all of Manhattan does because there are a lot of buildings on the streets, and those buildings make up walls down each street.

It's definitely more building than open space.

would not be Rosh Hashanah unless it's open on both ends.

And that's where you run into a problem, that it's open on both ends.

So anyway, Rav Moshe says 600,000 people doesn't mean 600,000 people on the street.

It means 600,000 people in the area, 600,000 people that live in the area.

Even in the 1950s or 40s, whenever Moshe wrote this Shuvah, I think it was the 50s, there were millions of people living in Manhattan.

And he said the raya that they don't have to be walking through the street is, we learn the number 600,000 from the Midbar.

In the Midbar, that was how many people it was.

Now, it's true, that's how many men between the age of 20 and 60 it was.

But we learn the halacha based on what is explicit in the Chumash, not based on our models of how many people there must have been using that population as a starting point.

So anyway, this became a major issue.

A lot of people disagreed with Rav Moshe and even published responses to Rav Moshe's

It's Rav Moshe's tshuva.

Rav Moshe wrote a long tshuva.

It's fascinating.

The tshuva is dated Erev Shavuos, and he closes the tshuva by wishing everyone a Chag Sameach, which, like, you know, I don't know what you do in Erev Shavuos, but, like, Rav Moshe is dealing with one of the most complicated suggers in Halacha and writing this long, long tshuva on Erev Shavuos.