Question on Jewish Law?

[Falcon]

Okay, I have a question. (And I hope this is in the right forum.) I was talking to a Jewish friend tonight, and she said that Jews aren't allowed to use umbrellas on the Sabbath. Is this true? And if so, why?

(FTR - I'm not slamming anyone. I'm just genuinely curious about this - it seems a little....odd.)


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"You have to laugh at yourself, because you'd cry your eyes out if you didn't."
-Emily Saliers

[MrKnowItAll]

ROFL!

Falcon, I don't know if she was pulling your leg or not, but that may be the funniest thing I've read tonight!

[Falcon]

I agree it's hilarious, but she was dead serious. And got annoyed when I questioned her. She's been known to go to extremes in the past, so I thought I'd ask the Teeming Millions for some confirmation. (cmkeller, you around anywhere?)

[mr john]

It is true. for very orthodox very conservative sects. they can not open an umbrella. Don't no about use. Some get around a prohibition of igniting fireson Sabat by having a gentile turn on lights. Hassid? hassidm? A source for one of the things i know nothing about [urlhttp://www.ohr.org.il/[/url] but you know what is really funny? Jews can't eat bats! Now that is hilarious.

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"Pardon me while I have a strange interlude."-Marx

[mr john]

AH,bats I mean RATS! http://www.ohr.org.il/ ask for 'ask a rabbi' nice guy ,I helped him with cleaning a smelly shofur once. ( Yeh,yeh ok, drove the limo through the carwash with the windows down , just in case nick or dex come by!)

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"Pardon me while I have a strange interlude."-Marx

[Alphagene]

Until, someone more knowledgeable about Judaism than I gives an definitive answer, I can provide this link.

http://www.jewfaq.org/shabbat.htm

Regarding "work" on Shabbat:
The Torah prohibits melachah...
Melachah generally refers to the kind of work that is creative, or that exercises control or dominion over your environment.

A list of 39 categories of forbidden acts is listed as well.

[C K Dexter Haven]

I'm gonna simplify enormously, because otherwise this would be way more than anyone cares about.

For traditional Jews, there are 39 forbidden activities on the Sabbath. One of this is carrying or moving stuff outside of the house (or fenced yard.) Thus, it would not be permitted to carry the umbrella outside. There'd be no problem with using the umbrella (as far as I know) in your fenced-in back yard, for instance, since the fenced-in yard is considered part of the house.

That would be my guess as to what your friend is talking about.

[Falcon]

CK -

That was one objection. She was also saying something about an umbrella being a tent, and you couldn't set up a tent on the Sabbath. Is that true as well?

[TubaDiva]

I was friends with a couple from nonobservant families . . . they became observant after their marriage.

They wouldn't even answer the phone on the Sabbath. . . walked to the synagogue because they couldn't drive . . . ate a cold meal because they couldn't cook. Last I heard they were renovating their house so it had two kitchens.

At Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, elevators are programmed for the Sabbath and they automatically stop at every floor; apparently the Orthodox cannot push an elevator button.

On the other hand, I know people that keep a kosher home . . . so that means they eat their cheeseburgers off of paper plates.

your humble TubaDiva
Work, schmerk, can I get a doctor here?

[Annat846]

So far as I know the rules about umbrella, strollers and wheen chairs are indicated by how the "community home" has been marked. In Cities with a large Jewish community groups will try tp mark several points, do not recall how many are required.

[Annat846]

There is an expresson that describes the above but do not recall it, believe is re-newed a few weeks before RH-New Year.

[JoltSucker]

TubaDiva, if they're observant, they won't be eating _cheeseburgers_ on their paper plates. That violates the commandment about mixing meat and dairy. When you see the marking "Pareve" on kosher food, that means it is neither mear nor dairy, so you can eat it with either one. Really observant families have separate dishes for meat and dairy, and if you go to the butcher's area in a kosher grocery store, you'll see separate slicers and cutting boards for the two, with a Pareve area between the two.

[Monty]

Okay, someone mentioned that some strict observers of the Sabbath "get around" the prhobition against performing work on the Sabbath by having a Gentile do this. What I'm wondering is, isn't that also prohibited? Doesn't the commandment prohibit "you or any in your household or your servant?"

[MrKnowItAll]

JoltSucker, I think the 'Diva was kidding.

[C K Dexter Haven]

On an umbrella as a tent: I never heard that, seems a stretch to me, but one never knows. Some interpretations become rather stretched, as rulings from about 100 BC thru 200 AD get applied to modern circumstances. I'll try to ask around and see what I learn.

On cheeseburgers: There is a wide range of practice, and there is the theoretical teaching of the branch (or sect) compared to individual practice. I know of many conservative Jews who keep a kosher home but eat non-kosher out of the house, or on paper plates. My in-laws, in fact, behave this way. I don't quite understand it, it seems pretty silly to me, but what the heck.

Someone who was truly orthodox would not eat the mixture of meat and milk/cheese at all.

On the other hand, it is nowadays possible to have a cheeseburger made from soy and non-dairy cheese, that would have neither meat nor milk in it, so the lines can be blurry.

On the use of a non-Jew to do work prohibited to Jews: I never looked into this, but my guess would be that the prohibition applies to Jewish servants and household members. A paid (salaried) non-Jewish employee would not fit that category.

I once asked a very Jewish friend if she could set her VCR on Thursday to record a show being broadcast on her Sabbath. She got very upset trying to figure it out and went to her Rabbi, who also got very confused and finally ruled that they can have a non-Jew set it for them, but could not set something themselves which would begin to "work" on the Sabbath.

. . . And people wonder why I'm an atheist.

[cmkeller]

cmkeller, you around anywhere?

Sure am...between Monday and Friday. What, you think I do this on my own time with a 28.8 modem? No, here, I've got a T-1 and I'm being paid for it!

As for the umbrella question: It is forbidden, for the tent reason. My understanding is that when you place something over your head as protection (not counting clothes, which are a different category of object), this is considered in the category of "building", which is one of the 39 forbidden categories.

Cheeseburgers: A Jew who keeps kosher will not eat a cheeseburger. I once heard a great line about someone who keeps kosher in the home but not when dining out...the rabbi told them that their dishes will go to heaven.

Use of a non-Jew to do work on Shabbos: A Jew cannot explicitly ask a non-Jew to do for him anything that he (the Jew) wouldn't be allowed to do for himself. However, the Jew could "hint" at it, and if the non-Jew does it, it's fine. For example:

WRONG: Christopher, could you please turn on the light?

RIGHT: Boy, it's dark in here, isn't it?

Sounds flimsy, but there is a difference in Jewish law between doing something "actively" and having it done "passively".

As for using a VCR timer: I'm unsure of the details of the VCR. I do know that most Orthodox Jews (myself included) use timers to turn lights on and off on Shabbos. My best guess is that she was using some sort of "VCR-Plus" service which would amount (according to Jewish law, as that Rabbi sees it) to her explicitly asking the company to record for her on Shabbos. But I really couldn't say without greater knowledge of the details of the case.

The word for that "community home" is Eruv.

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Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@schicktech.com

"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks."
-- Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

[Keeves]

Thanks, Chaim. The only thing I can add concerns the VCR. I don't think VCR-Plus is involved, because everything is pre-set, and no human actually would be doing any action on the Sabbath. Even if one would want to record some kind of pey-per-view event, I suspect that it is all entered into the computer beforehand, and no human would be doing any act on the Sabbath on behalf of any particular individual.

I have heard some rabbis allow setting a VCR because, like timers to turn the lights on and off, everything is done in advance. I have heard other rabbis forbid it because one might adjust the controls on the Sabbath if one realizes that he programed it for the wrong channel or time or whatever. My own rabbi okays it, provided the VCR is covered in such a way that he will not be aware of whether or not it is taping correctly, and so will not come to the temptation to adjust it.

OK, I just have to ask: WHY????

What is the biblical reasoning behind not being able to set your VCR or turn on a light on the Sabbath? Yes, I admit I am totally ignorant of most religious law, so please explain to me why a god would punish you for turning on a light!

[pluto]

please explain to me why a god would punish you for turning on a light!

The sin involved is not turning the light on or off -- it is in obeying or disobeying God. In many religions there are actions which are probably harmless, in and of themselves, but proscribed. The devout follower is probably well aware
that they are not spiritually significant except that they have been set apart, somehow, by God.

In a biblical story, King Saul was commanded to kill all the livestock from a captured city but he didn't. When Samuel chastised him, Saul said he was going to sacrifice them to God. Samuel's reply was that "obedience is better than sacrifice".


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"non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem"

[cmkeller]

corvidae -

As you correctly explained, using electricity is considered a type of fire, which is one of the forbidden categories. It might also be considered building (completing the circuit), but there's some disagreement, as I understand it.

However, the melachos are not based on the first Bais HaMikdash, but rather, on the Mishkan (the temporary temple the Jews built and used in the desert, until the first Holy Temple was built by Solomon).

Chaim Mattis Keller

[corvidae]

Oops! My mistake- thanks for setting me straight, Chaim!

Unrelated but related: How did yarmulke's stay put before bobby pins? How do they stay put on bald headed men? Why does the Pope wear one?

[cmkeller]

Don't know about the Pope, but I wear my own Yarmulke without a bobby pin. I hate those things. Sometimes the wind blows it off, but usually it's no problem, since it's so snug on my head.

Also, I think in pre-20th-century Europe, yarmulkes used to be much larger and would have stayed on the head like hats, by actually surrounding the crown of the head.

Chaim Mattis Keller

[Lumpy]

Isaac Asimov should have written a story about robot servants and Jewish law. That've been a hoot.

[JoltSucker]

I don't use bobby pins, <bold>Velcro</bold> is the thing for me. I happened to be going through Home Depot a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah, spied little self-adhesive Velcro dots, and immediately know I had the solution to my problem. Now, I could do handstands in synagogue if I wanted to...

[mr john]

I got it, ms Diva. It's a toss up whether it is more fun for me to read Rabbis or Jesuits debate. The Jezzies are realy great at using the same logic to dispute each other, but the Rabbi's really get into minutia. I have an old book somewhere titled 'The Commandments"(or similar) if memory serves there are 400+ detailed in the book. Dex and Anna, re.the fence and the community home. There was a great debate here in Dallas concerning those boundaries. There is an area of town with a lot of Orthodox, they proposed that the power and telephone lines constituted a fence. BTW, the Ghetto was not originally a place to confine the lesser beings , it was a walled in area, a community home. It just so happened that made it more convenient for the master races. Some of my friends turn the lights on before sabat, turning them off is not prohibited, unless some one argues that flipping the switch creates a spark, is creating a spark the same as igniting a fire? How long does it have to last before it is a fire? Is the spark, inherent,integral,incedental, accidental? Lots a fun.
As to servants there are different categories of servants , the laws apply to gentiles working under you direction. The 'hint' analogy was good, hire a farm hand,'Oh I can't tell you to do this work on the sabbath, but it does need doing.' There are some specific rules about servants,such as how long you can keep a 'servant' in your 'service', (read 'slave'),jewish servants have to be released in seven years, (don't remember if it 7 from date of service or at jubilee) the gentiles are broken into classes there are some 'races' that never have to be released. In this country some classified negros as one of those, others would 'release' their 'servants' to another master who in turn 'released' some to you. A lot of semitic samantics. Read some of the Rabbis on some of the 'piddly' things, there is no such thing as 'piddly'

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"Pardon me while I have a strange interlude."-Marx

[corvidae]

Flora,

The deal with lights and simple thing on the sabbath - and I think someone mentioned this before- is that there are a number of actions that are considered "work" on the sabbath. There are 39 categories of work, which correspond to 39 types of work (avot melachot) done when the Jews were building the first temple (bais hamikdash). Things like turning on lights (or completing some kind of circuit) are an extension of a prohibition of building a fire. Hope that helps!

corvidae

[corvidae]

JoltSucker,

Ok, I'm going to play dumb here. Are you being serious about the velcro? My friends used to joke about it- we always figured that the trick was making the kipot big enough, so suction would keep them on your head.

corvidae

[Keeves]

Just to help those who can't figure out this idea of 39 categories etc...

There is a verse in the Torah (sorry I don't have the exact chapter and verse available) where God is speaking to Moses and the people in the wilderness, giving them instructions on how to build the tabernacle, and the verse says quite plainly, "Build the tabernacle, but keep the Sabbath." From this verse, it is understod that all work on the tabernacle must stop when the Sabbath arrives, and therefore anything involved in building it constitutes "work" as regards the Sabbath laws.

The rabbis analyzed the steps involved in building the tabernacle, and developed 39 broad categories, and many sub-categories and other details. For example, the curtains of the tabernacle needed to be dyed specific colors, and this is the source for many of the 39 broad categories: the ground must be plowed, seeds planted, plants harvested, seeds extracted, dye pulverized, sheep shorn, wool combed, threads twisted, fabric weaved, fire lit, dyes cooked, fabric dyed, curtains sewn. This list includes many activities rarely done by today's city-dwellers, but also two of the most common: cooking and lighting fires.

It is almost universally accepted that operating electrical devices is forbidden on the Sabbath, although the exact reasons are debated somewhat. The most commonly accepted opinions say that incandescent lighting consitutes fire, as do the minor sparks which often appear in switches. Those who think that modern switches do not have sparks are invited to check out the gas stations in NJ which now have signs telling you to turn off your cell phone, to prevent explosions. (I thought there was a SD column about this, but now I can't find it.) Other electrical devices are similarly forbidden.

[JoltSucker]

corvidae, I'm not kidding. There are about a dozen 1/2 inch circles of the velcro hook stuff on the underside of my kipot. My hair is wiry enough that if I grind it on, the hooks latch on.

The motivation came from my first year of singing (baritone) at High Holy Days. I'm grew up Presbyterian (it's a long story...), and so my first exposure to High Holy Days was <BOLD>up on the bima</BOLD>. I was sitting up on the end of a platform that dropped off more than a foot, on a wire frame chair. My kipot fell off at one point and landed between my chair and the next. When I reached down to get it, I didn't notice it, but my arm pushed my chair over, ever so slightly. When I sat down, my chair and I went over the edge of the platform in front of 1200+ people. Soooo, I was real interested in finding a way to make the thing STICK the next year. Of course, that was a helluva way to get over being self-conscious.

[cmkeller]

John W. Kennedy:

You're right that a Jew cannot have a non-Jew do something for him on Shabbos. However, there are technicalities that allow it to occur (one of which I mentioned above) that have made the "Shabbos Goy" a halachic institution.

Chaim Mattis Keller

[C K Dexter Haven]

For those who might be confused by all this... (And please note, I am greatly simplifying in this explanation.)

Jewish law was originally set down in the Bible (Old Testament), not only as a code of moral and ritual behaviour, but as the law of the land. Much later, Christianity distinguished between ritual law (which they discarded) and moral law (which they mostly retained), and most moderns similarly differentiate; but the Old Testament itself does not separate moral rules from ritual rules from legal law-of-the-land.

If the moral laws are also viewed as legal laws (so to speak), then a law such as "Thou shalt not murder" is not sufficient. What about self-defence? What about during war? What about accident? etc. So the rabbis (essentially from 100 BC to about 200 AD) set forth the details of each law, based upon the oral traditions.

Thus, a law such as "Do no work on the sabbath day" needs much interpretation and regulation, starting with, what exactly is "work"? The rabbis set out the 39 prohibited acts, as described in detail by cmkeller and Keeves et al... and that has stood as the traditional definition of work.

For modernists (that is, Reform Jews and left-wing Conservative Jews), as for most modern Christians, "not working" on the sabbath is interpreted loosely, if at all. Modernists put emphasis on the moral underpining rather than the legalistic structure.

However, for traditional Jews (Orthodox and right-wing Conservative), these rules (including their interpretations) are not simply broad moral guidelines, but specific LAWS. The detail is therefore very important. Legal laws don't simply say "Stop at the stop signs," they have to indicate how many feet before the stop sign? what does a full stop mean? What happens if someone doesn't stop at the stop sign? and so forth.

Similarly for traditional Jewish laws. Interpretations and regulations are needed to handle the details of the law.

Once the rules were set down, they were pretty much immutable for traditional Jews. Later rabbis had to interpret modern inventions (like electric timers and umbrellas) in the light of the prior interpretations. The tendency was usually to be conservative in interpretation; it's safer to forbid something that might be permitted (in God's eyes) than to permit something that might be forbidden (in God's eyes.)

So, that's why the question of whether an umbrella is a "tent" is important to traditional/observant Jews... and is not important to nontraditional/nonobservant Jews.

[torq]

My understanding is that when you place something over your head as protection (not counting clothes, which are a different category of object), this is considered in the category of "building"

I've got this mental picture of a group of guys in black clothes with long grey beards walking around wearing those umbrella-hat things because they count as "clothing" and not as a "building".

[Monty]

All this talk about permitted and prohibited work has me wondering about something else.

In Israel today, some "ultra-orthodox" folks stone ambulances on the Sabbath. Actually this raises two questions for me:

(1) An ambulance is in the business of helping to save a human life. So what would these same folks who are stoning the ambulance do if one of their livestock had fallen in a well, say?

(2) Isn't stoning also considered a type of work?

[John W. Kennedy]

By the way, this Shabbas-goy business, however popular in legend and (for all I know) practice, is absolutely wrong in Jewish law. A Jew is allowed to take advantage of something that a Gentile did for his own reasons (the classic example is getting off a ship via a gangplank that a Gentile set up and used himself), but is not allowed to ask a Gentile to do work on the Sabbath that a Jew is not allowed to do for himself.

On another subject, one reason that some Jewish laws are iffy in the modern world is that there hasn't been a universally-accepted Jewish authority to make new rulings for many hundreds of years. Lesser authorities, therefore, tend to rule conservatively.

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John W. Kennedy
"Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays."
-- Charles Williams

[RickG]

I have seen velcro sold in packages specifically marketed for the purpose discussed in this thread. The brand name is, IIRC, Kip-ons (Pronounced 'keep ons').

Rick

[Keeves]

Monty, the Torah says "These are the laws that you will follow and live by them" -- and the rabbis teach "Live by them, and don't die by them." Saving human life overrides virtually all other laws. It is very unfortunate that every group has nutcases that the media like to pounce on, and the orthdox are no exception.