For those not familiar, B&H is the preeminent photographic equipment source. They have a huge store in New York City but do most of their business through their web site.
I don’t know if they are Jewish owned but they have a lot of Jewish Orthodox employees, so they close on Jewish holidays and also Shabbat.
Their web site stays operational during these closures but they won’t accept orders. I can understand why they wouldn’t do order fulfillment, but I don’t see why their web site can’t even accept orders since it is totally automated and requires no human intervention. Ovens and fridges have Shabbat mode so they can continue to operate and be used but don’t turn on lights or allow control panels to be used. It seems like a server isn’t much different. For that matter I don’t see why they can’t have gentile employees who fulfill orders on Saturdays.
So what are the rules about working on Shabbat that dictate that their servers can show customers products and pricing, put things in their shopping cart, but not actually order them? How do B&H policies compare to other observant businesses?
Yeah, Jewish law has several categories of tasks that officially constitute “work”, and which are therefore prohibited on the Shabbat. For instance, you can’t make a fire (though you can keep an existing fire burning), which is nowadays generally interpreted to encompass turning on anything electrical (but you can leave something turned on). So leaving the servers that run the website running is OK, though if there was a power outage or something that turned them off, they’d have to wait until after Shabbat to reboot it.
But one of the categories of work is any sort of monetary transaction, even if the other side of the transaction isn’t carried out on the Sabbath. So you can’t place an order, because that would be transferring money.
As one of their regular B2B customers on the West Coast for decades, I remember how annoying and bewildering the proscription used to be. More than once, a third-party seller on Amazon got their business on a Friday afternoon, just because it would be one less thing to do on Monday. But now it is so much a part of their brand, I don’t think I would place an order on a Friday afternoon with them, even if they allowed it. As an online businessperson who often has to work weekends, I envy, and kinda admire anybody who has the stubbornness to draw a line.
My understanding is that a Jew can’t directly ask a gentile to perform work that’s prohibited on the Sabbath. Instead, they’re only allowed to strongly imply that the work needs to be done. (For instance, you can’t say “Please turn on the air conditioner,” but it’s OK to say “Boy, it sure is hot in here…”)
The server is hosted by some company with a server farm that B&H doesn’t operate directly, they don’t care if it runs on Shabbat because they aren’t involved.
Taking your orders isn’t about not using electricity, it’s about not doing business on Shabbat. Even if you went up to someone in person at home or the synagogue and asked “hey, can I buy a camera from you, I have the cash here” they would by Jewish law have to tell you “let’s save business for tomorrow”.
In the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Israel such as Bnei Brak, it’s not uncommon for locals to use privately owned generators so as to avoid relying on the labor of less observant Jewish power plant employees who work on Shabbat. (There’s been a movement to hire more non-Jews to run the power grid so the whole country can have “kosher electricity” seven days a week.)
There used to be several stores similar to B&H Photo that sold cameras and electronics and many were also closed for the Sabbath. I remember Willoughby’s, 47th Street Photo, J&R Music World and others. I think some of the merchandise was gray-market goods and not covered by manufacturers’ warranties,
Or… they can’t say “Bob the Gentile, you’re scheduled for Saturday”, but they can say “Anyone willing to work on Saturday gets time and a half”.
Wouldn’t that have to be primarily accomplished on the Jewish side of things? I’m pretty sure religion is one of those things they can’t ask you about in job interviews, etc.
Is that true in Israel? And even if it was true, the employer could certainly ask if the job applicant is able to take certain shifts, without mentioning religion.
I do tons of business with both B&H and Adorama and often have to work around the Jewish holiday schedule, especially in the early fall, when they close for days at a time.
If I order from B&H on Friday, there is literally a transaction countdown clock until sunset (in NY, I am in CA) and if I’m late, they offer to send me an email reminder on Sunday AM to complete the transaction (ie, I can load up the cart, but not pay). I can’t recall if that also happens at Adorama.
In a past life, I worked for an ISR-based company that made set-top box software, and we invented a function that allowed a user to set channel changes - so they could leave the TV on Friday evening, but program it to tune different shows at different times (eg, movie Friday night on Ch 1, ball game Saturday on Ch 2, etc.), so no one had to violate the rules.
I wish B&H would allow you to submit the orders, but not actually process the credit card or do anything else until after the Sabbath. I’d imagine that you could argue that allowing the orders to be placed isn’t any different conceptually than mail-order orders coming in the mail on Saturday, or someone leaving an order on an answering machine. (maybe they don’t do those either; I don’t know).
I guess it would take a rabbinical decision to allow that, but it sure would be handy.
Asking about a candidate’s religion is indeed illegal under Israel’s Equal Employment Opportunity Law:
An employer shall not discriminate among his employees or among persons seeking employment …because of their…religion…in any of the following: (1) acceptance for employment…
And even if you ask about availability to work certain shifts, that still doesn’t tell you whether the employee is a gentile or a non-Sabbath-observing Jew. (Though the employer could certainly make the educated guess that an applicant named, say, Abdul bin Mohammed is the former and not the latter.)
That would be considered a violation of the commandment to “not place a stumbling block in front of the blind” (i.e., take advantage of another Jew’s unawareness of, or apathy toward, their own obligation to observe halachic law).
Since Sabbath runs from sundown on Friday, I’ve been there in December when the sign on the door said they were closing 3PM for the Sabbath, early sundown and allow employees time to get home before sundown.
The problem is, if you place an order on the website, it begins a transaction. I guess they could be nit-picky (??) as to exactly when such a transaction happens, but the safest way to look at it was any part of the transaction, including placing the order - but not processing payment or packing it - could still be considered “doing business”. In the same vein, isn’t that the essence of contract law, that a contract is made when your offer(website showing items for sale) is accepted, i.e. when someone places an order?
My former boss once mentined that his wife went to pay a neighbour for something they owed her money for, and the lady refused saying “I can’t take money on the Sabbath” even though it was an existing debt. So it does not have to be the full transaction. Or at one location I did tech support for once upon a time, the building manager mentioned about people leaving early on Friday “when it comes to leaving work, everybody is fully observant…”
I do have to say though that I truly respect people like these guys, or even someone I may disagree with generally like the Chik-fil-A guy. Closing your business when it could make a decent amount of money, for religious reasons, certainly convinces me they “put their money where their mouth is”, are sincere in their beliefs.
This is the part I don’t understand. (Well, one of the many parts.) If it’s OK to program what is essentially a computer to tune in your TV shows on your behalf, it must be OK to actually watch TV. It’s just turning on or changing the channel that is prohibited. So how is letting a computer take orders for you a rule violation? It’s the same thing–you are programming a machine for total hands-off operation to do what you would otherwise be prohibited from doing with your own two hands.
Also I found at least twosources that says you’re not supposed to watch TV on Shabbat, period.