So I expect there will massive numbers of articles expressing sympathy for the deaths, but none questioning this idiotic tradition.
I thought this was going to be about circumcision.
Don’t really see a connection between jewish religious practices and hot warming plates. I doubt if they are the sole or even major customers for electric hot plates. Could have happened to anyone.
A horrible and sad event.
Most people I know use crock pots or leave a burner on on the stove, or the over on. Hot plate are notorious for short-circuiting. The only people I know who use them are single people who use them anyway, and on Shabbes put timers on them. Hot plates are not tradition, and not turning on appliances on Shabbes is more than “tradition,” it’s law. However, I do agree that the insistence that you have hot food on Shabbes is a little silly, especially in the summer. Personally, I ignore that in favor of cold plates (or, I did back before I had a child, and we were a lot more observant), except when we had guests.
There are always outs for safety, though. Because we have cats, I never went to shul and left Shabbes candles burning, and there is a Talmud verse I could twist on its ear to get that it was OK to do this.
I don’t see it. Lots of us have automatic coffee pots, for instance, that turn themselves on and make coffee for us, so we’ll have our cuppa in the a.m. Sometimes these become defective and fires can start.
Some of us, in very hot weather, leave a fan running. The motor could short out and start a fire.
It seems pointless to single out the Jews for hatred and name-calling, when the unattended use of electrical appliances is very commonplace among the gentile population.
I’ve had my own exchange of opinion with the Ultra-Orthodox, when, in my neighborhood, on the Sabbath, certain of them used to cross the street without waiting for the “walk” signal – with very small children tagging along. Adults endangering themselves is bad enough, but endangering children is not tolerable.
But I wrote to the synagogue, had a friendly dialogue with the congregation, and worked out a compromise. The City of San Diego participated, installing automatic timers on the crosswalk signals.
Name-calling, 0; actual solution to a problem, 1.
The stupid tradition here is that the hot plate was turned on before sundown on Friday and intended to be kept running into the following Saturday, all to avoid turning on an electrical device on the Sabbath. It’s not the religious practice that is stupid, it’s leaving a hot plate on unattended that is stupid.
It’s pretty foolish to leave a hot plate on while you sleep. There are much safer ways of keeping unattended food hot. I blame this disaster on the stupidity of the woman in trying to comply with this religious law, rather than the law itself. She could have used a crock pot, or the sabbath feature of her oven (if she had one with this feature), or she could have made something that could be eaten cold. There’s nothing in Sabbath law that requires one to do something stupid in order to comply with it.
It’s a terrible tragedy and I don’t think it can be blamed on the tradition, which doesn’t force people to make idiotic decisions like this.
This could have been a standing heater that shorted out instead of a hotplate. There are plenty of people who don’t have heat and so they use space/electric heaters, and unfortunately those can catch fire as well.
Tyldesley man dies in electric heater fire
In the first week of February, seven deaths to fires apparently caused by space heater misuse
Nine dead including eight children in KY house fire
Three children killed in trailer fire
I know people need space heaters to survive. But it’s the same basic problem: massively hot electric shit shouldn’t be left on while you’re not awake/alert.
I don’t know what the solution is for the religious folks, except if you’re not going to be home, then suck it up and eat cold/room temperature food. It’s only one day a week, for God’s sake. Make pot roast the day before and have cold pot roast sandwiches–they’re better the next day anyway! I’m Jewish and though I’m not observant, my grandmother who lived with us was. She managed to eat when we weren’t around on the Sabbath, and she didn’t use a hotplate to do it.
Coincidentally, the woman who used to live in the apartment directly below me was an observant Jewish woman. One Friday before sundown, she apparently put a chicken in the oven to roast, then went out to temple. I don’t know if this was some super-long service or what, but at around 9pm, when she was still out, a fire somehow began–I think, IIRC, it was due to the chicken fat causing a fire, which spread to a dishtowel and thence to the wooden counters in the kitchen.
I was ordered to stay put by the firemen, although eventually they gave me the okay to get the hell out of there because the smoke was filling my apartment much to the detriment of me and my cats. (I dragged all three cats with me down nine flights, hooray.)
Anyway, basically her entire kitchen and most of the apartment were ruined by fire, smoke, water, and the windows that were opened in a rainstorm to let in some air.
My apartment was also damaged by the smoke and the requirement of the firemen to break through the wall of my kitchen to see whether the fire had spread through the walls. Luckily no one was hurt in my case (although the woman was evicted as a side effect… much to my happiness because she was a lunatic anyway).
Point of this story is, it’s the same Jewish law that indirectly led to my apartment fire as well as last night’s tragedy. But what really caused it was someone being fucking stupid and careless. Sadly in the Brooklyn incident, this woman’s mistake has been punished, extraordinarily harshly.
I live nearby; I could smell the smoke last night. A terrible tragedy.
A lot of people in the neighborhood still use a shabbos goy (a non Jewish neighbor or friend who will light the oven for them, etc.) to avoid this kind of danger. I didn’t think hot plates were still used, with all the other options available.
But the most incomprehensible thing was not having any working smoke detectors in the house (except for the basement, if the reports are correct).
What makes these deaths even more stupid is that she wasn’t even doing it to comply with Jewish tradition, but to make a mockery of it. Her children are dead purely because she tried to weasel her way around the prohibition against melakhah instead of either following it or ignoring it entirely.
It’s like if a Muslim choked to death on a ham sandwich because he thought it didn’t count if he didn’t chew.
It’s the first time I’ve heard the programmable feature in some ovens called “the Sabbath feature”. Heh 
.
Every year in Spain we still get some deaths from people using coal braziers (usually from CO poisoning). As they get replaced by electric heaters (I’ve even seen models which copy the size and shape of the old braziers as closely as possible) and due to people’s problems understanding “don’t pull on the cable”, we’re now starting to get deaths from fires caused by short-circuiting braziers :smack: Wanting to be warm isn’t stupid, but people manage to find some very stupid ways of being warm.
I would simply title this “Stupidity leads to death.” Or perhaps “Mechanical malfunction kills people.” I fail to see where Jewishness has anything to do with it.
some devices are designed to be left on for long duration, some are not.
there can be safety problems when you abuse a device.
Electrical malfunction and not enough attention to safety procedures were the causes of this tragedy, not Jewish law.
Incidentally, those are the same things that cause terrible Christmas tree fires.
Good point. My guess is that Christmas trees kill way more people in real numbers and per capita than Orthodox Jews and hot plates. And way more people who celebrate Christmas use tree lights per capita than Orthodox Jews use unattended hot plates.
The PastTense is a massive fucking idiot.
Reminds me of the woman of a certain ethnicity who lived below us years ago. She returned from a trip to the States, and decided to fry up some chicken. She put it on the stove and then jet lag took over and she fell asleep on the couch, like those lazy fuckers always do. I nearly had to kick her door in before she woke up and put the fire out before it killed us all. Fucking WASPs.
** Idiotic Orthodox Jewish Tradition Leads to Death of Seven Children
**So it is idiotic to not have open flames in the house? It’s too bad the hot plate caused a fire, but I don’t think I can call the idea idiotic. I don’t know anything about Jewish religious beliefs, but if there is no open flame, does that include the furnace’s pilot light?
Holy shit, what is with the fucking white knighting of religious stupidity around here? If some obscure stupid Christian rule lead to people getting killed, we’d all be mocking it. But because it’s a Jewish religious stupidity, oh then it has nothing to do with religion at all, how dare you.
This is clearly the result of religious stupidity. The entire reason the limitation and the culture deciding creative ways of bending the rules is okay is based in Jewish religious and cultural traditions.
Hardcore Jews do all sorts of ridiculous shit. They tie strings around houses and and neighborhoods so that they can do things around their neighborhood that are technically only allowed in their own homes - but if a string connects them, then it’s one continuous structure and therefore it’s okay to go to your neighbor’s house and do it. Not only is the initial religious rule stupid in this case, but people’s absurd gaming-the-system cheat is a childish response to it on top of that.
They can pay other people to walk around and turn on lights for them on the Sabbath, or operate their washing machines, or cook their food. They can leave the TV on all day on a certain channel so long as they don’t touch the power button or change channel button during the day. These are ridiculous workarounds to get around ridiculous religious laws in the first place. It’s completely childish and stupid.
And so leaving on a cooking surface all day in order to skirt around the rule about turning on appliances is exactly in line with Jewish religious and cultural tradition. It’s fucking ridiculous and a product of that religion and culture. “Oh it has nothing to do with being Jewish, this woman was just totally randomly stupid for no reason” is the dumbest fucking lesson you can take from this instance.
All of you fucking liberal douchebags who are so willing to jump on Christian stupidity but start white knighting and being apologist for other religions are such fucking hypocrites. Religion and the culture of religion are stupid. They do stupid shit. Sometimes that stupid shit gets people hurt. When it does, it should be mocked and attacked, not excused, defended, or worst of all, pretend that religion had nothing to do with it.
Hey SenorDumbfuck, please cite one of us in this thread so far who have demonstrated the behavior that you describe. Just one.
For the record, I think that Orthodox religious practice and in particular the way that they rules lawyer their way around them are asinine. There are plenty of ways around the rules that don’t involve stupidity like this woman did.
The very first reply in this thread:
Emphasis added.
No. I meant the claim that we would be blaming Chistianity for an analagous story.