Hey, I heard someone say “I saw a bunch of Hasidic [“ultra Orthodox”] Jews driving on Shabbat, and they said everything’s Kosher because they had stashed a bottle of salt water under the driver’s seat, and Halacha specifically mentions transportation over the ocean is exempt…”
Could be true. Who cares? The world is large.
From memory; they never said that they were orthodox; as a Christian, that was my understanding of why the rules would not allow them to phone for, or pay for a taxi or flowers on a Saturday morning. I knew where they were going and about the flowers in advance. As I remember it, they only said “Good morning,” and “Thank you.”
Other Jewish customers had no such problems.
Some of the "solutions to fool god" are mind boggling.
Lending money with interest can be done with a Heter Iska
Growing food on the 7[SUP]th[/SUP] year (Shnat Shmita) is possible by selling the patch to Gentiles for that Year. Also not burning all the Hametz (leavened bread) on Passover has the same solution.
One can use an elevator on Shabbat, if it functions as a Shabbat elevator (how else ? 
), that is it stops at all floors and automatically opens/closes the doors.
Doors (for the public) at hospitals will close and open by themselves with random timing (unlinked from the IR sensor normally triggering them).
Israel Museum in Jerusalem is open, but you cannot buy tickets on Shabbat. However you can buy tickets from the Druze-operated lemonade kiosk just outside the parking lot.
And so on, and so on. Thinking of which, and related to another thread I participate in, this reminds me on the peacock tail and the Handicap Principle. If you can do all this and still survive, that must be something special. Or not. Maybe we just have an OCD gene.
BTW All of this happens with Orthodox support. Not Ultra-Orthodox. Ultra-Orthodox have their own set of legerdemain methods, which can be smaller, since other Jews make their life possible with the larger set. I’m speaking of Israel, of course.
An ancient, tendentious, querulous, and simply simple-minded topos.
Any Jew (let alone anyone else) who thinks these exact examples you listed are “to fool God” is seriously wrong about what laws are and how they get made and amended. Ideally, to the religious, they are “allowed by God” (of course the whole point of a free society is to dispute this if you feel strongly, and God knows Jews dispute with God and man) because we all live in reality and human society, and* all laws are made in a free society* by willing participants who attempt to be good to each other given competing interests.
Farmers should not be forced to commit economic suicide every seventh year (one such term would be enough); bakers should not be forced to destroy their entire inventory and commit economic suicide every Passover. Etc. and etc.: if the injunction is Biblical, God had a point, somewhere, somehow, to the religious, and still does.
Translation into day-to-day laws, by a reasoned and impassioned process continued to this day, of course, tries to think of why and keep a part of it relevant–and in doing so, references aspects of previous debate on social and individual circumstances, debates which I would wager are fantastically more ethically philosophically and intellectually saturated than any poster here has the slightest knowledge of.
Oh, Leo, Leo you fooled me. From your salt water bottle story, I thought we were on the same wavelength. I was wrong, and am really sorry.
Some of the examples I have given represent the position of the Ultra-Orthodox. They claim it is god-fooling. They, for instance, do not accept the selling of the field on the seventh year and Sabbath elevators. Some of the people in Bney-Brak (an ultra-orthodox town) have generators so as not to use the grid electricity on Sabbath.
In fact, one of the reasons for Agudat-Israel (the Ultra-Orthodox party) to oppose the establishment of Israel for a long time, and actually to be anti-zionist, was the need for adaptations in the Halacha for being able to live in a Jewish state. The Religious Zionists were those with many ideas of how to square the circle. But religious zionism (they are considered orthodox), even if superficially similar to other Jewish ortodoxy, have a different dogma and different eschatology.
You may like to read: The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox.
This reminds me of the Appalachian Trail Thru hikers (those who hike continuously from Georgia to Maine) tradition of yoging. Basically letting someone know they are hungry but not asking for food and receiving great food (such as BBQ hamburgers & beer).
Me, too!
I’m trying to remember, but after our nice Palestinian taxi driver dropped us off at the Museum (since no transit was running that day) I could have sworn we bought our tickets to the King Herod exhibit inside.
But…
Just to prove that nothing outdoes Christianity… I should mention that we came from the Shepherds field in Bethlehem. The Catholic Shepherds’ field. God, it seems, thoughtfully announced the nativity to one group who were Catholic in one field, protestant shepherds in another field, and orthodox shepherds in a different field, so each creed could have their own field to celebrate in. Unfortunately, while in Jerusalem we only saw one of the two tombs Jesus was laid to rest in, along with the 18th century marble slab on which his body was prepared and the upstairs room in the 12th Century house where the last supper was held, and King David was entombed on the ground floor.
I checked and you are right. One can buy tickets on Saturday directly from the Museum. Last time I visited there on Saturday it was maybe 15 years ago.
Progress happens.
Even funnier is that when the Sherut Taxi dropped us off near the hotel at 1 in the morning, the bar we stopped beside happened to be blasting “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.
But yes, pretty much everything was closed on Sabbath… until sundown. Even the LRT (tram) was shut down. Coming from a country where Sunday shopping was a battle given up decades ago, it was truly different. But then, Sabbath was a good day to visit Bethlehem since it was in the Palestinian countryside.
This is priceless. Israel–what a country!
The song and context, for those who haven’t come across it.
I know a True Scotsman they could call instead…
Do you have a cite showing that “current Orthodoxy” prohibits Internet use? All of the Orthodox Jews that I know are quite ardent Internet users (just not during Sabbath).
One of the all time great bait-and-switch political debate maneuvers. God you see versions of it every single day. Wiki.
I assumed that meant that using the internet instead of a Rabbi to help you decide/interpret Sabbath rules is not allowed, right? (which makes a lot of sense)
It is mostly a phenomenon of the ultra-orthodox, but the distinction between orthodox and ultra-orthodox is fuzzy at the edges. In the ultra-orthodox community it is perhaps the most forcefully pushed prohibition in the last years:
The Gedolim Declare War on the Internet
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Must Choose Between Obedience to Their Rabbis or to Their Smartphone
Re Shabbos Goys
AIUI the yellowjacketcoder’s scout had it right. You can’t command somebody to do work. You can’t even ask them to do work. You CAN loudly make your desires knows. “Turn on the heat!” is forbidden. “Brrr! Is it ever cold in here!” is allowed.
I’ve long wondered about certain medical devices. Obviously, if life is at stake you can use the device. But what about hearing aids or Stephen Hawking’s speaking device?
Correct about when life is at stake. In other cases, it depends on both the seriousness of the need, and the exact mechanics of the device.
For example, it has been mentioned above that electricity is considered to be a form of fire, and therefore forbidden on the Sabbath. That logic applies strongly to an electric device that generates light or heat as its main function (such as some sort of aid for those who have sight problems), but much less so for an electronic device that does not does not generate light or heat (such as most hearing aids), and in the middle for devices devices that do generate light or heat but only in an incidental manner (such as a landline telephone whose buttons light up but the light isn’t really necessary to use it).
And similarly, there is more leeway for someone in a serious situation (such as someone with a severe but non-life-threatening illness) and less leeway for someone who has a relatively minor problem (such as someone who uses a hearing aid often, but occasionally manages without it).
We try to be at least vaguely familiar with these rules so that when a situation comes up, we can either take an educated guess, or be able to ask one’s rabbi intelligently. When in doubt, the law is: “If someone is dangerously ill, it is a mitzvah (commandment) to violate the Sabbath [for him], and the faster, the better. One who [pauses to] ask questions is a murderer.” (That’s my own translation of The Code of Jewish Law, section 328:2.)
Having grown up with a lot of these restrictions, it was a life-changing moment when I realized that if I could directly ask G_d about all the “rules” I grew up with, he would roll his eyes and wonder why we do these things to ourselves.