Thanks for the responses, everyone!
The idea of the Sabbat goy is interesting, I need to check that out further. I realize how much disagreement there is within Judaism, I’ve heard the joke about the four rabbis with the punchline, “Then it’s two against three!” I was looking for general information and mainstream views, and boy, have I found them.
Do you have a cite for that, please? Contemporary news source, for example?
I also recall reading about light switches an such that involved moving your hand through a beam of light. You weren’t actually touching or moving anything so it was supposedly OK.
NYC seems to have found the same solution as Jerusalem - let the Muslims drive the taxis. 
I was in Jerusalem on a Saturday and NOTHING was running, not even the streetcars. But the taxis were going. OTOH, come sundown on Saturday and the bars were full and lively.
Some, not all, probably not even most, of the Brooklyn Hasidic groups can get fairly insistent about gentiles either respecting their traditions or conforming to their rules, depending on one’s point of view.
No, Shmendrik, I don’t have a cite for that. I live in Brooklyn, and on occasion I’ve been one of the gentiles negotiating a peace treaty with one particular Hasidic group over the use of a local public park on Sundays. No cite, because nobody really wants this in the papers, that just seems to escalate things.
This has nothing to do with “ways around Sabbath restrictions,” except that this group feels that, since they cannot use one particular feature of the park on Saturdays, they should be given more or less exclusive rights to that feature on Sundays. Everyone else in the neighborhood disagrees.
And there was another little tempest in a teapot, somewhat similar to what **Broomstick **describes, over bicycle paths in Brooklyn, of all things. Another of the Hasidic sects very much wanted to have a bike route that ran to Coney Island, through their neighborhood, re-routed, because apparently the sight of women in cycling outfits was disturbing. That one went away pretty fast – I think they ultimately realized that this wasn’t winnable, and made them look like idiots.
While living in East Lansing, MI, in the late 1980s, I was invited to dinner, on the Sabbath, with some folks who were Orthodox Jews. They told me some of thier kitchen appliances had timers for switching on and off. One could put a dish in the oven before Sabbath, set the oven to turn on and off at a certain time, and have a hot meal. The women especially seemed to think this was a modern convenience that beat most other solutions to working around the rules.
Here in NYC, every hospital I’ve ever been in has a Sabbath elevator running on Saturdays. And all of the appliances in my (new construction, at least as of about 10 years ago) have timers. You can set the dishwasher, or the oven (although not the stovetop) on Friday to turn on at a given time on Saturday.
Very handy.
I lived on Touhy avenue at the time and thus had some direct concern about the matter so other than my memory no, not at the moment. And at this remove some of the details are getting a bit hazy. There is an official eruv for that part of the city that you can learn about by googling it, but it’s set up in such a way as to not interfere with gentile activity. The dispute - such as it was, it blew up and blew away pretty quickly - was after I was married and before I moved to Indiana so it would be mid-1990’s, probably. I have a dim recollection it wasn’t the first such eruv to cause some controversy in the Chicago area although I’m not conversant with the details of the other ones. I only knew about the Touhy one because, living on the street, it was very briefly an issue once we drove past Western Avenue when heading away from the Lake on Saturdays. And any Saturday in the neighborhood was very heavy pedestrian traffic regardless because the Jews in that neighborhood did not drive on the Sabbath so it was a lot of people walking to and from the various Jewish community buildings along Touhy Avenue.
My dad’s family had an extensive, and I do mean extensive, collection of chafing dishes utilizing sterno for hot food on the Sabbath. Seriously, I’m talking “professional catering service” quantities because they needed one set for dairy, one for meat, and one for Passover. Get your hot food fixed before the Sabbath and park it in one of those babies for the next 24 hours and no Sabbath Goy needed. Of course, this did mean the daily [del]argument[/del] discussion had to then be about something other than whether or not Sabbath Goys were a permitted thing.
Modern appliance on a timer is probably much less of a fire hazard than chafing dishes and lit sterno.
Indeed.
When I read the below:
my first thought was that somewhere in the world there’s a batch of Jewish scholars debating all of the above this very minute. And the discussion will not be a short one.
You’d need a pretty big Sterno can to last from sundown Friday until suppertime on Saturday. Most cans only last one or two hours. And, of course, you can’t switch them out, because that would require lighting fires.
As for Shabbos goyim, in a lot of cases that’s not an employee, but just someone in the neighborhood who (very delicately) negotiated to volunteer for the duty. The negotiations have to be delicate, because the Jewish folk wouldn’t be allowed to directly say what would be useful to them.
I’ve a suspicion that the stereotype of the passive-aggressive Jewish mother stems from this sort of indirect negotiation. “I’ll just sit here, in the dark” does not mean “I’d appreciate it if you’d turn on the lights for me”, even though the situation where you’d say the former is exactly the situation where the latter is true.
Just chiming in to add I have a very high end Miele oven with a Sabbath setting, which is a delayed on off preset timer. I’ve never felt the need to use it but see how it could also come in handy for a goy.
In my reading of the Jewish press, the subject of RFID keys came up. They do not seem to be allowed for two reasons.
First, you are carrying something, and that seems to be prohibited. You may not even carry a conventional house key.
Next, such a device on your person would be completing an electrical circuit through your action. That is not allowed.
The folks opposed to the RFID apartment keys insisted only a non-Jewish doorman to keep the building secure was acceptable.
Sometimes, it makes the papers This article includes a previously segregated public bus route and a desire for libraries to open on Sundays rather than Saturday, this mentions the bike lanes used by “scantily dressed women”, and this is about gender segregated hours at public pools.
Slight nitpick, but it’s generally accepted that the Laws were “laid down” well into the Iron Age.
I have a friend that lives in an Orthodox Jewish community. She wasn’t very close with her husband at the time of this story (they are currently separated) and he was seldom at the house. One Friday night, when he was home, the doorbell rings. Hubby answers. It’s a neighbor that they only know in passing. But this almost stranger had a story for her husband. It involved the pilot light on his furnace, which had apparently just gone out. And it was going to be a cold night. Hubby could not figure out why this guy had knocked on their door to tell this story. He’s just standing there, baffled.
My friend comes to the door to see what is going on. She smiles and says “We’d be happy to come over and turn your furnace back on for you”. We’ll be there in 10 minutes. Neighbor leaves, his mission accomplished.
I’ve done some interesting home automation setups for Orthodox clients. One of my favorites included automatically having a bathroom outlet turn on for 10 minutes at 9:30 every Saturday morning. As the client explained. “If my wife happened to leave her hair dryer plugged into that outlet with the switch on, the hair dryer would turn on for 10 minutes at 9:30. And if my wife happens to be in the bathroom at that time, she can pick it up and dry her hair.”
Door jamb switches (that apparatus that automatically turns on a closet light when the door is opened) are generally avoided when designing the electrical for Orthodox homes. Because, then the homeowner can’t open the closet at all without “doing work”. So the standard is a regular switch outside the door. That way they can at least open the closet door without turning on the light.
One time , for an extremely wealthy client, we engineered a set up that used a time clock to disable the door jamb switches. And once, it didn’t work. And these people tried to dump a whole bunch of guilt on me, like I was personally responsible for the destruction of their mortal souls. I just mumbled something under my breath about avarice and owning hedge funds that destroyed the economies of small nations being a far greater sin IMHO.
I had destroyed their souls before anyway. I was working at their house one day, during EXTREMELY inclimate weather. I had brought a yogurt cup for a snack and the house manager for the property told me I couldn’t open it inside the house because it wasn’t certified kosher. I agreed then I went to the furnace room in the basement and ate my yogurt, thereby damning the family to the fires of hell, or something.
At the time I worked on Touhy in notably Jewish Skokie and I remember that, if that’s a form of confirmation.
Can an orthodox Jew make a sandwich on the Sabbath or is opening the jar of peanut butter work?
So if you are one of those Jews who believes it is permissible to coincidentally benefit on the Sabbath from work initiated by a Gentile, such as getting into an elevator for which they press the button, or following them through an automatic door, then is it permissible to do so when it is a fellow Jew who initiates the work? I can imagine that this situation arises in communities where Orthodox Jews, who strictly observe the Sabbath rules, live alongside Reform Jews, who do not observe all the same rules, or to the same extent. Is using a non- or less-observant Jew as your “Shabbos goy” OK, or is there some other rule that prohibits this? If it’s prohibited, then keeping in mind that not all Jews are identifiable as such on sight, how are you supposed to determine whether you can benefit from any given stranger’s work? Or is the idea that you should only avail yourself of work by people whom you have personally met and who you know to be gentiles?
I work in a store owned by Orthodox Jews, in a town with a large Jewish population. We sell six hour sternos, and I just realized another reason for that–prohibitions against lighting something on Shabbos. All our appliances have a Shabbos mode.
And I have had some people tell me it’s nice not to use a computer one day a week. It keeps them from getting totally addicted to it. Ditto their children.
A six-hour Sterno still wouldn’t be long enough to be useful for Shabbos purposes, though. If you light it just before sunset, then it’ll only burn until about midnight. What’s the use of a fire that only lasts until midnight? Cooking something for Friday’s supper, you just do all of your cooking before sundown, and maybe eat a little bit early. Something you want to eat even for breakfast on Saturday, you’ll want to keep hot longer than midnight.
Clearly this is why God invented the Instant Pot.