Some appliances have a "Sabbath" feature to get around restrictions of what Jewish law allows on the Sabbath. For instance, instead of turning on an oven, you put it into Sabbath mode. Then, when you press BAKE and enter the temperature, it doesn't display the temperature or give any response. After a random delay of up to a minute, the oven turns on. Since you didn't turn the oven on directly, it's okay to use it.
This and the eruv all comes across to me as blatant cheating for convenience.
Pressing Bake turns the oven on after a random delay, if you didn't press Bake the oven wouldn't turn on at all. Ergo you turned the oven on, no matter how much you lawyer speak your way around it.
Just reinforces how ludicrous the meaningless rules are, that surround all religions.
To be fair, it takes 7.5 years to study the entirety of the Talmud doing one two sided page a day for about an hour...and this barely scratches the surface... to have an opinion of religion without putting in the effort is equally as ludicrous and meaningless.
Just as I don't need to study homeopathy or alchemy for a decade to have an informed opinion of it, I've had more than enough education on and experience of religion to take a view. Most of it appears to be holdover from ancient and medieval periods when people of a powerful group set the rules. Which is not discounting faith itself.
Which is by the by to the point -- if the rules are there, the amount of effort spent to creatively discount them feels like nothing other than blatant cheating. A sleight of hand.
I can appreciate your perspective but I strongly disagree with your reasoning. It comes off as shallow and founded with preconceived notions and biases. Not to say i dont have my own biases and perspectives...but it would be easier to take you seriously if you simply said, I havent studied it and dont feel a need to focus my energy there. You are free to use shortcuts and heuristics in all your decision making, we all do...but its a mistake to have a strong opinion and call something meaningless or blatant cheating without even having a minute understanding of how jurisprudence of Jewish law is established.
Well without going into why and how I arrived at those views, or any religious heritage I may have had... That's far too deep an exploration for HN, and not likely to be productive.
Note also my response to your second comment to my original -- OP said nothing of it needing to be used before the sabbath. In terms of the eruv, what may be a gentle convenience or exception for a few neighbouring houses, or relations, seems to really stretch when it encompasses tens of thousands+ in multiple city regions. Though I note from other comments regarding Feinsten, if accurate, that some noted Jewish scholars appear to have thought the concept stretched the point too.
Fair enough about how you arrived at your views. For what its worth, my views are not as rigid as these comments suggest. They are nuanced and ever evolving... I suspect Eruv is a complex topic with more reasons than just "convenience."
I am not an eruv or even a Jewish law expert, but I can assure you though that Rabbi Moshe Feinsteins positions were widely accepted in the Orthodox Community and his opinions are not only well documented and sourced, they are studied today much like court precedents are set. There are obviously differing view points, but in order to disagree with him and be listened to, one would need to extensively show their math and support their dissenting opinion with reliable sources and case history...
In general, the rule of thumb around Jewish law atleast for Orthodox Jews is, "ask your local orthodox rabbi." And interestingly enough, when interviewing for synagogue and pulpit positions, one of the common questions asked of Rabbi Applicants is "who do you ask your religious and halachik questions to?" Central to the faith is collaboration and discussion at the highest levels and if you arent stumped constantly and discussing with mentors and peers, you by default disqualify your credentials to most Ultra Orthodx Jews.
Fair point, and I suspect I would find why Feinstein seems to have objected to (this|all) eruv as interesting as the root article, until discussion descends to minutiae anyway. Like most atlasobscura the article barely scratches the surface of what underlies.
Faith is a personal construct to help people cope with the vast desolation of life in the universe. Nabokov's "the cradle rocks above an abyss" and all that.
Religion is an exploit of faith to allow power to beget more power, just like any other "isms" like capitalism, fascism, socialism, etc etc.
In theory, I can also argue that your view above is also a personal construct to help you cope with existence...
I wont pretend to understand consciousness or the human experience...but I like to be pragmatic, and from a pragmatic perspective, I dont see the utility of your belief about religion and faith and power structures...its an almost helpleas viewpoint that rejects everything as imaginary and malleable...and I dont see the value in that in my own beliefs and philosophy.
You would be violating Sabbath law if you press any buttons on the oven especially Bake, even with a timer...unless you set the timer before sabbath starts.
Sabbath mode just turns off automated features when you open or close the oven or fridge door.
In fairness, that does put a rather different complexion on it, as OP didn't mention it needing to be done the preceding day. "After a random delay of up to a minute, the oven turns on." As described it merely gets you a few random seconds pause after pushing the button and setting temp, thus screams of "cheat mode", which seems at odds with your description. Setting a timer to come on tomorrow at roughly 3pm doesn't feel like it's quite so blatantly breaking the spirit of a rule for the day, as press then maybe you wait 1s, maybe 59s. Whether a next day timer is also bending the rule is a much finer judgement...
The OP is mistaken (in my view) about Sabbath mode and its function. The common scenarios are a fridge or oven light that turns on when you open the door. In those cases, opening the door would be no different than flipping the switch to complete a circuit that turns on a light. So, sabbath mode disables that feature and allows you to open the door without turning on a light. Unscrewing the lightbulb or using tape to hold down the switch on the doorframe is the other way to do this.
Setting a timer during sabbath, for another time on sabbath would be the same thing as just turning it on directly.
As difficult as it may seem to many people, the "hacks" are grounded in sound but nuanced reasoning...the cases that make no sense logically are typically mistaken application...the talmud is literally rabbis disproving these ideas based on logic all the time.
The OP is actually correct on function and its name "Sabbath Mode".
The name is a misnomer because the baking function can only be used on Jewish holidays (Passover, Sukkot) when baking/cooking is permitted (okhel nefesh) whereas on Sabbath cooking is forbidden.
Not really. Some debates are based on different ways to interpret modern activities with ancient frameworks...but it still has to follow rational and defensible reasoning or sources... you may find a rabbi who says its ok to push a button on an electical oven on sabbath but you wont find one wh says you cannot do that, but you can set a timer on sabbath as long as it doesn't show on the display...
So, that is not how sabbath mode I am aware of works. I think in this case most rabbis would agree with you; I've never heard of a sabbath mode that turns it on after a "random" delay. I think the GP was mistaken.
Rather, sabbath mode is things like... a sabbath mode elevator just goes up and down all day stopping at every floor, so nobody needs to press any call or floor buttons. A sabbath mode oven, what it actually does, it just stay on all day (disabling features that will turn it off if unattended for a few hours), so you can just leave it on at a relatively low temperature all day and put things in and out of it, without starting a fire yourself. (It is starting the fire that is forbidden not making use of it). (In some cases a timer you set in advance before the sabbath is okay though, so perhaps a sabbath mode oven could have a timer you set Friday afternoon telling it to turn on and/or off at some point in the future).
HOWEVER. In general. I think there is a larger point. As someone who does not particularly believe in God, but still has some respect for following disciplines like this: You say the rules are "meaningless" -- but I would say the rules are meaningful only because of the meaning WE give them, the effect they have on us, the meaning we find in them.
If you don't believe in God, that's the only kind of meaning there is, anyway, right? Or you believe everything is meaningless in a kind of nihilism, which is something some people do, but I don't believe it's what most of us atheists do or is the only option.
So the rules of shabbat can be "meaningful" because of the meaning we find in them, because of the _experience_ of following them, which may be an experience that we find meaningful, especially when done with a community doing it consistently. Shabbat is a good example, because I find it to be so, having some experience with observing it in a community; it is a pleasurable and personally meaningful experience with no need to believe in God to make it so. So whether a modification of a 'strict' rule would make sense would depend as much on the effects it has on the practice as anything else.
I don't think religious Jews usually look at it quite this way (although not as different as you may think either); but the Amish, for instance, I think are closer to this. It's not exactly that God said don't use cars so you go to hell if you use a car; it's what effect do cars have on our lives and communities, and do we want those effects, and it might be okay to use a car sometimes in ways that minimize those effects for a greater good (say, an ambulance, perhaps).
Meaningless in the sense (I was probably far too throwaway and should have added context or explanation) that all religions (and most of our institutions) have layers of human added baggage, rules for rule's sake, and things that are done because that's how they are done. Things that might have made some sense when instituted, or in the context of first century Middle East, or a Medieval religious-focused society but look increasingly anachronistic in a modern, developed world. Clearly they couldn't predict the swathe of inventions and human change any more than the US founders could predict the later interpretations and re-interpretations of their relatively simple words.
As they become no longer of their time, it becomes the rule that is significant and the heritage, and becomes the heritage rather than the reason it might have been instituted way back when. Yet just about every society develops habits and rituals. Occasionally they turn out to be counter-productive to the adherents in a modern world. Now you certainly raise a good point about the experience of following -- the ritual itself can take on importance, and the community benefits are well known. Decline of community appears to be implicated in no end of modern problems, and whether secular or religious, anything that preserves it is to be lauded.
I'm surprised at the discussion spun up from the oven feature -- seems like some manufacturers may interpret the feature differently to others. Which is correct, and which right for Judaism, I'm unqualified to say. A sabbath mode elevator is, to my mind, a much more obvious and clean workaround that seems to preserve the spirit of the underlying idea.
As an atheist with Jewish background who is thinking more about Jewish traditions these days, some thoughts are: The act of figuring out as a community the details of the rules (or 'exceptions' of they seem so) in the face of changing social conditions can itself be meaningful. It can produce meaning related to bringing people into a community of discussion and debate in which decisions are made, or of authoritarian following the orders of a designated leader who decides how you are to interpret the rules, or some combination thereof.
It's all full of meaning, very meaning-producing. It may be intentional or unintentional, the kind of meaning we'd want or not want. Once you are an atheist -- or otherwise don't believe that there is a God who speaks to us in human language giving commands -- it actually frees you (singular or plural) up to alter the practices to produce the meaning you want.
Thought provoking. To paraphrase to ensure I understand correctly, the meaning is the significance of the rule being another result of debate or decree, either of which prod the community to face in the same direction. Whether or not it appears to make sense is somewhat secondary to preserving and strengthening the coherence of the community (c.f. Papal decree and infallibility)?
As an atheist of Protestant heritage I've wondered on the secret sauce of religion that brings the obviously stronger sense of community, as it appears to run deeper than faith, and whether there are ways to achieve that in a secular context. Perhaps particularly difficult in an era when individual choice and consumerism is promoted as paramount. :)
I mean, that's one way I've been thinking about it, yeah... whether how many religiously observant Jews would think about it that way or not, I don't know. :)
But Jewish practice generally/traditionally is really big on "community" as a focus and priority, and religiously observant Jews would agree that's so, in general, I think. They would of course probably say that the reason they do things the way they do, though, is because God said so, the end.
But as outside "sociologists" or "anthropologists" we can have our own interpretations, although perhaps it's rude.
But then, for some interesting additional anthropology, I know increasing numbers of atheist/agnostic Jews, not from Orthodox communities, who I think have attitudes toward Jewish practice along the lines we are talking about...
Sabbath mode for the GE JK915 oven works as I described, starting the oven after a random delay. I tried it right now and it started after a delay of about 42 seconds. See page 8 of the manual for details: https://products.geappliances.com/MarketingObjectRetrieval/D...
OK then. I'd imagine some rabbis are okay with that and others aren't. I think that is somewhat unusual.
You can read about typical sabbath mode's on ovens, as well as other appliances, on wikipedia, which also has some info about how much consensus there is about the legality of various approaches.
For ovens, it does indeed say "With some Shabbat mode ovens that are controlled using a keypad to set the temperature, there is a random delay triggered after a button is pressed before the temperature change takes place", but after going over other more common "sabbath modes" on ovens.
This is incorrect. The Sabbath mode allows the oven to stay on for longer than it normally would, so the oven can be left on the entire Sabbath or holiday with food kept warm inside, as lighting a fire is prohibited, and cooking is prohibited on Sabbath (but not on holidays). In some senses it is a misnomer - it should really be called holiday mode, because that is when cooking is permitted but lighting a fire (without a preexisting flame) is not.
I suppose there may be some rabbi who permitted this, but I would love to hear the reasoning. This is definitely NOT what Sabbath mode usually is.
Edit: here is the rabbinic authority that worked with GE to develop the Sabbath mode. They explicitly state that adjusting temperature on the Sabbath is not allowed. Again, I don't know why that feature exists as it does not provide any benefit from a Jewish perspective.
https://www.star-k.org/articles/articles/kosher-appliances/a...
Wrong. I have an oven like the one mentioned. The manual (which I have read) specifically mentions sabbath mode will delay for a random interval without user feedback before starting the oven.
Perhaps you are misunderstanding, and sabbath mode will turn the heating element on and off without regard for user input - i.e. opening and closing the door. That the manual is not clear is not a surprise, nor is it that someone completely unfamiliar with the Jewish Sabbath laws would misunderstand them.
Thats not what sabbath mode does. It allows Jews to open and close the door without turning on a light or a fan. You cant change the temperature or press bake or any buttons on it...it simply doesnt active automated features that typically activate.
