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.
Its not a religious symbol its a legal boundry that has a religious benefit. Most city eruvs use existing infrastructure like phone wires, walls, fences through backyards even gulleys if they are steep enough.
The legal proclamation from the city that is required for it to be valid. What makes anything a legal boundary? What makes a neighborhood zoned as residential? Is it the residents and how they use the structures they call homes or is it the legal process and documentation that designates it?
Melacha is the 39 base categories of avodah (translated, but not literally work) that went into the construction of the temple. The talmud then expands upon how we learn about and understand these - including their sources and the discussions in Mesechet Shabbat (the Sabbath Tractate).
Over the years Rabbis have clarified and expand these definitions to understand how they relate to the current generation and modern world. This is a long conversation.
This is sort of correct - its not the temple rather the Mishkan (tabernacle)... The commandment of Shabbos is six days you should "Taaseh Melacha" and rest on the seventh day... later by the building of the Tabernacle, it connects mentions shabbat out of place and is interpreted to mean, dont build the mishkan on shabbat...and to interpret work as related to creating a tabernacle...https://www.etzion.org.il/en/mishkan-and-shabbat
Ultimately, the general idea is "we create during the week and on sabbath, separate ourselves from that creative energy and just enjoy our handiwork, just as the creator of the world did... this is why even plucking a blade of grass would be forbidden..anything that creates either through adding or removing things is in the framework of how Shabbat laws are interpreted...
While all rules in Judaism are debated endlessly and have a multitude of opinions... My understanding is that most stringent Halacha followers would agree one SHOULD not watch a spurs game on Shabbos...and there are clearly several rules around separating the day from others that may even make it a prohibition(not that I havent watched my share of sports games on Shabbos.) I just think its worth pointing out that its rare youll find a rabbi that says you Should watch the game.
The only thing an eruv makes permissible is carrying an item from one domain to another. (I.e. a personal house to the public street to a public synagogue.) It's not so much a hack as a way of making the boundry of the two separate domains part of the same domain. The same way, a row of houses can also be a block or a group of streets can also be a neighborhood...there were laws around moving things from one boundry to another, but all boundries are fictions, so its not really doing anything thats tricking anybody...its not really different than buying your neighbors house and putting a big fence around both properties... I think this is actually why an eruv needs permission from the city or mayor. Its actually a legal boundry in this context...
The point about watching the game...thats not really permissible according to many Rabbis, its just an excuse your friend made because its much worse to take an action that completes an electrical circuit (similar to biblical prohibition of lighting a fire) than to just look at something happening...but there is clear guidance about what you are allowed to even read or look at on Shabbos.
This is just human nature...we all do the best we can with who we are at any given moment...the Eruv though is a very different mechanism.
Another important point is that the eruv was instituted because of the rabbinic prohibition on carrying in a semi-public area.
According to Jewish law there are 4 categories of domains: 1) Public (Large area, heavy traffic), 2) Semi-public (most of what we would consider public), 3) Private, 4) Permitted (a small distinct area in the public domain). Carrying in the semi-public domain is biblically permitted, but rabbinically prohibited due to its similarity to a public domain. An allowance was made to carry in the semi-public domain if a symbolic eruv is put up to distinguish it from a public domain.
>... its much worse to take an action that completes an electrical circuit (similar to biblical prohibition of lighting a fire) than to just look at something happening...but there is clear guidance about what you are allowed to even read or look at on Shabbos.
Knowing very little of the "rules" and on the way they are followed, I have always been intrigued by this thingy here (Halachic switch):
> When you slide the on/off button, you’re moving an isolated piece of plastic. It is purely mechanical, and is not attached to anything electrical (electro-mechanically isolated). This is done at a time when you see a green Status Light, which provides 100% assurance that the relevant components within the switch are inactive. Subsequently, after a random interval, the device will activate and determine the position of the plastic by flashing an internal light pulse. The attached light fixture will be triggered only after the switch overcomes two failure probability processes – one prior to this light pulse and one after it. Halachically, your action is simply the movement of an isolated piece of plastic with no implications of causation.
This is obviously messed up, but its nothing new. Thousands of startups growth strategy is ranking organically for brand search of their prospects. Google sells that ad space on branded search, yelp and other directories rank for them. The great big Internet Scam no one wants to admit is that digital advertising is one big protections racket! Hijacking customers and selling it back to businesses. Just look at super shady companies like rehabs.com that ranks for thousands of rehabs and pushes their phone number on all the listings.
If google and the internet went away tomorrow, small local businesses would likely be better off. Instead of having to pay money just to keep competitors from bidding on their brand or worrying about all the ways tech startups prey on small local businesses!
This is a teeny tiny symptom of much more eggregious problem. Online publishing and Digital advertising today is essentially a modern day protection racket. The data targeting is only one iteration of this problem.
Google selling ad space on brand searches to competitors unless you outbid them. Ad networks selling you in market audiences based on intent to buy from you anyways...if you dont buy that data, your competitors will... than you need to use first party data to compete and you spend to remarket to customers who would buy from you anyways if the ad networks were selling that other signal driven data to your competitors. Startups and publishers whose entire business model is ranking in google for your brand name and selling data... than they all have the chutzpah to claim their targeting and ad network should get credit for the sale...
Its one big protection racket driven by publishers and ad networks to skim from businesses...
If the targeting didnt exist for everbody, the cream would still rise to the top... 80% of online advertising today is only necessary because those same predators would sell your customers to your competitors if you dont pay to play!!!
The only solution is to take advertising out of the hands of publishers and put it into the hands of businesses and consumers...
The incentives are all wrong because publishers and middlemen control the monetization!
This is not at all historically accurate. List brokers have existed for at least half a century. Tracking advertising with coupons can be traced to the 1800's if not earlier.
Catalog sales, mail order and direct mail businesses have been doing for the last century all of the same things we do today online.
The only thing that changed is the speed and access of information. The same way we didnt hear about conflicts two continents away, we didnt hear about the stores reselling our data.
Im not saying we dont have a privacy problem today, but its far from something new.
