Jews are the original hackers. Our religion has a lot of rules (like a whole lot) and as technology has progressed, the rules have not, so we've had to come up with a lot of workarounds, and also been enabled by technology.
This is one great example. Also a lot of ovens have sabbath mode. So do TVs (although those are just timers for on and off now). The Eruv wire is another Jewish hack.
Alexa has opened up a whole new avenue of hacks. Previously you had to get light switches with random timers if you wanted electric light on Saturday, but now you can make an Alexa routine that is triggered by certain words or motions so that it technically doesn't count as "activating" the switch.
Jews have basically been hacking for 5000 years. :)
In my opinion the extreme following of rules that were made up thousands of years ago without considering their relevance on the modern world is stupid. And then coming up with these "hacks" to break the rules by over complicating things is even worse. If you want light, just press the button, if you really really strongly believe that should not be allowed then don't use light...
I think religion brings many good things to the world, guides people and gives them something to hold on to in difficult times. But the super strict following of rules that someone interprets out of a book that was written thousands of years ago is not one of the good things. And to be sure: for me that applies the same to all religions, this article is about Jewish hacks but there are also Christian and Muslim rules that make no sense now centuries later.
In my opinion (not a Jew) the good in religion cannot be boiled down to its moral guidance nor its stabilizing effects. Religion is not therapy and is not a replacement for therapy either.
Following a set of rules, even arbitrary rules, can be a part of a tradition. For example, one of the rules that my family follows is putting up a Christmas tree around the beginning of December and decorating it. This is work, in some sense "stupid" and "irrelevant" work: my hands have gone numb while trying to cut with a handheld saw at the base of at tree before. The needles make a mess everywhere. Cutting down trees is probably not great for the environment. But, if my (American, Protestant) culture weren't so hellbent on seeing religion a matter of individual belief, we'd probably recognize that this is a religious practice. It's a unique set of weird things we do that sets us apart and brings us together.
Other practices seem connected to holding a sense of wonder for the world we live in. My experience with Sabbath-remembrance is that it is an attempt to commemorate life itself (as a creative act) by choosing to rest (not creating) on that day. (I can't speak for Jews, my background was Christian.) As someone who's now a religious "none/other", I think there's something still work respecting in these practices, even if they sometimes seem badly aligned with the modern fast-moving world.
A Christmas tree has aesthetic value, and the decorated tree brings cheer in a time of year where darkness, cold, and late fall, early winter gloom affects many people. This tradition has so many redeeming factors, that it is embraced by religious and non-religious people alike.
Following a set of arbitrary rules can create tradition and community, and if these are harmless this is fine, but this example of finding workarounds for your own religion comes across as keeping up appearances for others who subscribe to it; not actual religious adherence. I mean, most gods I've read about don't look to kindly on interpreting their principles to the letter (“Look! I'm not touching the switch, but if I say ‘Alexa, I feel gloomy’ the light comes just happens to come on!”) rather than to the spirit.
> I mean, most gods I've read about don't look to kindly on interpreting their principles to the letter ... rather than to the spirit.
"Israel" is literally defined in Genesis to mean "the one who strives with God", so this kind of argumentative approach to one's own religion might not be approved by "most gods", but that doesn't mean it can't be part of some religions. I would also note that some Jews who have replied to this thread have indicated that they do endeavor to follow both the letter and spirit of the law.
We sometimes do this, sometimes don't, and if we do, it's not because of our own cultural traditions. We're doing, as sibling post pointed out, for aesthetic reasons.
The point is not light or no-light, push the button or don’t push the button.
The point is to sculpt the life of the practitioner—so that we remember God and His creative presence in our lives in all that we do. Extra work beforehand, moving effort around to clear the Sabbath, then having a weird day on the Sabbath, is a great way of doing that. Acting as a family on the Sabbath doesn’t hurt either!
The orthodox all seem to feel an obligation like that of lay brothers in Christianity. Even there: God is eternal, so prayer cannot change Him. Why pray? It changes us. Why pray unceasingly? For unceasing change.
In most societies, we leave most people at the default shape of life and set apart those who want to sculpt their living of their life. Orthodox Judaism asks that level of commitment of all its members, and so has persisted for a couple hundred years with less change than most.
If the point is just to show a commitment from the members, why not choose a method of showing commitment that doesn't create so much unnecessary waste? Like Lent or Ramadan, or simply meditating or something, rather than having elevators and ovens run for 24 hours extra?
I'll tell you in one word. Tradition![1]
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWSoYCetG6A
Agreed - these kinds of things are a decent example of the dumber parts of religion.
It’s also odd to me that violating the spirit of the rules via technicalities is considered morally acceptable in that context (and yes, like any religion there are twisted rationalizations about why it all makes perfect sense).
I follow these "archaic" rules myself, although I have a very different approach to these "hacks". Orthodox Judaism has an explicit prohibition of using loopholes to circumvent the spirit of the law called "Ha'aramah" mentioned in various plances throughout the Talmud including: Moed Katan 11b,12b, Nedarim 43a, 48a; Bava Metziah 62b and a bunch more I do not recall.
I have always understood there to be two classes of hacks in Judaism.
The impermissible class circumvents the spirit of the law.
The permissable class clarifies what the spirit of the law actually is.
The spirit of the Shabbat law is to rest and resting is defined as refraining from a set of 39 categories of labor. One of these categories is transferring an object from one domain to another. But is it really labor to carry a cake to a friends house as a gift when attending a meal? Is it labor to push a child around in a stroller?
The loophole of Eruv is intended to enable Jews to define communities by drawing a string around them and demarcate a logical line of what constitutes labor vs not on Shabbat as a something external to the community vs external to the home. This is a psychological exercise to force Jews to understand the boundaries of their communities so as to protect them from actually performing labor and preserving the sanctity of Shabbat.
Maybe some of the details of sabbath keeping is amusing to see, but I think a day of rest has even more relevance to modern society.
Hell, in ancient times they even had land Sabbaths.
Not that it’s all feasible but can you imagine how better off oceans and lands would be if they could be given even a year’s break on a seven year cycle?
It is something I never understood: why the practice of finding creative ways of getting around laws of the very religion you claim to adhere to is generally accepted in Judaism. While undoubtedly charming, by paying someone to speak the Kaddish for one year instead of yourself, or paying a Shabbes Goy to push buttons on your behalf just outsources your religious duties. Having the elevator stop at every floor even the opposite effect achieved than the spirit of the law intends: more energy is consumed on Shabbes than on other days.
Why not be honest to yourself and admit that you actually don't care so much about the Laws?
It's not about consumption of energy. Shabbat in Judaism is not an energy saving measure, it's a religious ceremony. Judaism is big on doing things differently for a reason (one could probably write a PhD thesis on it) and Shabbat is one of those where the different thing is avoiding making changes in the world. Of course, as with many major religions, everybody finds their own meanings within the framework.
Not making changes in the world? The make a lot of changes before so they don't have to do them on shabbat. They make actually more changes than without shabbat, and in this case even more environmental damage.
There is a strict and particular set of rules and while "not making changes on the Sabbath" is a useful metaphor, it doesn't perfectly capture the rules or why specific workarounds are permissible and others aren't.
The core set of rules comes from specific actions that were banned in the ancient Tabernacle on the Sabbath. Electricity use is not banned per se on the Sabbath (as electricity was not discovered several thousand years ago); instead, the core law of "do not fix things on the Sabbath" was ruled to ban completing circuits on the Sabbath once electricity became widespread; similarly, "do not break things on the Sabbath" covers breaking a circuit. The rules only cover actions performed by Jews during the Sabbath; they don't cover actions taken on other days even if those actions result in changes on the Sabbath, so for example setting up a timer to turn lights on or off is permissible as long as you set it up prior to the Sabbath. Ditto for these kinds of elevators.
The Sabbath rules have pretty much nothing to do with environmentalism or energy use.
I'm not a religious scholar but these interpretations:
- "do not fix things on the Sabbath" ban[s] completing circuits
- "do not break things on the Sabbath" covers breaking a circuit
sound extremely convoluted to me. A switch's express purpose is to break and complete circuits to direct current. It is part of the object's usage, part of the creator's intent on the object's utility. It has modes of operation where the circuit is broken and complete by design. The saner interpretation of this law IMO would be along the lines of "if a switch got stuck on a Sabbath, good luck on the energy bill, mate".
I have one of those trash cans with a pedal that opens the lid. It is a switch but none of it is electronic. Are Jews not allowed to operate these contraptions on a Sabbath too? It arguably introduces a break in the object, namely the opening for the trash can. Heck, does Jewish law even allow opening trash cans on a Sabbath, at all? By such broad applicability, the only difference between any lidded trash can (a closed object most of the time) and an electric circuit is the presence/absence of current. Can a Jew unlock padlocks on a Sabbath? What about opening doors?
(FINAL NOTE: HN mostly has charged---pun intended---discussions over things we deem ridiculous. Such discussion is NOT my intent here. I know J. Random Netizen like me isn't going to change Jewish culture in two paragraphs. I just wanted to waste actuations of my mechanical keyboard to register my astonishment and confusion over this interpretation.)
>sound extremely convoluted to me. A switch's express purpose is to break and complete circuits to direct current. It is part of the object's usage, part of the creator's intent on the object's utility. It has modes of operation where the circuit is broken and complete by design.
This is an excellent point and is a big reason why a lot of rabbis would not give "building" as an answer. Another answer commonly given is that electricity is like fire (made a lot more sense when "electricity" was 99.9% stuff like starting your car with a spark and incandescent lightbulbs) and lighting a fire is prohibited; this doesn't really hold much water anymore. Another reason given is that there's a rabbinic prohibition on "creating", but that doesn't really work because, like you said, all electric appliances are made to be turned off too. Basically electricity on the sabbath is pretty weak as far as prohibitions go and any explanation you hear for why it's banned will always be post-hoc, and the real reason why it's banned is because rabbis are afraid that letting people use electricity will "destroy the spirit of shabbat" (but they can't actually say that's the only reason because it's not strong enough to prohibit it). In fact, on holidays (like passover and the like) the prohibition becomes much, much weaker (to the point where some poskim say that turning on and off LED lights is permitted, among other things.)
The can probably is OK because opening it does not materially change the thing. If it had an attached cover that you had to tear off, would be different business. Padlocks I'd say look ok but then for an observant Jew there wouldn't be too many regular Shabbat activities that require dealing with padlocks. Doors are certainly ok, I've seen observant Jews opening (and closing) doors on Shabbat many times. Of course, if a particular door has e.g. an electronic sensor there might be complications... But again, as an observant Jew you probably wouldn't find yourself in a place with such doors on Shabbat.
But the proper way to address this question is to ask your rabbi of course. If you're an observant Jew, you have one. If he says it's OK then it's OK, if he says it's not then it's not. Sometimes they disagree, and sometimes the disagreement grows big so some strict people for example only eat food that has the Kosher stamp of a specific authority and not the others, and so on.
Just want to point out that this argument is not universally accepted by modern halachic (Jewish law) authorities.
Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, a very prominent orthodox Jewish halachist held that closing/opening an electrical circuit does not constitute the biblical prohibition of building and destroying.
Instead, he held that that electricity was prohibited "Rabbinically" for an unrelated reason (which is of a lower degree of severity, which has practical implications).
Notwithstanding this, if one say, turns on an incondescent lightbulb I believe that is biblically prohibited according to all because of the heat it generates.
Can you make a switch Kosher by putting 1M ohm resistor across it. Then the circuit would never be broken just modified. Electric Eruvin? (Consult your local Rabbi) I think that was done to touch-tone telephones in Israel many years ago when we still used land lines.
There is an organization in Israel, Tzomet, dedicated to these kind of stuff. I believe they manufacture such products.
But they're explicitly dedicated for times of need and not for leisure purposes.
"Sabbath mode" ovens work in a clever way, where the temperature switch is only checked on a certain interval. So when you change the temperature you're generally not completing or breaking a circuit, since the circuit is likely currently broken anyway.
Most rabbinic authorities still prohibit Sabbath mode ovens on Shabbat for different reasons, but on holidays with weaker restrictions but that still have electricity bans, like Passover, permit their use.
I remember when my parents first got a "Sabbath mode" oven, the local Orthodox rabbi came over excitedly just to see it at work.
I'm not sure what is your point. Nobody is trying to convince you to follow Judaism. In fact, it is customary to strongly discourage anybody who wants to convert. If it doesn't make sense to you, it's ok, it's not supposed to. I'm just trying to explain how those who follow it see it. If you're not interested, well, you're welcome to not being educated.
I would phrase the Shabbat prohibitions as "creative work", modeled after the days of creation and the creative labor of building the Tabernacle. The 39 general categories of labor have been documented for millennia, and are applied as the archetypes for technical usage in the modern world.
Where do you get the idea that the spirit of the law is not to consume more energy? Is this something you've studied?
Why not be honest to yourself and admit you've literally no idea what the laws are?
>Why not be honest to yourself and admit that you actually don't care so much about the Laws?
The the following obviously isn't universal since people have different approaches to their faith, but I would argue the exact opposite. Many people don't do this because they are dishonest or because they don't care about these laws. They do this because they are honest with themselves and they do care about these laws.
Modern society is now setup in such a way as to often give people a choice between living a modern lifestyle or living strictly by laws written thousands of years ago before this life was possible. If presented with the choice between breaking these law and having that lifestyle, people chose to be honest with themselves and adopt that modern lifestyle. However the laws are so important that they must be maintained even if that maintenance now only exists in a symbolic way. That is how you might get people that maintain these seemingly bizarre workarounds. They are able to live a more normal life while constantly reinforcing and reminding themselves of the importance of their religion.
Some believe that this dedication in pleasing God might be just as if not even more important than following some law written thousands of years ago as strictly as possible.
I'm from Israel, and while I don't personally abide by any religious rules, I do come into contact with people who do and have an idea: it is important to understand that most people do not follow these rules as a functional method to achieve some goal. For example, it's not like they're actively thinking "oh if I press this button on Sabbath then I'll go to hell, and I wanna go to heaven so I won't".
Instead, they're following these rules as a social decree. In their circles, it is the obvious and accepted thing to do to follow these rules, which the community's leading Rabbi sets (or well, gives guidelines which are socially considered binding). If you don't follow the rules, then you're a weird one, and religious communities tend not to be accepting of the different, so they will shun you for turning on the light on Sabbath (if you keep doing it..)
So for one born into a religious community, you're taught to do so and there is a strong social incentive to do so: if you don't, you're first branded an odd one, and in some cases shunned, depending on how severe your straying off the path is. If you were told that were you to use the elevator normally, your parents would be very upset with you and may stop talking to you altogether, you'd think about it twice, even if you don't personally feel that you want to follow Judaism.
Finally, the religious authorities have a power incentive to do this: by setting rules and maintaining their position as the authorities who set rules, they keep a lot of power over a large number of people. Often this even manifests financially, as a respected religious authority can give Kosher certificates (and many products which are not food, like phones, can also be Kosher) - of course, the certification costs money, just like a SOC2 audit. Same goes for Sabbath certified electric devices - someone gave their stamp of approval, and the developer paid for it.
So to summarize - religious authorities enjoy power and money by being those who set the rules, everyday people have a strong social incentive to follow the rules as breaking them is taboo.
I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it.
But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to.
I'd like to point out that this isn't all there is to it - there are very obviously other incentives to do things this way (e.g. personal belief), but I'm just trying to make an analogy with terms from the HNer's day to day to show why you might follow religious rules even if you're (say) a teenager who doesn't care one bit.
I think this is a bit of an overstatement. In my experience — I'm an athiest who doesn't follow any particular religious rules either, but I was raised Orthodox Jewish — most Orthodox Jews do truly believe in God, and believe that at some level they'll be punished for breaking the rules and rewarded for following them. It's true that teenagers who haven't yet left home might be going through the motions cynically — when I was in high school, I was — but that's generally not true of adults: if you don't believe, when you leave home (either for college in the US, or army in Israel), it's fairly easy to "fall off the derech" and stop practicing now that you're free to find your own community. That might not be true in some of the ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel that are exempt from army service, or the Yiddish-speaking communities in America where there's a language barrier preventing you from interacting with the rest of the world, but for most religious Jews there's a pretty strong element of true belief. Religious Jews are a pretty tiny minority in the world; if you don't believe, it's pretty easy to find something else to believe in or to have a community around.
> I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it. But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to.
In general there are a huge swaths of rules in Judaism that are expected even within Orthodox Judaism to serve no practical purpose, other than simply God (supposedly) said to follow them. If you believe that God said you can eat a goose, but you cannot eat a stork, why is it any more ridiculous to believe God said you must not light a fire on Shabbat? It's all kind of silly unless you believe in the fundamental premise that these are rules from God, in which case none of it is silly. In the Orthodox communities I was raised in, the idea of a checkbox that you feel silly complying with didn't really exist: either you believed in the premise that God really wanted you to check those checkboxes, or you didn't, at which point why were you not eating shellfish or driving on Shabbat?
There are social norms too, of course. But at least for religious adults, in my experience it's mostly uncynical.
Yes indeed, it is multifaceted and there are many reasons any one person is following the rules. But I was trying to give a plausible explanation for why one might do so, even if it doesn't make strict sense to them to use a Shabbat mode elevator (the user I was replying to asked how does this make any sense, if you're trying to avoid labor during Sabbath), further outlining the idea that there are incentives other than belief that God said so.
In the case of the Sabbath elevator, obviously it was not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, so it's what the Rabbi thinks. So why believe the Rabbi when the logic doesn't seem to be 100% there? I think the reason is there is massive social incentive to comply instead of asking questions about such widely accepted ideas.
It does seem you're speaking from more personal experience than mine, so I defer to you, but I'd like to reiterate that I'm just trying to provide a plausible explanation for why one who doesn't have such a strong belief might still end up doing it (the hypothetical person in the post of the poster I was replying to who's asking themselves why a Sabbath elevator makes sense), but I'm not trying to say that's all there is to it. People who don't question it in the first place because their thought process is that the Halacha is telling them what God meant and thus they are merely following God's instructions don't question whether a Shabbat elevator makes sense in the first place.
If you believe that the laws are the literal word of God, it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to argue that God would've worded it differently if the loopholes weren't meant to be there.
The laws aren't the literal word of God though, because a lot of them come from the rabbis. The problem is that we don't have the rabbinic authority to overturn laws that don't apply anymore, so we're stuck with what we have a little bit.
we don't have the rabbinic authority
As a former LDS/Mormon (now effectively humanist/atheist), this concept of authority is pretty interesting. One of our core lessons when I was a missionary was that God's authority was lost from the Earth, and had to be restored by a new line of prophets. Some of my fellow missionaries enjoyed discussing this with messianic Jews in the area, sharing interpretations back and forth.
So in Judaism, are there tiers of rulemaking authority? Could a rabbi override a previous rabbi, but not a prophet?
The important bit is that an individual rabbi cannot overturn anything; the power comes from a legislative entity called "The Sanhedrin". However, in order to be part of the sanhedrin you need to be ordained by another member of the sanhedrin and at some point (unknown exactly when, possibly around the year 400) this lineage was lost. The idea of overturning a prophet doesn't really matter though, because as far as I know we don't get laws from the prophets (except Moses obviously).
You're not "getting around the laws" you're following the laws.
To me it sounds more like "cargo cult" (the software variant) than hacking. There's something, in this case a set of rules, that cannot be removed or modifed but nobody knows exactly why. They just keep following it and inventing costly hacks to keep the system running.
You either follow the spirit of the rule or you don't. This sounds like the "hack" of christianity: live a sinful life and then repent on your deadbed.
See also: Amish hackers
https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/
A question for you, Mr. Jewish hacker, a serious question, if I may.
The Commandment in Genesis 20:10 spells out the Sabbath rule. "But the seventh day is a sabbath to [the holy name]; you shall not do any work — you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns"
There seems to be a streak of moral fairness here: don't work on the seventh day, and don't use your power over others to force them to work either. Everybody enjoys a day of rest, migrant workers and beasts of burden included!
How strong is this sort of ethical argument against hacks like Shabbat elevators?
"By consuming electricy needlessly we compel some electric-utility workers to be on the job, and we fail to give Creation a much-needed tiny bit of rest."
I know there must be some conversation among observant Jews about this kind of thing as it relates to the ancient commandments. How does it go?
>There seems to be a streak of moral fairness here: don't work on the seventh day, and don't use your power over others to force them to work either. It's not prohibited for non-jews to work on the sabbath though, it's only prohibited for jews.
>Everybody enjoys a day of rest, migrant workers and beasts of burden included! I actually do think getting an animal or someone else to do shabbat work for you is prohibited except under certain circumstances and following certain restrictions.
>"By consuming electricy needlessly we compel some electric-utility workers to be on the job, and we fail to give Creation a much-needed tiny bit of rest." Don't think god needs to rest.
>Don't think god needs to rest.
Except for that one time, you mean.
> Don't think god needs to rest.
Remind me again what happened on the seventh day?
This is an excellent question, and one dealt with in Israel. Today, electricity is required for the normal functioning of modern civilization, including for hospitals and security. Once power generation is required for society, all are permitted to benefit from it.
Wikipedia source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat#Use_of_...
There are also light switch hacks that allow to turn on/off the light without actually interrupting or creating an electrical circuit (e.g. there's a photo-sensitive relay which checks at random intervals if the path of light is blocked, and then switches the circuit, but since blocking the path of the future light does not do anything right now, it may not be a violation). While the religious permissibility of those are still questionable, one has to admire the ingenuity. Not sure about Alexa things, would be interesting to check what rabbis think about the always-on devices on Shabbat...
The simplest hack I've seen was pre-torn toilet paper - while tearing stuff is not permitted on Shabbat, the needs of your body do not cease, so one has to prepare :)
But literally all of those hacks feel like playing some stupid game with God. Like, if God is a truly omnipotent and all knowing, why would he/she care that you're tearing toilet paper on Shabbat or flipping a light switch. Equally, if you assume that this all powerful God really cares about this stuff, why would you assume they can be "tricked" by those hacks? Is the God all powerful and all knowing? Or literally so stupid that you can defeat the sacred logic with some simple hacks? Like the Eruv wire that wraps around Manhattan - do religious people honestly think that this "trick" works, in a spiritual sense? That they go to have their eternal judgement dispensed and God goes "yep, well done, you tricked me, I never specified the maximum diameter of the wire, and clearly you humans are too stupid to read context/intention in 'do no work' so yeah, it's all good, I have to let this one slide".
There's no reason to follow the internal logic of a religion when trying to understand its workings. With Sabbath, observe how the rabbis decide on how to apply the rules. They know that their task is to keep the society functional, even if they use religious language to express it.
One basic reason a community will have some arbitrary rules: They make it expensive to be part of the community. They make it harder to fake adherence and profit from the group. All members of the community understand this intuitively even if they can't express it. So they welcome what looks like silly rules to the outsider.
You are re-visiting questions posed by a famous 2nd temple period rabbi from the Galilee which ultimately spawned a radical offshoot sect that exists to this very day. ;)
I'm not religious anymore, but none of this strikes me as particularly compelling. I can take up the part of the theist here.
>Like, if God is a truly omnipotent and all knowing, why would he/she care that you're tearing toilet paper on Shabbat or flipping a light switch.
Because god prohibited these things.
>Equally, if you assume that this all powerful God really cares about this stuff, why would you assume they can be "tricked" by those hacks?
Because they permitted doing it that way.
>Is the God all powerful and all knowing? Or literally so stupid that you can defeat the sacred logic with some simple hacks?
God is all powerful and all knowing and the things they prohibited are prohibited and the things they didn't aren't.
>Like the Eruv wire that wraps around Manhattan - do religious people honestly think that this "trick" works, in a spiritual sense?
Loaded question, but short answer is yes. I think you should read this article (https://www.halachipedia.com/index.php?title=Introduction_to...). The eruv is to get around a rabbinic prohibition, not a divine one. It's also not accepted by everyone as a valid technicality; my rabbi would carry in nothing less than a walled city.
>That they go to have their eternal judgement dispensed and God goes "yep, well done, you tricked me, I never specified the maximum diameter of the wire, and clearly you humans are too stupid to read context/intention in 'do no work' so yeah, it's all good, I have to let this one slide".
No you go to your eternal judgement and god goes "good job you never violated any of my commandments".
Right, some good arguments here. If you don't mind, to continue the discussion a bit further:
>>Because god prohibited these things.
But God didn't, at least not explicitly. The specific instruction is to "do no work on Shabbat". The interpretation is human. I think(and of course Rabbis disagree) that interpreting "flipping the light switch" as work is NOT what God meant, it feels almost like an insult to intelligence to interpret it this way. There is an intention behind it, and I think the intention is more important than trying to be as literal as physically possible. After all doing literally anything is "work" in the sense that there is physical activity happening, you are burning oxygen just breathing, walking creates sound and talking moves the air about - it's all "work" in the physical sense. Why is flipping a switch special? I know the answer to this - because religious authorities have decided that's the case.
But that loops back to the original point - God didn't decide this. Rabbis did.
It's like Muslims are prohibited from consuming alcohol and if we accept that this is a divine restriction, we can still discuss what it actually means for us humans. Some interpretatioms say that Muslims shouldn't drink alcohol because the intention here is to prevent inebriation. But cooking with alcohol is fine because it doesn't lead to inebriation. Some other teachings say that all alcohol is bad. Those teachings conveniently ignore that alcohol is in everything(your average loaf of bread contains up to 2% alcohol by volume, purely due to yeast fermentation), but dogma is more important than reality.
So yes, I think I stand by what I said initially - all of this feels like a game, with some really crazy rules. Play according to the rules and you get eternal salvation. Don't question the rules.
>The specific instruction is to "do no work on Shabbat". The interpretation is human.
This is a good point, but I think orthodox judaism wouldn't say that the interpretation is human. In orthodox judaism, the interpretation of biblical commandments is usually assumed to be oral tradition from god. There are also rabbinic decrees, but these are generally treated with something approximating the force of a biblical command because there's also a biblical command to follow the rulings of the rabbis.
>I think(and of course Rabbis disagree) that interpreting "flipping the light switch" as work is NOT what God meant, it feels almost like an insult to intelligence to interpret it this way. There is an intention behind it, and I think the intention is more important than trying to be as literal as physically possible.
This is speaking like you're not obligated to fulfill the commandments. That's axiom one. Once we have that down, the obvious next question is "what are the commandments." Asking "what is the spirit of the commandments and when can I violate them" is wrong because the answer in orthodox judaism is that you can never violate them. You can make an orthodox argument that electricity should be allowed, the prohibition is definitely rather unbased in actual law imo. But that wouldn't be because it's ok in the spirit of the law, it would be because the law permits it.
>So yes, I think I stand by what I said initially - all of this feels like a game, with some really crazy rules. Play according to the rules and you get eternal salvation. Don't question the rules.
I think I can agree with this. Most of the rules do in fact feel like dumb contrived bullshit. If you actually look at the categories for work on the sabbath it's very clearly stuff that a worker in the BCEs would think is work; lighting fires, doing planting and harvesting, carrying stuff, weaving, making bread, it's all very strange and disjointed from modern reality. And this is supposedly divine decree too, so it's not even the work of ancient rabbis, supposedly.
> I think(and of course Rabbis disagree) that interpreting "flipping the light switch" as work is NOT what God meant
It's amazing that people can just come out and say "I know what the God meant, while people who lived this tradition for thousands of years, carried it over several continents and kept it alive through wars, plagues, genocides, raise and ruin of empires - they all don't know what they're talking about". It certainly is gutsy.
The thing is, there's only two ways to know things, in general. One is experience it yourself - in this case, you go to God, ask Him (or Her, or Them, whatever works for you) what is the meaning of that, get an answer and live the rest of your life according to it (or ignore it if you like, your choice, free will and stuff). Another is trust the relevant authorities - and in this case, those are the rabbis. If you are interested in Judaic tradition, then there's no Judaic tradition outside the rabbis. Of course, inside there's a lot of variety, but if you discard the rabbis, then you've got no Judaism. Whatever is left is not based on Judaic tradition anymore, and then one would have to ask - what exactly is it based on? Why would you believe anything in those texts at all or put any importance into it? Of course, you don't have to - but then the question of what's the right thing to do on Shabbat is moot - you do whatever you like (well, excluding the obvious things like murdering people etc.) and it's fine.
>>It's amazing that people can just come out and say "I know what the God meant, while people who lived this tradition for thousands of years, carried it over several continents and kept it alive through wars, plagues, genocides, raise and ruin of empires - they all don't know what they're talking about". It certainly is gutsy.
I'm just amazed that all of the thousands of years of experience, of wars famines struggle, of tradition of practice of worship of deep religious study was required to come up with a conclusion that somehow flipping a light switch is work. I'm not saying I know better, after all I'm not a follower of this religion, but this article was very specifically about a way to avoid pressing buttons because once again, all of those thousands of years of tradition decided that pressing buttons is work. Ok, cool, I'd like to point out that it doesn't make any sense to me. But then I forgot that religion doesn't have to make any sense to exist.
It's not "work" in the meaning you understand work. You're reading a fourth or fifth party translation of the actual tradition, with the terminology dumbed down to the level that makes it accessible to the layman. It's like reading quantum mechanics book and laughing about how stupid those physicists are thinking quarks have colors and flavors. I mean, do they really imagine they could taste a quark? Surely doesn't make any sense!
> I'd like to point out that it doesn't make any sense to me
It wouldn't. At least until you actually learn the framework and understand the terminology and the rules of it. And it's not supposed to make sense you you anyway - it's not made for you.
Fair enough.
> if you assume that this all powerful God really cares about this stuff
Nobody knows what God "cares" about, nor even if "caring" is something God does at all, in a sense that humans do it. It's like comparing human to CPU by clock frequency - these are different things, and clock frequency is a useable measure for a CPU (at least certain designs of CPUs) but quite useless if you want to talk about a human. You can't just bring terminology from one area onto another and expect it automatically to make sense.
> Is the God all powerful and all knowing?
Yes.
> Or literally so stupid that you can defeat the sacred logic
Why you think it's "defeating" anything? God is not a CTF contest. You framing it as "defeat" is just your framing, but it's not how Jews see it - they see it as "preserving", not "defeating".
> do religious people honestly think that this "trick" works, in a spiritual sense?
What you mean by "works"? It certainly works for them. It may not work for you, but if you are neither an observant Jew nor God, who cares if it works for you or not?
>>What you mean by "works"?
Works as in - they believe that they go for their eternal judgement and God says "I clearly said 'do no work' and you thought that by wrapping an entire city in a piece of wire you can safely ignore my commandment".
I know it's pointless to apply logic to religion, but how far could you stretch that? Could you wrap an entire country in wire and claim it still have the same effect? An entire continent? The entire planet?
>> who cares if it works for you or not?
I understand you're being flippant, but come on. I'm just asking if religious people think that such a simple "trick" is really going to be accepted by God as compliant with holy commandments. I can see the answer is clearly yes.
Try to think of the Torah -- God's literal word, to Orthodox Jews -- as the Constitution, and rabbinical scholars throughout the generations as the Supreme Court.
The Torah prohibits work on Shabbat, but only points out a few instances in the broadest terms. One of those is to not carry items "between domains", directly referenced in Exodus and Jerimiah, but again only a single passage in each instance. This was expanded upon in Talmudic works, which include an explanation of what exactly constitutes a public domain.
The eruv is not a loophole to "fool God". The eruv is a means to adjust the technical (or legal) definition of a public domain.
When one ensures that a community has a functioning eruv, that itself is part of Shabbat observance.
> Works as in - they believe that they go for their eternal judgement and God says "I clearly said 'do no work' and you thought that by wrapping an entire city in a piece of wire you can safely ignore my commandment".
No, that's not what they believe - they're not ignoring the commandment. They are fulfilling it in accordance with the rules given to them by God and passed down by tradition.
> Could you wrap an entire country in wire and claim it still have the same effect
I don't know, maybe - if an authority in the Jewish law declares it ok, then those who follow that authority would consider it OK. That's exactly how most Western law systems work too. If you want to know if something is lawful, you ask a lawyer. If lawyers disagree, they go to SCOTUS. If SCOTUS decides certain way, then the law is this way. Well, maybe a bit different since Jews have no SCOTUS (then called Sanhedrin) anymore, so if rabbis disagree, they just disagree and their followers do different things.
> I understand you're being flippant
No, really I am not. You try to apply your criteria to the environment and the culture of which you don't know the laws, the customs, the motivations and the history, and you complain it doesn't work for you and you don't understand it. It's like coming to somebody's house, trying on their shoes and complaining they don't fit. Well duh, it's not your shoes, why would you expect them to fit?! For people that accept this culture, it works, if you're not part of it - it doesn't, but that's fine. It's not some criticism of you, it's just not meant to work in way you think it is meant.
> I'm just asking if religious people think that such a simple "trick" is really going to be accepted by God
Religious people don't think it's a "trick". You think it's a "trick" but it's your definition, so asking what they think about it is pointless - they don't think in the terms you do.
Probably also why the stereotype that Jewish people are good at being lawyers exist, they basically start studying law from as soon as they start attending synagogue and studying the Talmud.
>Alexa has opened up a whole new avenue of hacks. Previously you had to get light switches with random timers if you wanted electric light on Saturday, but now you can make an Alexa routine that is triggered by certain words or motions so that it technically doesn't count as "activating" the switch. I don't know any rabbi which would allow this. Maybe it's a conservative thing.