Erev Shabbat Jewish Blogging

[gnomi]

This week (on recommendation of mabfan), Eiruvin!

Not the masechet, but the actual item.

In the book of Shmot (Exodus), we read that b'nei yisrael (the Children of Israel) are very enthusiastic in bringing items to the Mishkan (tabernacle), and eventually they are instructed to stop bringing items to the encampment of the Levi'im:

“And the call was broadcast in the camp, saying, no man or woman should do any more workmanship for the sanctified donations; then the people stopped bringing.” (Shemot 36:6.)

According to the Gemara (Shabbat, 96b), this announcement came during Shabbat, and from this we learn that we are not allowed to carry from the private domain into the public domain on Shabbat. This has come to mean that while we can carry inside our houses all we want (as one of my teachers once put it, "You can carry an elephant around your house on shabbat,"), we cannot carry from our house to the public domain (namely, outside on the street).

However, since one can carry within a private domain, there exists a method by which we transform the public domain into a private domain. The method is called Eiruv Chatzerot (usually clipped to just "eiruv"), literally, the mingling of courtyards. A series of wires and ropes, traditionally, are erected around an area to designate it as all one domain, and thus one can carry within the eiruv. This allows, for example, one to carry one's keys, one's siddur (prayer book) and talit (prayer shawl) to shul, food for a meal to someone's house, and one is permitted to push a baby carriage within an eiruv (while one cannot push one on Shabbat outside an eiruv).

When I was younger, Boston did not have an eiruv. In fact, I was in college before the Greater Boston Eiruv Corporation's eiruv was completed. In the 13 years since its inception, this eiruv has grown to include a number of communities in Greater Boston that have large Jewish populations. There are also eiruvs ("eiruvin" is the plural) in Cambridge and Sharon. As more eiruvin have gone up, it has become more and more possible for observant Jews to interact with their friends on shabbat, especially if they are families with small children.

I've already called the Eiruv hotline for the Greater Boston eiruv, and the eiruv is reported as Up.

Shabbat shalom!

Comments

[angwantibo.livejournal.com]

I'm one of a score of volunteer checkers in Sharon. What's odd is reporting back the status on my section and then calling the hotline in another town, as I will be doing this shabbos. Even stranger is that I will be staying w/ a Chabad rabbi who doesn't hold by the eruv. Is it inappropriate to carry into/from his house?

I bet Shabbat 96b doesn't answer that question!

[magid.livejournal.com]

I remember the Boston i>Globe article that came out when the eiruv went up in Boston, and one of the few people they interviewed was a Chabad person who didn't hold by it. D'oh.

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

this may be a dumb question, but how can you carry stuff/push a baby carriage TO the eruv? or do people just designate it around a bunch of houses?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

The answer is you can't. You have to have your house and the shul within the eiruv if you want to push the carriage to shul.

[magid.livejournal.com]

You can carry (/push a carriage) only within the eruv, but the eruv is pretty large, encompassing most of some municipalities.

(For instance, most of Cambridge and Somerville are encompassed in the North Charles eruv. Bits aren't, but there's a lot of walking area enclosed.)

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

ok, that makes sense, thanks. i always wondered how you got to the eruv and exactly how big they were in the first place.

[ckd]

It's around a whole chunk of area. The North Charles Community Eruv covers most of Cambridge and Somerville.

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

that's what magid said, but without the handy map. thanks. :> (i evidently live just inside it. good to know.)

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I am completely boggled by this one.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I take it there's some rule that ponds aren't allowed to be included in the eiruv? And what's up with City Hall?

[magid.livejournal.com]

Ponds have to be excluded, as do cemeteries. I don't think there's any kind of problem with City Hall, though.

[ckd]

From the description, it sounds like there may be a cemetery adjacent to City Hall.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Ah. OK, yes, cemeteries have to be excluded. Depending on what is being used as the boundary, it can lead to descriptors of where one can/cannot walk like you quoted in your other comment.

[ckd]

Ah yes, here's the text:

From the corner of Walnut and Commonwealth proceeding southwards, one must stay on the east side of Walnut until Homer and then can proceed on Walnut along either side of the sidewalk until the edg of the Cemetery Fence. {Newton Cemetery} From here until the south end of the cemetery, one must walk only only on the east side of the street (and never IN the street). The sidewalk along the Newton Cemetery is out of the Eruv from north end to south end along Walnut Street.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The Newton City Hall has a pond in front of it, with a creek on either side. That's a separate exclusion from the Cemetery, which is a block away, and from Bullogh's Pond, which is a block away in the other direction, and to which we like to take the kids in nice weather. (So the kids are getting an early education in the concept of eruv and carrying.)

[ckd]

Thanks for the clarifying info!

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

Ok, that is *so* cheesing the mechanic.

I'm sure it makes life better if you can define three towns or your whole city as private domain for the purposes of carrying your keys... but the whole point is to differentiate public and private domain! Deciding that the street (and restaurants and parks and so on) is actually your private domain because there's string around it? It's so against the spirit of the rule.

Although maybe I should go move into an eiruv so that when my roof leaks, I can have all the local jews fix it, because it's in their private domain and is thus clearly their problem. Or at least, have them carry money to me to fix it, since it's probably just a shabbat thing and they can't actually fix my roof then.

You're lucky I'm not your GM!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Eruv doesn't work with all public domains. Technically, something is truly a public domain if 600,000 people pass through every day (based on the number of Jews leaving Egypt, where the same Hebrew word for something like 'multitude' is used). Anything that is public like this cannot ever have an eruv around it. Spaces that have fewer people through them can have an eruv built around it (excluding bodies of water and cemeteries).

Also, the string (and posts, which are also integral) are just a fence... with really large openings between slats. So this is making a fenced-in area that defines a community, rather like a walled city did in medieval times.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

I think what's getting to me is not that it's defining a community - but that it's explicitly taking a chunk of the public domain and calling it private.

Maybe it's a translation issue, but public domain and private domain are distinctly different things, with distinctly different characteristics, laws, behaviors, etc. Saying you've turned public private by simply putting a metaphoric wall around it just doesn't work, to me. You're not actually changing any of the characteristics of the domain that make it an inappropriate place to do private domain things.

Or to put it another way, I'm just saying it's about as funky as turning crackers into God.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I think it is a translation issue. I usually translate them as "enclosed area" and "unenclosed area", because what constitutes a "reshut hayachid" is NOT ownership by an individual but whether it has a physical demarcation at its boundary.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Or to put it another way, I'm just saying it's about as funky as turning crackers into God.

OK, here's a way of looking at it that might make it easier to get your head around. It's like you're camping within the confines of a National Park. Everyone has the right to go into the National Park, but your specific camp area is your domain. For the period that you are camping there, it would be tresspassing if someone from outside your camping group came into your camping area. But when you and your friends are done camping there, you break camp and the area returns to being part of the National Park. Were you to return to the same space in the same National Park the next week and reestablish your campground there, that area would return to being your space for the balance of the time you're camping there.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

530nm330hz explained it satisfactorily to me. I'll quite happily accept that you can turn an unenclosed area into an enclosed area by wrapping it in string.

Sadly, my first comment was supposed to be funny instead of confused. Apparently I can't be funny on Fridays....

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Another point - where carrying id forbidden by biblical law an eruv is of no use. Only where the rabbis forbade carrying can the rabbinical instrument of an eruv be efficacious.

[sethg]

"Private domain" and "public domain" have special meanings in the context of eruvim that they don't have anywhere else. gnomi's residence is in the same "private domain" as mine for the purposes of the laws of Shabbat, but that doesn't give me the right to, say, break into her apartment and rifle through her books without her permission.

In order to convert a group of houses into one shared "private domain" for the purposes of Shabbat, you can't just put a string around them[*]; you need permission from every land-owner that the boundary is built on, and then (if memory serves) you need permission from the civil authorities. Because of all the permissions that had to be sought, building the Boston eruv took eight years. The eruv skirts around one condo complex where the management company categorically refused to give permission.

(Well, you could use a wall instead of a string, but presumably most of the people on the boundary of the eruv would take exception to someone else building a wall across one side of their land. The string is used because a string suspended across two poles is the minimal case of a doorway, and a line of adjacent doorways is the minimal case of a yard.)

It's a weird law, but no weirder IMHO than not being able to eat clam chowder... mmm... how I miss Legal's clam chowder....

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

You know, Legal's also has a trefe fish chowder that doesn't have clams! (What I mean, of course, is that the only thing that makes it trefe is that it's cooked in the same pots and pans as all the unkosher food. The basic ingredients are kosher, though, so if we could get the recipe...)

[sethg]

I've had Legal's fish chowder. I've had their clam chowder. Sorry, there's no comparison.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

Nah, that makes perfect sense. :)