10 ms·

my personal favorite is the Sabbath mode https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Sabbath_service_(SHO) not to

• chimeracoder 5y ago
  > not to pick on a specific belief system, but it's quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things. That's not the way observant Jewish people look at it at all. You're assuming that these workarounds are not "following the spirit", but according to them, the workarounds are as much a part of the spirit of the law as the law itself.
  • tamaharbor 5y ago
    Tell that to your nearest Eruv.
    • seigando 5y ago
      There's no reason for that to not be the case.
• AndrewDucker 5y ago
  The letter was, they believe, the word of God. If God hadn't meant the loophole to be there then he would have used different words. The loophole is divine.
  • krapp 5y ago
    >If God hadn't meant the loophole to be there then he would have used different words. The loophole is divine. One could just as well state that if God had meant the loophole to be there, he would have mentioned it.
    • Kalium 5y ago
      When you believe in an omniscient and omnipotent lawgiver, that line of argument is a little weak.
      • BitwiseFool 5y ago
        If you assume omniscience and omnipotence as a starting point, then you can justify anything that exists using the same reason, otherwise it wouldn't exist, right? I don't mean to get into a theological or ontological argument, though. It just seems like you can use the foundation to justify anything you want.
        • stickfigure 5y ago
          "If God didn't intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?"
          • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
            "If God didn't intend for us to eat people, then why did he make them out of meat?"
            • krapp 5y ago
              God doesn't explicitly forbid cannibalism anywhere in the Bible. We just have to find a way to define humans as ruminants with cloven hooves and it'll all be kosher.
              • smegger001 5y ago
                CRISPR to the rescue
              • skissane 5y ago
                Whether humans are kosher is actually debated in traditional Jewish sources: https://judaism.stackexchange.com/a/101466 https://judaism.stackexchange.com/a/101466 No Rabbi approves of eating humans; it is more a technical debate about whether it is explicitly prohibited by the rules, versus "not strictly prohibited but ewwww... so don't do it"
  • LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    If the loophole seems to go directly against intended meaning, can you say it’s there?
    • jacobr1 5y ago
      The distinction is the belief that there is no intended meaning beyond the literal meaning.
• michaelhoffman 5y ago
  The prohibition is on doing work generally, with a specific prohibition on kindling a fire, which was quite a lot of work millennia ago. Does using a device that allows you to avoid walking up many flights of stairs really violate the spirit of a law prohibiting work on the sabbath?
  • moduspol 5y ago
    And for that matter, where is the line drawn? The other workaround I had heard for this is to have a non-Jew hired specifically to stand in the elevator and push buttons on behalf of Jews on the sabbath. But they'd still have to speak the floor so the attendant would know what button to push, right? If so, what if an elevator had basic voice recognition? Speaking the floor number to a machine is no more work than speaking it to an attendant, right? Maybe this rule interpretation was originally made back when elevators generally had attendants and did require some expertise to operate (e.g. to stop at the right spots)? And then didn't get rolled back when it became essentially trivial?
    • bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      If speaking isn't allowed, a hack* would be for the elevator to start counting, and tell the passenger to nod or lift their head up after their floor number is mentioned. Or even just walk to the activation corner. * I asked Yahweh, he said this is legal.
      • krapp 5y ago
        >* I asked Yahweh, he said this is legal. Seems legit.
  • hawk_ 5y ago
    if the idea is to not work then pressing a button isn't going to change anything. if the elevator is being taken to do some work, again pressing the button has nothing to do with it.
  • ars 5y ago
• jackbeck 5y ago
  There are sects (like the ultra orthodox) who don't use Sabbath mode specifically for this reason. They say that the added weight causes the elevator's motor to work harder thereby desecrating the Sabbath.
  • dmurray 5y ago
    Are they allowed to go down? Also, depending on the counterweight and the current load of the elevator, adding an extra person to it might tax the motor less even when ascending.
    • ars 5y ago
      Generating electricity is equally forbidden. The prohibition is not work, but rather creation. In this case creating electrical energy.
      • nybble41 5y ago
        A prohibition on "creation" is over-broad. Any action taken purposefully can be considered an act of creation. That would include choosing to adhere to the law (thus creating a world where there is more compliance with the law) even if that takes the form of deliberately doing nothing. The only way I can think of to completely avoid creating anything would be to remain unconscious the entire time, thus preventing yourself from making any choices.
        • ars 5y ago
          Judaism has a specific list of what counts as creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/39_Melachot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/39_Melachot
          • nybble41 5y ago
            Yes, that is understood. My point was that if the intention was to prohibit "acts of creation" then the official list is woefully incomplete, and rather arbitrary; other acts which could equally well be considered "creation" under the same reasoning are not prohibited. (Mostly IMHO because if said reasoning were applied consistently it would be impossible to follow the law, regardless of what one did or did not do.) It leaves the impression that "creation" is merely an excuse or after-the-fact rationalization, not the actual reason for the prohibition.
• chadash 5y ago
  In Orthodox Judaism, the letter of the law typically is the spirit of the law. Not a perfect analogy, but think of the talmud as similar to the tax code. There are things that are black, things that are white and things that are gray. If the tax code said there's a 5% sales tax on tangerines, clementines, navel oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, I'm probably not gonna volunteer to pay taxes on my Sumo Citruses, because it's not explicitly in there. Perhaps doing so would be in the spirit of the law, but that's just not the way people think when it comes to taxes. Same thing in Judaism... if it's technically legal, you can do it (this stems from the notion that the Jewish legal rules are of divine origin, and so if something was excluded, then its absence is intentional)[1]. Of course, much like the tax code, there are gray areas where different accountants (rabbis) may interpret the rules differently. One place where the analogy diverges is that in Judaism, there are lots of areas where the earlier generations of rabbis acknowledge something to be technically allowed according to the divine rules, but they forbid it anyway, either because they felt there was some societal benefit to doing so, or because they felt that adding an additional prohibition would prevent people from accidentally breaking the divine rule [1]. [1] Of course, the analogy breaks down, because it's more complicated than this. There are plenty of areas where people are customarily stricter, even if something is ok by the letter of the law. This applies to Sabbath Mode on elevators, which many Orthodox Jews won't use, but won't necessarily say that it's prohibited. [2] An example of this is the prohibition of eating milk and meat in the same dish. Technically, the divine rule is no cooking milk and meat together, but the rabbis added an extra rule of no eating them together to make sure that people wouldn't come to cook them together.
  • asciimov 5y ago
    So my Jewish friends could technically eat a cheese burger, as long as the cheese was placed on the burger after cooking? Would they have to wait till the burger cools down so that it doesn't melt the cheese? (Here I am concerned about carryover heating/cooking being considered cooking by law.) I am endlessly fascinated by religious laws and their implications/consequences.
    • dsr_ 5y ago
      You would have to find someone who counted the validity of the original law ("Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" in Exodus https://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0223.htm https://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0223.htm) but did not count any later interpretation or fence around it. Please talk to your participants well before you start this experiment; very few people are going to have an equivocal attitude towards it.
• jackbeck 5y ago
  Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010617
• canadianfella 5y ago
  Can we all agree that religion is pretty silly?
  • grayhatter 5y ago
    It seems not on HN you can't.
    • sevrinsky 5y ago
      HN has a religion all its own, with its virtues and deadly sins.
• disruptthelaw 5y ago
  I took my gap year in israel with a religious Jewish friends. We were slight stoners back then and on sabbath in order for him to get high I’d have to light a bong in a cupboard and fill the cupboard with smoke and then swap places with him. This was multiple times per sabbath every sabbath. I also had to constantly open the fridge for him because of the automatic light. I found these rituals ridiculous (20 years later I still do) and we fought over it and decided to part ways for the rest of the gap year.
  • deregulateMed 5y ago
    Any idea if he is still a zealot or if he is woke yet?
  • ars 5y ago
    He should not have done that. In general a Jew is not permitted to ask a non-Jew to do things that are forbidden to him. Some exceptions are things necessary for normal life, that would be impossible to do in advance. A classic example is lighting a fire for heating (back when that was done with a pile of wood), and minor medical needs. (Major medical needs the Jew would violate the Shabbath and do himself.) Getting high is not a necessity, and the fridge switch could have been taped before the Shabbath.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      My former (I moved) Orthodox neighbors had some lovely coded language for this sort of thing. "Our house is really hot, do you want to come over?" "We're cooking, perhaps you have some advice?" I actually enjoyed being the goy for a few years.
• jtchang 5y ago
  Goes well with the Eruv around NYC: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-encircles-manhattan-protecting-sanctity-of-sabbath https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci... It is hilarious the lengths people go to.
  • seigando 5y ago
    It's funny because you don't understand it?
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  You'll enjoy this then (when Richard Feynman encountered something similar): https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ev3gy/excerpt_from_richard_feynman_is_electricity_fire/ https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ev3gy/excerpt_from...
• el_nahual 5y ago
  There are a few sibling comments explain this by saying that, since the law is divine, so are the loopholes. That doesn't tell the whole story. A big chunk of judaism has always centered about cultural preservation. In a way, the careful crafting of ridiculous loopholes is a stronger indicator about caring that the law exists --ie, presereving the culture-- than blindly following it. And so it's allowed and celebrated. ("What happens when a culture that is built on the notion of being an opressed people finds itself in a position of dominance" is an interesting question and left as an exercise to the reader.)
  • thrdbndndn 5y ago
    With all respect, what you said makes zero sense to me. I don't see how "caring that the law exists" equals to "preserving the culture" (at least not see it in a good way), or how it's not "blindly following it".
    • seigando 5y ago
      It is a form of blindly following it, in the same way that at some point for any legal system that people follow there's some level of blind following.
• seigando 5y ago
  What qualifies you to know the spirit and letter better than those that adhere to and study this belief system?
• wolverine876 5y ago
  > s quite interesting the lengths people go to follow the letter but not the spirit of things. Perhaps it appears that way to you, but what do you know about the 'spirit' of Jewish law compared to generations of life-long practitioners and rabbis?
• DonHopkins 5y ago
  As if they were so clever they could trick God. Pretty presumptuous and irreverent. Why worship a God you believe is such a gullible chump?
  • sevrinsky 5y ago
    Shabbat observance is a massive world unto itself. It originates in Biblical sources (i.e. "the word of God"), but has developed throughout the entire rabbinic tradition, from the time of the prophets through the Talumdic era, and subsequently to the modern day. Today, it is universally accepted in Orthodox Judaism that direct active interaction with electrical appliances is forbidden on Shabbat. However, one may benefit from and "use" devices and automated systems set in place before Shabbat, including light timers, fridges, and heating plates. To be clear: nobody is "tricking" God by using a Shabbat elevator. Rather, this maintains the special nature of the day within the parameters established by centuries of tradition and scholarship ultimately based on God's commandments, while facilitating navigating our modern world.
    • DonHopkins 5y ago
      Of course nobody is actually "tricking god", because there is no god to trick: they're only tricking themselves. So of course it looks to them (the actual gullible chumps in this situation) from inside their tiny little closed-form logical trap of their fictional make-believe "massive world unto itself" role-playing MMPORG that they are "logically consistent", and not both worshiping and tricking a make-believe god who is a gullible chump, but that's sure not the way it looks and actually is objectively from outside in the real world. They also have just as many stubborn closed-form rationalizations for their outrageously neanderthal sexism, too. Just blame it on centuries of tradition and scholarship ultimately based on chump-god's commandments, not the frustrated angry misogynistic old men who originally invented and still perpetuate it. How about putting all that energy and ingenuity into coming up with clever exceptions and work-arounds to the traditional misogynistic commandments of a sexist god, that allow you to get away with respectfully treating women as clean and equal human beings seven out of seven days of the week, even while they're menstruating, instead of smugly obsessing on inventing intellectually and physically lazy tricks to cleverly ride elevators without pressing buttons one day a week?
• Animats 5y ago
  Oh, the workarounds. See KosherSwitch.[1] [1] http://www.kosherswitch.com http://www.kosherswitch.com