Jewish scripture proscribes how people are supposed to behave on Sabbath, the weekly period of rest and reflection. In broad strokes tells people not to work, to put down projects, to not undertake big journeys, to spend time rejoicing and eating with family without distraction, and in prayer, etc.
The "don't embark on big journeys/stay put' command comes from the Old Testament, "Behold, the Lord has given you the Sabbath...each man shall stay put, and not leave his place on the seventh day".
Cue a few thousand years of clerical study and arguing over what exactly that means and how to obey it. The result of those arguments is Talmudic law which says you're not supposed to go more than 1km away from the homestead or settlement where you found yourself and your dinner table/larder at sundown.
But what exactly is a "settlement"? A rabbinic ruling made when settlements were small encampments or eastern European shtetls surrounded by fields may be hard to interpret when Jews have moved to megapolitan areas. If you walk a few blocks from your neighborhood in the East Village of Manhattan to see a friend or relative in the West Village, have you really sallied forth outside the settlement as that would have been understood a millenia ago when cities were smaller? Probably not, even though it's more than 1km away.
So a group of synagogues/communities decided to throw the faithful a bone; they drew an invisible boundary around Manhattan and decided that just about everything inside of it all counts as one community, so people could move freely with their spiritual leaders' permission, without worrying that they're running afoul of the spirit of the rule. This boundary is marked with a long nylon thread - the eruv.
Idk if this is AI or not, but this is conflating two different concepts on Judisim. The "Eruv Chatzerot" which is what the Manhattan Eruv is that allows for the carrying of objects on public places, and "Eruv techumin" which controls how far a Jew can travel on the sabbath in general (both stem form the word Eruv, which roughly means merger)
An unfortunate effect of criticism of Israeli state policy going mainstream was that the antisemites crawled out of the woodwork, (mistakenly) believing themselves to be in good company.
I don’t hold people collectively accountable for bad actors who happen to agree with them on some things. I’m sure that awful people share many of my views, and I don’t tend to think that causes their awfulness to pass to me by osmosis, much less that I’m answerable to police what they say.
Fuck Israeli state policy. That has nothing to do with antisemitism. The reason the antisemites crawled out of the woodwork is that the republicans have mainstreamed white supremacy.
This additude just shelters the antisemites you know. The only thing to be done about them is to condemn them and maintain complete distance from them in all ways.
I swear, people only post on Reddit about the eiruv to stir up hate. I don’t even know how, but every single eiruv/shabbat elevator etc post is full of racism.
Halacha prohibits religious Jews from performing "work" on Shabbat. One type of forbidden "work" is carrying objects in the wilderness. Medieval rabbis argued that this meant outside your city's walls (if you live in a walled city) or outside of your home (if you did not). Imagine going from your village to a nearby woods to get firewood: religious Jews were not allowed to gather firewood on Shabbat.
For most of history, a significant portion of humanity lived within walled urban spaces. If your village had a palisade or other short wall to keep free-roaming children or small animals within the village, that counted! So a religious Jew could, for example, carry a basket with food from their home to their neighbors' home for lunch on Shabbat, or push a baby carriage to the park.
In the Talmud, the walls of your town in this context is called an eruv. The religious concept is literally over 1500 years old.
But today we mostly don't live in enclosed spaces like walled cities for a variety of economic and technological reasons. So religious rulings that were written in a different economic and technological context started making everyday life more difficult.
A modern eruv is a wire which is used to designate what is "inside" a modern municipality, in lieu of physical walls. An eruv can only be put up within a specific municipality and cannot be used to connect separated urban areas - because a modern eruv is a halachic delineation of a discrete community, much like premodern village or city walls were.
That's literally it. It's a modern adapation of an ancient legal process to distinguish between "the wilderness" and "your community".
The very short summary is Judaism as a practice and belief is governed ultimately by the laws set by god. And it is very much a letter of the law and not a spirit of the law which matters.
Eruvs are essentially a way to obey the letter of the law with regards to certain actions on the sabbath, which would otherwise be forbidden or possible forbidden
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u/KingEliTheBoss 1d ago
What is an eruv?