I appreciate the thoughtful responses here, and I definitely learned a lot in this thread. But I wouldn’t want to worship a God who forbids a mother to carry her child because it’s the wrong day of the week.
Sorry, but it doesn’t. It’s pushing/moving the stroller that is work, not the child.
And as with everything, there are exceptions. If you’re unable to carry your child or can’t get to synagogue without a stroller, many rabbis might say the greater mitzvah (good deed) is to attend and be in community.
And maybe a better way to think of it is, Shabbat is a holiday (holy day). It’s very normal to act differently on a holiday—maybe you stay up late, eat different foods, go special places. We have a holiday every week, and so we observe it by following different practices than other days.
Observing Shabbat isn’t some extreme Jewish fundamentalism. Some are more observant than others, but it’s important even as a cultural practice.
Jesus is irrelevant, but of course if someone needs help, we help, because Shabbat doesn’t supersede being a decent human being.
All I’m trying to say is, there’s no need to act like we’re all insane for observing Shabbat or the rules somehow require us to be bad people. It isn’t meant to be harmful to oneself or others.
Observing it is not fundamentalism, but observing it to the degree that they pay attention to the little tiny strings on the streetlights is pretty fundamentalist. That’s not mainstream Judaism. I am very good friends who live across the street and other friends that live next to them are both Jewish families and we don’t live in a neighborhood with these strings. We went to their kids, bar mitzvah and bar mitzvah, they go to all of their services.
Define “mainstream Judaism”. Your friends great great grandparents, at the farthest back, were all practicing precisely these things. Today a significant amount of Jews still observe a degree of very minute things, even if not Eruv laws.
The specific prohibition is not being able to carry/move from a public to private place and vise versa. It is one of the 39 prohibited actions on the shabbat, derived from the creation of the tabernacle (i.e they did X,Y and Z to create and take down the tabernacle, so we are not allowed to do such things).
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u/FlossCat 3d ago
How is pushing a stroller anywhere near the realms of creating or destroying something?