“We reroute the perimeter to keep it continuous, so it is constantly changing.” - Rabbi Sholey Klein
The Jewish religion demands that their ‘Shabbat’ day is a day of rest and during this day, there are many different rules that must, thirty-nine in fact that, under no circumstance be broken. Failure to abide by this strict set of rules, means you have transgressed against God and will not be allowed entry to heaven. Shabbat begins on Friday at sunset and ends on Saturday at sunset. Meaning that for those 24 hours, orthodox Jews who take the Shabbat incredibly seriously, use this time to show their devotion to their God. Of these thirty-nine rules, the one that causes the most consternation is the fact that, Jews are not allowed to lift or carry any item whatsoever, from a private domain, to a public one. As a result of this, anything that needs to be picked up, such as keys, a book, a cup, a pen can only be done inside the walls of their home, they cannot walk outside the walls of their private domain while carrying even their children, as this is forbidden on the Shabbat. They cannot leave their home while carrying anything. Carrying items is too akin to ‘work’ and as such is a transgression in the eyes of the God. Leving them trapped inside their homes on the Shabbat day. However, even followers of the strictest form of Judaism and the most devout, find this particular set of rules quite difficult to adhere to. What if you have an appointment? A birthday party? Meeting a friend for lunch or an interview? Necessity is the mother of invention and so the eruv wire was born.
Talmudic law derived from biblical commandments forbids doing 39 kinds of work on the Sabbath. In addition to ploughing and harvesting, buying and selling, cooking by kindling a fire, writing and other obvious kinds of employment, carrying any object outside the home such as keys, books, prayer shawls, canes or even babies is forbidden. Pushing a stroller or wheelchair in public on the day of rest is also prohibited. There is a significant loophole, however, that was developed millenniums ago by the Talmudic sages in Babylon as a way of making the biblical law compatible with the practical necessities of living and honouring the Sabbath as a day of rest. It is known as an eruv wire. The word eruv is the Hebrew term for an artificial boundary enclosing an area, buildings and fencing with gaps filled in by wire, or, in modern times, translucent fishing line strung between lampposts and utility poles. According to the sages, an eruv extends the private domain of a home into the streets.
Therefore, in any Jewish community, fishing line encircles the entire Jewish neighbourhood. This creates one large, extended wall of their private home that It is attached at the top of telephone poles and extends for miles in an enormous perimeter that creates ‘one’ home. Meaning, that the Jewish community, as long as they stay withing this huge imaginary perimeter fence, are ‘technically’ not breaking any commandment as they are withing a ‘private’ domain. Therefore, they can carry on as though it is not the Shabbat so their daily lives are unaffected. There are eruvs in all Jewish communities, Manhattan, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and so on. The West LA eruv is one of the biggest in the world, even bigger than the eruv in Jerusalem. The wall encloses much of West LA. Its perimeter covers about 100 square miles. It was created in 2003. There was a smaller one that preceded it that began in the 1970s. A maintenance and repair team oversee the eruv. There’s a four-person crew of rabbis who specialize in the law surrounding the eruv. They drive the perimeter and look for breaks and if there’s a break, a three-person maintenance team of paid staff mend the line and put it back in place so that the line remains intact and the entire neighbourhood, becomes ‘one’ private domain again. Every week they find breaks, and fix them immediately.
In ancient times, walled neighbourhoods or entire cities could be used to frame eruvs, figuratively extending private spaces into public areas. Of course, putting up a wall around a modern urban city is not so straightforward, even a hypothetical one made of fishing line, and with cars, buses, planes and general weather to contend with, lines constantly snap, ruining the loophole the Jewish people have come to rely on. What does it mean for something to actually be a “wall” as such? “A wall can be a wall even if it has many doorways creating large open spaces,” according to Lorne Rozovsky a Jewish lawyer, “This means that a wall does not have to be solid.” By extension, an eruv can be formed by treating, say, public telephone poles with cables slung between them as minimalist “door frames.” Effectively, this creates a system of “walls” that are entirely made up of doorways. And that is the argument behind NYC’s eruv. Any break in the line means that the makeshift doorway is no longer intact. Therefore, any disconnect is a serious problem. Sometimes, workers employed by the local government will clip a line by mistake or on purpose for any number of reasons, or they may allow it to drop down, technically breaking the “door frame.” In other cases, weather or accidents can take down a key pole in the network. Fixing these breaks is usually a simple matter, involving some wire, a cutting tool and maybe a small cherry-picker crane. If the line can’t be repaired in time, an entire eruv is declared void until it can be reconnected. It gets tricky if the eruv goes down on Shabbat. According to the law, you’re not supposed to tell people if it goes down. Because if you don’t know that it’s down, then you’re not breaking the law. You can plead ignorance. So if you see a car crash into a fence of the eruv on Shabbat, you’re actually required to keep your mouth shut.
This is why some ultra-Orthodox do not use it. Doniel Berry is a Hasidic Jew who doesn’t use the eruv, and he explained why. “There is a practical concern that it might fall down over Shabat and that possibility doesn’t make it not kosher or not usable, but it does make it a possibility that it might not be kosher. So for that extra precaution I am not alone in the community that we choose not to use it, basically just out of an extra layer of protection that in the event it should go down, we won’t accidentally be transgressing the prohibition of carrying on the Sabbath,” Berry said. Maintenance of the eruv in NYC costs 100,000 dollars annually but the cost is spread around, shared by Orthodox synagogues across Manhattan.
The eruv might be the World’s biggest loophole and arguably makes a mockery of the Jewish faith as it shows the lengths people are willing to go to in order to modify religion to suit what they see fit. However, ss cities continue to evolve, the eruv remains a clever solution that bridges ancient traditions with contemporary urban living. Ultimately, the eruv serves as a powerful reminder of the adaptability of tradition in an ever-changing world.
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