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Today we’re going to be talking about a wire—not The Wire, a wire—but not just
any wire, specifically, this wire: the Manhattan eruv.
It’s a piece of wire that’s hung up 15 feet above the ground on telephone poles,
it’s eighteen miles in length, it costs over $100,000 a year to maintain, and without
it, observant Jewish people wouldn’t be allowed to carry their keys outside on Saturdays.
Now, if you’re not an expert on Jewish law, that sentence might have been a little confusing,
so let me go back.
These are the ten commandments: they’re sort of like the Jackson 5, except instead
of five, they’re ten, and instead of child musicians, they’re commandments.
One of them says that on the Sabbath, you can’t do “malacha,” which means work,
but that raises the question, “what counts as work?”
It’s a question that my writer Adam often asks me when trying to argue that browsing
Reddit should count as background research for videos.
Well, to answer the question of what work is, enter a bunch of rabbis: specifically,
these rabbis who met at a place called Yavna after the Romans burnt down this very important
thing called the Second Temple.
The rabbis wrote down a bunch of rules, which they called the Mishna, which they and other
rabbis later expanded on with stuff called Gemara, and that all together makes a thing
called the Talmud, which is basically just a bunch of rules: like YouTube’s community
guidelines, but less convoluted.
The rabbis decided to define work as follows: when the Jews were wandering in the desert
for 40 years, looking for Israel because they didn’t have MapQuest yet, they had to build
this thing called a tabernacle, and so the rabbis said that all the things you gotta
do to build that: that counts as work.
You might think, well that doesn’t sound very limiting at all.
I mean, it didn’t take me that long to build my tabernacle, how much could it possibly
involve?
Turns out, a lot.
39 things to be exact, including writing, cooking, and—the one relevant for this video—carrying,
which the rabbis called “hotzaah” because, you know, they didn’t speak English, they
spoke Hebrew; English hadn’t been invented yet, do you not understand how history works?
But they didn’t mean literally any carrying, like carrying a toaster from your bed to your
living room, they meant specifically carrying objects from a private domain to a public
domain, or vice versa.
But then the rabbis in Yavna were like, “this whole no carrying thing seems like, you know,
a lot—what if I want to bring my toaster to my front lawn” so they developed something
called an eruv, which was originally a wall or a fence that enclosed the area where the
Jewish folks lived, and made it all a private domain.
Then they were like, “this whole walls thing seems like a lot, too—what if I want to
bring my toaster to places where walls are illegal” so they made a symbolic wall, which
was a piece of wire that was hung around the area, and as long as you were within it, you
were supposedly in a “private domain” and so you could carry things, and that’s
a modern eruv.
Today, there are over 200 eruvs across North America, but the largest and most expensive
is New York’s.
It’s been in place since 1999, and originally it was just around this area, the Upper West
Side, but as time has gone on, it’s expanded to cover this entire area, which includes
most of Manhattan, except for a bit of Hell’s Kitchen, because they don’t want a shouty
Gordon Ramsay to ruin the Sabbath mood, and a few other small spots.
Maintaining the eruv’s integrity is vitally important to its efficacy, and so every Thursday,
before dawn, a rabbi drives around the eruv’s entire perimeter to inspect it because sometimes
it gets knocked over by tall New York-y things like Macy Thanksgiving Day floats or Bill
DeBlasio or pizza rat on stilts.
Overall, the cost of maintaining the eruv adds up to about $100,000 a year, which is
paid by a group of Orthodox synagogues.
The eruv is only one of many creative ways that observant Jewish people have come up
with to deal with the work ban on the Sabbath.
For example, one of the other banned activities is “makeh b'patish,” or “completion,”
which means that you can’t complete any type of object on the Sabbath.
That means no finishing a puzzle, no final touches on your birdhouse, and according to
some Jewish scholars, no completing circuits—which means no electricity, which means a lot of
inconvenience.
That’s why, in some areas with a large Jewish population, on Saturdays, elevators are programmed
to stop at every level so that nobody has to push the buttons, but perhaps the best
Sabbath workaround is the Sabbath goy, a non-Jewish person who’s around on Saturdays to do certain
banned Sabbath stuff on behalf of the Jewish people who can’t—like turn on a synagogue’s
lights in the morning for services.
It’s a job that’s simple, yet requires diligence: because the Sabbath also prevents
observant Jews from directly asking for help, if the Sabbath goy forgets to turn the lights
on, nobody at the synagogue can remind them.
If you’re a Sabbath goy who has trouble remembering things, then you should try getting
more organized and productive, which you could do by taking this class called “Real Productivity:
How To Build Habits That Last,” which is taught on Skillshare by my friend Thomas Frank,
from the YouTube channel Thomas Frank.
Even if you’re already freakishly productive, though, Skillshare will have something for
you: it’s got thousands of classes for creatives to take their skills up a notch, in everything
from coding to animation to music to marketing.
There’s options for any skill level, and the classes have short lessons to fit into
any schedule.
To get two months for free, be one of the first 1,000 to sign up at skl.sh/hai34.