electricity

[cellio]

There are halachic issues with using electricity on Shabbat, but some Conservative authorities permit it. I have sometimes wondered about the reasoning to determine what is and is not permittted; is the Conservative rabbi who turns lights on and off on Shabbat acting within that halacha? Here's another small bit to add to the data pile.

From Rabbi Simcha Roth, Rabbincal Assembly in Israel (Masorti):

"... However, those Conservative authorities that permit the making and breaking of an electric circuit on Shabbat and YomTov did not and do not intend to permit the use of electricity for any purpose which is directly prohibited by Torah. Thus, accepting that halakhah follows Tanna Kamma, while they permit the making and breaking of a circuit they would not permit the electricity thus released from being used, say, to cook food on Shabbat."

(From RMSG April 22nd 2002 / Iyyar 10th 5762 [Pesachim 82])

I'll read the discussion of this mishna more thoroughly later; I was just skimming email and saw this go by. There doesn't seem to be more discussion of this particular point, but I could have missed it. (The mishna is nomially about how to cook the Pesach lamb, but as with all talmudic discussion, tangents abound.)

Comments

One possibility...

[goljerp]

One possibility is to use fluorescent lights, but not incandescent. My rabbi was actually talking about this a while back during his class, where he spoke about the fact that heating metal until it glows is actually spoken about as a forbidden activity in the talmud, while the excitation of gas molecules to a higher energy level from which they fluorese (please excuse my spelling, I don't have time to look it up, sigh) is, strangely enough, not mentioned anywhere in the talmud.

Not that this is exactly what I do, but like you said: another data point.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

I knew several Orthodox Jews who kept the bulb in the fridge unscrewed for that reason. They also had their lights and even the TV on timers. You can even go so far as to set up your TV to change channels for you using a VCR or a TiVo unit (the latter works best).

Of course, if you're Reform or most varieties of Conservative it's moot because you don't have to follow those rules.