seasonal humor

[cellio]

The following is (IMO) hilarious if you're at all familiar with Talmudic reasoning. I've been told that it's pretty darn funny even if you aren't.

Hilichot Xmas (the laws of Christmas).

(No, I don't know what the letter of approbation really says. If you do, please tell me.)

Comments

[cellio]

This brings up a question I had when I read a newspaper article on shmita a while ago. What would the Jews do in the case where there were no non-Jews in their land, and they were still required to not farm? How would they get food?

I think they were expected to store food from previous years (and the presumption is that God will provide good harvests to help out).

There is a controversial rules hack that I gather is applied today: they "sell" the land for a year to a gentile. Today in the middle east this sounds like a very risky proposition, as the bill of sale would have to be valid in order for this to work halachically. But I don't know the details of how this is done.

Why is it allowed to request that another person do something which you are forbidden yourself?

Sigh. It's not. People abuse this all the time, but they are violating halacha when they do it.

You are allowed to hire people on a task basis, and if they're gentiles and do it on Shabbat that's not your problem. (There are exceptions, but they're tangental.) A Jew is permitted to personally violate Shabbat in cases of health dangers (this principle is called pikuach nefesh), and must do so to save a life. I *suspect*, but do not know, that the tradition of the Shabbos Goy arose in a time when *economics* required that you keep your shop open on Shabbat (else you wouldn't make enough to keep food on the table), and from there it generalized. (Gee, if Moshe can have his gentile employees keep the shop open, I guess I can hire a gentile to tend my fire.) Pure speculation on my part, of course.

Is it different if they volunteer without you asking?

Sort of. If they are doing it explicitly to do something for you, this is a problem. If they do it for their own benefit, it's not. So if a gentile says "gee, it's cold in here" and stokes the fire (or turns up the thermostat) for his own benefit, that's fine. If *you* say "gee, it's cold in here" and he turns it up, you're on shaky ground. And you can't say "would you turn that up?". If there is a genuine health issue you can turn it up yourself so you don't need to ask, and if there's not a genuine health issue you are asking a gentile to do forbidden work for you.

As you can imagine, this can lead to some pretty ludicrous situations and conversations. I personally try to be careful here; even if I see my Orthodox friends twisting things to "not quite ask" for something like this, I prefer to just not go down that path. (Yes, there are areas where this Reform Jew is *stricter* than some Orthodox. I never did get back to that rant on rules hacks, did I? Well, this is part of it.)

As you can probably imagine, being married to a non-observant Jew has added even more complications to Shabbat for me.