This video was made possible by Skillshare. Start learning new skills for free for two
months by being one of the first 1,000 to sign up at skl.sh/hai34. 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.
Very interesting. Here in Minnesota, there's an eruv just outside Mpls.
Why not just run an electrical current/TDR through the wire to verify that it’s connected?
I have a better idea. Why not make a tiny wire circle, and declare the outside of it 'private space'? Seems it should still be legal in this sense, and would save a lot of hassle and money.
My goodness. Religious people really do cause a lot of unseen problems.
Absolutely normal behavior.
At a point you would think having to make so many loopholes for your rules, you might as well just not have those rules at all.
Tl;dr fundamentalist Jews gaming their religion.
couldnt bring myself to finish the video, the lame jokes were too much for me to push through
The attempts at humor made me cringe, but overall a quite interesting submission.