Religion wasting money and resources that could be feeding/sheltering/helping.
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Except why? I mean it’s like clearly it is just getting around an arbitrary rule in an arbitrary fashion. If you seriously believe you shouldn’t be doing those things on the day of rest this “cop out” can hardly be legitimate can it?
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And genuinely, without wishing to seem like I’m sneering, I find it ridiculous that a magic wire can be seen as a greater human good than needle exchanges, food for the homeless or a walk-in clinic.
The difference between a religious institution and entertainment is that the latter doesn’t profess moral authority, like “this wire is more important than anything tangible because we’ve got ancient wisdom and we’re right because God”.
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That’s not quite true. Instead of complaining you could always institute a religion that defines life as you think it should be. I think that in a free market, a progressive religion which strives for giving people sex, advanced technology, and augmenting them with superpowers would do quite well. Religion is an empty container, and each person is responsible for what they fill it with.
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So, I take it no one here has read “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”. There goes my joke about the boundary maven.
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It would be if it didn’t represent a sect that oppresses women, conducts arranged marriages with underage girls, denies children education, and supports Palestinian apartheid.
I believe in the free exercise of religion provided that religion is tolerant, and respects human rights and the law. But segments of the Jewish population, especially in New York, are anything but tolerant.
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Yeesh, not digging the holier-than-thou* attitude from atheists in this thread. The eruv is a very complicated subject in Judaism, and there are large swaths of Jews that do not respect them, for some of the reasons you illuminate so concisely. They seem like a dodge.
Here’s my perspective on them, as a guy that converted to Orthodox Judaism and has since lapsed quite a bit, ironically somewhat as a result of NOT having an eruv in my community.
Sabbath is a day of rest, and the Torah says you should not do any malaxot on it. This is translated as “work” but that’s not quite right—work, like your job, is avoda. Malaxot is specifically the work forbidden by the Sabbath, which oral tradition teaches is “the stuff you have to do to build the Mishkan, the tent-like structure that served as God’s dwelling place before the Temple.” So, no skinning animals, for example. Need animal skins, donchaknow. One of the tasks was carrying stuff from here to there, where here and there are separate places. You can move furniture around the house. But you’d want to avoid tasks that look like you’re bringing some stuff to help set up the Mishkan, i.e., from your house to another place. Or gathering stuff up along the way to bring. Those both smack of malaxa. So, the eruv. A thin wire, surreptitiously hung, to make a chunk of Manhattan “one place.”
I see folks complaining about the money spent here, as a waste, because it wasn’t spent on something they would prefer. I am sure you are freely expressing your opinions on the amount of real estate Catholics reserve for silly cathedrals when low-income housing would be better and the amount of money spent by evangelicals on all that baptism water that would be better used growing fresh vegetables for the needy. Wouldn’t prayer rugs’ fabric be better used as blankets for the sick?
At the same time, you will likely not express opinions on the $26B in charity (almost $5B per year going to healthcare and social services) from the Jewish community, nor the countless good works of Christians, Muslims, and others that happen to believe in a “sky man” or whatever other small words you cook up to define thousands of years of philosophy.
You can and should complain about the bad. You should. We do all the time: the intolerant amongst us are a blight and an embarrassment. You should also look at your own intolerance and see if you can overcome it.
*this is a burn, you may wish to report to a burn ward for treatment.
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why not just make it a real imaginary line and say it encloses the globe?
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For the record, that 5 seconds you could have spent volunteering for a homeless shelter. Good job, internet commenters!
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And His Son became a carpenter, yet!
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Came here for a rational perspective on this by @Brainspore, was not disappointed.
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Sold.
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I believe the term is “Sex workers”.
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For the record, Orthodox Jews are more likely to be living below the poverty line, and yet are the most charitable religious group per capita in the US.
snort That’s how Christianity works, but not Judaism, where the rules and the interpretation thereof are the domain of human beings.
Jeeze, the Christian-centric viewpoints on this thread are incredible. An eruv is not for fooling G-d or any entity, but is an interpretation of older commandments from an older era where walled cities were the norm. Can it seem silly in modern contexts? Yes. Do I personally observe the eruv anymore? No. But it’s a fulfillment of a legal requirement that means something to my people, and I really can’t comprehend this adversarial relationship you Christians have with your zombie god, even after you’d renounced it.
Look, I get it that Christianity is a religion of faith that can be cheated, connived, or otherwise made false by surface appearances. But Judaism is not Christianity Lite; the perspective is not “I have a set of rules from God, how do I cheat my way out of them?”; the perspective is more along the lines of “I have a set of rules from God; even though circumstances have changed since they were handed down, how can I modify them in a way that still seems valid and yet workable in a new era?”
And primitive. And somehow aimed at “cheating”. The terms being used to describe Jews on this thread have been very illustrative.
Exactly!
I see that someone has met a certain rabbi of my acquaintance…
Thank you!
Yeah, ditto. It’s almost as if they’re steeped in a culture that’s fundamentally Christian and have taken that cultural viewpoint as a given, even as they reject the explicitly religious aspects of that culture.
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I’m not Jewish so I’m not biased, but I tend to agree. The word “religion” may derive from the Latin res + ligio, “the things that bind”, i.e. the customs and practices that hold a society together. Some of those might be slightly bizarre to the hypothetical Martian, like cathedrals, carnivals or Japanese penis-worship processions, and there are always the fascinating but unhelpful questions like “do the people in charge of this really, really believe in the sky-person?” or “could the money be better spent”. My answer is that the money almost certainly would not be better spent. Joint projects that bring together a wide range of people with varying talents build communities, communities evolve culture, cultural transmission may or may not result in progress, but the Jewish cultural tradition has resulted in a lot of progress. (So has the Anglo/Dutch tradition in a somewhat different direction.) A few dollars per head per year on an eruv is a small outlay to bring about additional social cohesion.
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False equivalence is false. Their spending money on this does not mean they don’t spend money on charity (and they do).
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I like this sort of approach to religion and spirituality. Seems very practical, but still in keeping with the tradition.
Trying to remember where I’ve seen on of these before, London I think, but it seems that the London eruv was only built in 2003, so it couldn’t be that one. 
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Yiddish Policeman: First thing I thought of when I saw the article. Great minds.
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