Rav Avi: Hello, and welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times! I am Rabbi Avi Killip, and I am here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva of Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City.
Rav Eitan: Hello, Avi!
Rav Avi: Hey, how are you doing?
Rav Eitan: I'm doing alright.
Rav Avi: So, we're gonna start with a question that I think is near and dear to the heart of many Jews. It involves two things that Jews love: shabbat and coffee. "Can I use my electronic automated coffee-brewing device that has a timer on shabbat? Is that okay? If not, why not?"
Rav Eitan: Great, so let's start with that. The question really harks back to questions from time immemorial about how much our concern on shabbat is that Jews don't do forbidden activities, forbidden melakhah, the kind of creative labor that the Torah talks about, and how much the concern is that their environment be free of that kind of labor. You could imagine actually being surrounded by work and labor happening all the time without you being involved -- what kind of status would that have vis a vis the laws of shabbat? In ancient times the way that played out was often actually around the status of gentiles, a question of whether it was appropriate to benefit from things that were going on in the gentile world surrounding you on shabbat.
And another way that it played out was, could you begin an activity before shabbat and allow it to continue into shabbat and then eventually benefit from it afterwards? So for instance, a very concrete example of that, kinds of questions that came up would be, what if I have a tank of water, and I unplug a little channel that comes out of the bottom of that tank of water right before shabbat, and then allow it to drain at a slow rate into an irrigation canal in my garden over the course of the next many hours leading into shabbat? Watering one's plants and one's garden on shabbat is a core forbidden activity in rabbinic law, and this would seem to set up a situation where that's happening. That was approved and permitted -- as long as you began the activity before shabbat, it was totally fine for it to attain completion during the hours of shabbat. There were other activities that were not permitted -- for instance, taking grains of wheat and throwing them into a water mill being operated by a river right before shabbat started, and letting them grind into flour over the course of shabbat. There were sources that were much more restrictive about that action.
One of the reasons given for the prohibition around that was actually that it would simply make too much noise; it would create an atmosphere that on shabbat, that instead of the quiet drip drip drip of water into the irrigation canal,would make people aware of something that was going on. So that tension about whether our action or how much we're affecting the atmosphere we live in is kind of at the heart of this. Now in the contemporary world, I think where we've come much more intensively to this is as our world gets more and more automated, the question is what things could we actually automate without the use of a gentile and with actually delaying the process to happen entirely on shabbat without violating the halakhah, the laws around shabbat practice? And here I think it's actually interesting -- when you look at the various responsa literature, the giants that weigh in on this question have a very hard time really pinpointing why it's forbidden to automate everything before shabbat to happen on shabbat, but a very strong instinct that it is forbidden.
And I share that instinct, which is the idea that it doesn't seem like the setting up of a timer alone is necessarily really the beginning of a process; it seems like it's actually the timing and delaying of a process to happen later. So unlike the water draining out of the tank, where when I pull out the plug the water has begun to drain out, it's actually continuing to do so, a lot of times with timers what we're basically saying is I want nothing to happen until 10 A.M. tomorrow morning, and then for it to kick in. Now there, I think the kind of distinction I would make is, it feels like, and some of the later responsa address this, it feels like there's a difference between things that we set up before shabbat to happen on shabbat but that we don't really want to benefit from on shabbat, as opposed to things that we set up to happen on shabbat, that would violate shabbat if we were to do them ourselves, that we want to then take advantage of on shabbat itself.
And that seems what the case of the coffee is. If we talk about a case where someone essentially hooks up a machine that maybe even grinds the beans and then boils the water and then mixes them and then filters them and it can do all that on an automated timer, that already feels like I am essentially using shabbat to prepare my food from a raw state in order to eat it on shabbat. And there's one responsum in the name of the Tzitz Eliezer who addresses this specific point, and he actually goes back to the text of the Torah itself, which back in the story of the mann, the story of the manna that's falling for the desert generation, the Torah says one of the ways we get ready for shabbat is anything you gotta bake and anything you gotta cook, do it beforehand.
And there's something there I think specifically about food, the things we eat and drink on shabbat, that we can reheat them, we can sort of get them from a basic ready state into more of a ready state, but we shouldn't be going from nothing to completion on shabbat itself. So even when we think about something like cholent, which you might put in raw right before shabbat and eat it then the next day, essentially cooking on shabbat, there's still an aspect there where I have begun the cooking process itself before shabbat, and in that sense someone who wanted to say I wanted to push the button on the coffee grinder maybe right before I go into a Friday night meal to have it freshly brewed at the end of dessert --
Rav Avi: Exactly the follow-up question I was gonna ask!
Rav Eitan: -- that, there might be more room to be lenient. That's much more analogous to the kinds of things that were permitted in earlier times.
Rav Avi: So, no fresh-brewed coffee on shabbat morning.
Rav Eitan: I would vote no on that. I would vote no.There's others ways to do it! You heat up water and you can combine it with grounds, et cetera, but the kind of machine that would actually be boiling the water on shabbat, grinding beans on shabbat, I would say that's not appropriate.
Rav Avi: The irrigation story makes me think of some sort of a slow drip coffee would be ideal for that purpose. Okay. So the short follow-up question is, what about using the French press on shabbat? If that has problems, what problems exactly -- is it cooking, is it separating things out, and would that be different on Yom Tov, on a holiday than it would be from shabbat?
Rav Eitan: Great. So, there are two separate issues involved as you hinted at with preparing coffee on shabbat and specifically in a French press. The first has to do with bishul, the cooking and preparing of something with the use of hot water or hot liquid, and the second is the issue of borer, of taking something that is in an unrefined state and essentially sifting it, sorting it, filtering it to make it a kind of pure product. So, let's talk first about the cooking piece. The cooking piece here is kind of interesting in that coffee, first of all, has already actually been roasted. The kind of coffee that we use to drink has already gone through a process where it is not raw by the time you've bought it.
And one of the debates that happens in the medieval period which is really interesting is, does transformation by one kind of heat source render irrelevant for shabbat purposes any transformation by another heat source? Meaning, if I boil something, is the subsequent act of then baking it a violation of shabbat? Or is the real violation essentially going from raw to not raw? And once that's happened once, the thing is just being manipulated. So can a roasted coffee bean be cooked in a way that violates shabbat at all? The Ravya, one of the prominent medieval authorities, ruled that it cannot, that in fact once something has been roasted, it is completely immune to cooking for the purposes of shabbat, and therefore there's no concern about putting something like a roasted coffee bean, ground roasted coffee, into any kind of boiling water, et cetera, et cetera.
Rav Avi: So that sounds like good news for coffee drinkers.
Rav Eitan: That's overall the beginning of a good-news answer. Now on the other side, the other corner, stands the author of Sefer Yeraim, Rabbi Eliezer Mimetz, who was more stringent on this question, and said no, we have to look at the processes that are transforming this item, and vis a vis cooking in water, something roasted is basically raw, because it never went through that process. And therefore mixing and matching different kinds of cooking processes in fact is significant for shabbat purposes. So Rabbi Eliezer Mimetz would say the fact that something has been roasted does not release it from the concern of cooking. However, here we have to engage with coffee also, because coffee is different from a lot of other things that we might cook, in that we don't really cook coffee in order to eat coffee.
We actually, it's more accurate to say, use coffee as a spice to flavor our water. In other words, the way we are using this is the same way you use a tea bag or any number of other things, is not like the way you would, you know, bake a bagel after boiling it in order to eat the bagel, but you are actually in a sense steeping the coffee in the water in order that the water absorb the flavor. And that's the halakhic category of tavlin, something which is not a food that you're eating, but rather a spice you're using to flavor something with. And when we're talking about a tavlin, that kind of spice, what we're really concerned about is not the actual cooking, but we're concerned about the optics of cooking. We don't want to do anything that seems too close to the way we cook. And what that means is in the context of something like coffee, one would want to avoid pouring hot water directly on the coffee grounds in a way that would be similar to the ways in which we have a kind of connection from the food directly to the water that's on the heat source when we generally cook, and to the extent when we're following the Yeraim's position that we have to strict in some way with roasted things in terms of cooking, you would want to first pour the water out from whatever urn it was in, into some other container, and then at that point combine it with the coffee grounds.
So in the case of a French press, someone being strict for that position would make sure first to fill up the French press with the water, and then pour in whatever coffee grounds, let them settle, stir them up, whatever it was, and then you would be good to go on the cooking front. Now that covers the cooking concern. On the question of separating, the French press is a tool which is designed to actually take an amalgam of coffee and water and turn it back into just water, with coffee flavor, but without any of the grounds actually being caught up in what you're drinking. And that presents a concern of borer, one of the core melakhot, forbidden activities on shabbat, is not separating raw produce into a refined, sorted product.
For that reason, there are many people who would not use a French press on shabbat, because it would be filtering in that way. However, there is a strong basis for being lenient in the context of a French press, and that relates to also thinking about what it is we're doing, in this case of separation, that's different from a lot of other cases of separation. When you sift flour, you're taking a raw product that has different elements of the wheat kernel in it, that have never been separated from the time that they were harvested and ground, milled, et cetera, and you are now trying to get them to their final stage of preparation as being the finest kind of flour. With coffee, you've actually deliberately put it into the water in the first place, so that the water will absorb some of its flavor. Meaning, when you sort out coffee or filter coffee, you're not taking a raw product and trying to remove something from it that you don't want in there; you're actually taking two things that you deliberately combined together and now are simply separating them back out to the way they were before.
Rav Yishaya Ditrani, who was a prominent Italian medieval authority, in another case that had to do with making spiced wine on shabbat, argued that you could take wine that you had put cloves and other kinds of spices in and filter it on shabbat through a filter, and it would be absolutely no concern whatsoever about borer, because the whole reason you put the spices in there was so that their flavor would go in, and therefore you're not separating a thing you want from a thing you don't want. And therefore the prohibition doesn't apply. Now, a lot of later authorities got nervous about this, nervous about people starting to use tools, starting to get involved with what his grandson actually called a torach gadol, a kind of big enterprise on shabbat that feels inappropriate; my sense is that even those restrictive authorities might look favorably upon a French press, which is deliberately small in scope, is used for that kind of immediate use, it's not the kind of thing you're gonna sit around all afternoon wasting your shabbat away doing, and particular someone who wanted to be strict in that regard, maybe they'd buy one of those single serving French presses which really emphasizes that this is not part of some larger production of melakhah, but it's simply a local act of getting the water I had in the first place enough flavor.
Rav Avi: I think it's a healthy way to think about drinking coffee as just flavored water, that's all it really is, right?
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