Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, and I'm here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. If you enjoy listening to Responsa Radio, please consider making a donation to Mechon Hadar at www.mechonhadar.org, or Jewish Public Media at jpmedia.co. So, one of the things I think has been really interesting and rewarding to me as a side effect of recording this podcast is that we have a lot of listeners who do not themselves consider halakhah as binding, they don't live their lives, necessarily, exactly according to what the halakhah says, but nevertheless are extremely interested to learn from halakhah, and many of whom are in relationship with people who do consider halakhah to be binding on their lives, and that some of the questions that we address help all of our listeners to understand each other better, in addition to understanding their own lives.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think it's great that we've, we connect with that broad range of people. I think it's a really exciting piece of this.
Rav Avi: And so this next question really speaks to that experience of how we live together in community as Jews who have different practices but are drawing on the same halakhic tradition.
Rav Eitan: Alright, great. Let's hear it.
Rav Avi: Okay. She writes: "I drive on shabbat, and one of the places I drive to is a Bible study group that starts during shabbat in the homes of observant Jews. After havdalah, I offer rides home to the study participants, and most are happy to get a lift in what is often cold and wet weather. One woman insists on walking home alone, and in the dark. I suppose she doesn't want to benefit from my shabbat breaking, though after havdalah, I'm no longer breaking the shabbat. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be there with my handy car if I hadn't driven. It's a comparatively safe neighborhood, but still I worry about her. Is there a halakhic argument I could use to convince her to accept a ride?
Rav Eitan: That's a great one. You never know what's gonna convince someone, so that I won't vouch for, but I think it's a really interesting question. Look, this goes back to what you said at the beginning: obviously we get lots of questions that have premises that are not, you know, you don't control the premise of a question. Obviously if the person was asking me a question about driving on shabbat, I would have some opinions of saying here's why you shouldn't drive or how you might think of it differently. But as you say, that's not the way the world works; the world works in ways that people intersect with one another in complex ways. And this is actually an interesting and important opportunity to examine one particular category, which is known as ma'aseh shabbat. Ma'aseh shabbat, literally something that's been done on shabbat, in the sense of it's the product of a violation of shabbat. This is a really rich category, be great to explore in-depth from all kinds of angles, but I want to zero in on the angle that's been explored here, which is, well, how do we deal with a case where someone knows something's a violation of shabbat, they do it, that's the choice that they make, and then there's some kind of result of it, there's an after-effect of it — what kind of restrictions does that impose on other Jews, other Jews who would not have done that action on shabbat, who would consider it a violation that they would never do?
So this is taken up in the Shulkhan Arukh in a very direct way. We're not the first ones to deal with these kinds of questions. And there, really processing, like, a long tradition that goes all the way back to the Tosefta in the Mishnah, the Shulkhan Arukh cites a case of someone who cooks on shabbat, and says if you cook on shabbat, if someone cooks on shabbat, deliberately, they know it's forbidden to cook on shabbat, they know it's shabbat, and they cook anyway, after shabbat other people are allowed to benefit from that right away. So, you have a friend who is fully aware of the rules of shabbat and they're Jewish, but they decide to bake themselves a cake, okay, on Saturday morning. As soon as havdalah is over, as soon as shabbat is done, you're allowed to eat that cake. You don't even have to wait as long as it would take to bake the cake after shabbat. It's muttar miyad, it is permissible immediately, even though they did it deliberately and it was an outright violation.
Rav Avi: That feels surprising to me. I would have assumed that you do have to wait the amount of time it would have taken them to bake the cake — is there a good explanation for why it's okay?
Rav Eitan: Well, it's an interesting question. So, there is a notion of having to wait that long, to kind of allow it to play out such that you could have done it after shabbat, but we only find that directly in sources that speak about benefiting from stuff that non-Jews do on shabbat. And the way most commentators explain the distinction is, well, the fear is that you will end up using someone non-Jewish as an agent to do things for you on shabbat, so they'll be ready immediately afterwards. And only if we say you have to wait the amount of time it would take you to do it will you lose all benefit from doing that, and then you won't use them. But the idea is, but no one — an observant Jew, let's say, at least — would actually have the gall to ask another Jew to do something they consider totally forbidden on shabbat for them, and therefore to the extent that it happens and it wasn't done, you know, by you or for you in some specific way, there's no reason to penalize you. It's not shabbat anymore, you didn't do anything wrong.
Rav Avi: So in our scenario here, for example, you're saying it would be different if this woman had said to the questioner, could you please drive to the study group this week so that you can give me a ride home after?
Rav Eitan: That would be majorly problematic. Now, even then, I'll say, to the extent that the person themselves, you know, they're actually coming to the study group and they're driving for themselves anyway and it's the same amount of driving for one person as for two people, it's not even as black and white in that case, that the person's really doing it for the other person involved. In other words, even if they're checking in with them and saying oh, are you coming in this week, because if you're not I may stay home, but if you are, I'd appreciate a ride on the end — technically, I want to complicated this in a minute, but technically you can say, well, the person actually hasn't really done anything for the person in question.
Rav Avi: So you're saying even that would be okay, potentially?
Rav Eitan: Potentially it's not really that different, because the person is already doing this action for themselves and is not doing it in a way specifically for someone else, or no additional melakhah, no additional forbidden labor is being done. Let's get to another kind of lenient factor here. Put aside the fact that the driving of the car to give this person a lift home is obviously a melakhah, that's like a significant act, but when you think about what's actually happened to the car by bringing it over on shabbat, the thing that was done that enables the person to get a ride is really actually about transporting an object from one place to another. That is to say, the car, in theory, could have been put in neutral from the original person's house and rolled all the way to its present place. It's not like the actual act of driving or lighting the fire in the car in any way is benefitting the person receiving the ride on the other end; it's the fact that the car shouldn't have gotten here. And that falls into its own category of melakhot of these forbidden actions, where the object itself hasn't really been transformed.
So the Shulkhan Arukh's case of cooking, baking, well, there the cake is completely different from the flour and oil and eggs and ingredients that made it up. That is to say, the violation of shabbat has actually turned it into something completely different. But the car is the car is the car. It's just now parked in a different place, and there there's precedent for even saying that on shabbat itself, you can benefit from an object that was illegally and even deliberately transported from one place to another. So for instance, you know, if you had a guest bring something to your house on shabbat from outside of an eruv from, let's say, you know, carrying it in an impermissible way, but the bottle of wine is the same bottle of wine, it's just in a place it shouldn't have been — there are many contexts and many poskim, many authorities who would say yeah, you can actually drink that wine on shabbat itself.
Rav Avi: Even right away, wow.
Rav Eitan: Because nothing happened to it, and yeah, this person shouldn't have done what they did, but that's a conversation about their religious observance, not about something that's left a mark on this object.
Rav Avi: Yeah.
Rav Eitan: So, as we said, we don't even really get there, because again on the black-letter law here, even with the cake, you're allowed to eat it right after shabbat, because the idea is we don't suspect that you're gonna come to ask people, other Jews, to do melakhah for you on shabbat. And once shabbat is over, there's no reason to treat this particular object as being irrevocably marked. So, that would be the sort of skeleton of the halakhic argument this person is looking for, to convince this person, here's why it's okay for you to get a ride from me.
Rav Avi: Yeah. There's — these sound like very pluralism-friendly halakhot in this moment. It doesn't seem clear to me that pluralism is the motivating reason behind these answers, but that as the fallout, the practical answers that people can be in community more easily, be less suspicious of each other, and maybe have a little bit less friction around their different observance levels than they would had the halakhah come out differently.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent on both counts; I don't think there's any sense here of trying to soften up on our opinions about shabbat violations, or doing it in order to take those less seriously, but it is an indubitable effect of this way of kind of restricting the indelible mark that's left on objects that stick around in our world after shabbat, that it gives more breathing room for just being able to navigate a world in which you perceive those violations to be going on and nonetheless you're in relationship.
Now, let's make it a little more complicated here from two angles. I think, as you already alluded to, you do have to be careful that this doesn't cross the line of starting implicitly to be done for you. That is to say, okay, if you're dealing with a case where a person has been going to a study group for 20 years on their own and then you join that group and then it turns out that person is available to give you a ride, that's one thing. If this is someone you actually forged a relationship with in the context of the group, actually part of what is keeping them in is feeling like they also get to do a mitzvah by doing you a ride home, that can start to begin to cross a line where you're actually becoming a kind of a factor or implicated in the decisions they're making on shabbat, which even if you don't want to judge and you're not really interested in getting them to change their behavior, there is a sense in terms of your own integrity of, well, okay, your way of observing shabbat shouldn't, as an observant person, depend on someone else essentially, you know, not adhering to those standards.
Rav Avi: So I have a question about that, because why wouldn't that apply to my appreciating their contributions to the study group in general, if I said wow, the real main reason I go to this study group is because this individual who drives there every week has fascinating things to say, is a really close friend of mine, you know — if for whatever reason I'm implicated in their showing up, then why does it matter whether or not they drive me home after?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, well, so I think when you're talking about someone's contributions independent of how they happen to get there, there's a wide range of reasons why you might treat that with tremendous openness and generosity. First of all, they could make those contributions if they had other ways of showing up, and you might invite them to stay in your home or the host might — there's any number of ways.
Rav Avi: So it's like, if they would have walked, they would have said just an interesting comment.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, their contribution is not dependent on the way that they got there. And then I think also, beyond that, once you're dealing with kind of that perspective on their participation, I think it's important also from a generous place to say well, it's not really even clear if this person self-perceives as doing something wrong by driving on shabbat in order to get to this study group. Whether or not, you know, I or someone else would give that guidance, I think you also have to take an honest take in saying what this person seems to be doing in terms of their religious disposition and their commitment to community is what they perceive in some broad sense to be a mitzvah.
Like, sure, a mouthpiece of the rabbinic tradition might say, I think you should think about this differently, but when we're just sort of assessing what are the intentions, what's the disposition, the contribution, I think any honest person would have to say this is a well-intentioned person who's investing and contributing to the Jewish community, and therefore celebrating their presence in the group doesn't have to be at odds with my not necessarily thinking about their mode of transportation as the ideal way to facilitate that. Here's the other piece, which I would say, which I think is, you know, important to keep in mind: I don't know exactly what's behind the questioner's state in terms of their experience of potentially being judged by having this person refuse the ride.
And I can imagine that there's some degree of discomfort, even though the question sounds like it's articulated in a very self-confident, transparent, open way — you know, I think there's no question that if everyone else is accepting a ride and this person isn't, it's not hard for me to imagine that the questioner might feel, this feels a little yucky to me, week in week out, to feel like someone's telling me implicitly, hey, you shouldn't have done that, and I'm gonna almost demonstrate it to you by walking home in the dark. To the extent that's going on for the questioner at all, that's where I would push a little to say, maybe you shouldn't worry so much about convincing this person. Because at the end of the day, were you not in the picture, this person would have to, in keeping with their own understanding of what G-d and the Torah and the discourse of halakhah wants of her, would have to figure out how to get to and fro from this place. And that's not really actually about you.
And to the extent that this person, you know, has their own system for doing it and really would prefer to create a space, even if there's some black-letter law justification to the contrary, would prefer to create a space where they do that in a sort of pure shabbat-observant environment — that's okay, and actually part of respecting the difference between people in that way is recognizing that, yeah, there may be certain barriers between us when we don't share all the same convictions; we can still participate in the study group together, but it may be you're gonna drive home and I'm gonna walk home. And while I think it is appropriate to explore when can those barriers be overcome, sometimes it's equally as important to recognize, this is actually a divide between us, and despite it we've got all these other things in common, and let's focus on those.
Rav Avi: Great. I think that's helpful. I have a follow-up question that you may tell me is its own episode, but maybe I can get you to just say one or two sentences about it. I'm wondering what you think about the concept of asking halakhic questions for other people, that this is a person who's writing to the posek who's writing into Responsa Radio to say what should she be doing about this — I don't know if there's a long history of, you know, writing to rabbis about other people's problems and situations, if that feels like that's a good use of halakhah and of the halakhic process — I don't know. It may be its own question, but I would love your thought.
Rav Eitan: It's a really interesting question, and I'd have to think more about it in the abstract — in particular I'm intrigued by the question of how much do we see that in the literature. That's a a very interesting question to me. But I think part of where I instinctively go whenever that happens, and you heard me to go this place at the end, is to have my pastoral antennae go up, and to say that oftentimes when someone is asking a question for someone else, they're actually probably in part asking for themselves, whether or not they admit it or are fully aware. That is to say, there's something about their interaction with this person and their practices that is bothering them, or that is difficult for them.
And you don't want to project or overly psychologize as to when that may be going on, but I think that part of what was so interesting about this question is, it's both a very practical concern that someone is asking out of care for another person, but I sense also it's about their relationship, and how do I navigate, what might halakhah tell me, even if I'm not listening to what the classical sources might tell me about driving on shabbat, or I feel my circumstance is very complicated, I'm not yet in a position to put that into play, might it still have something to tell me about how I interact with others around that? And that does ultimately come from the questioner herself.
Rav Avi: Yeah. Thanks.
Rav Avi: Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at halakhah@hadar.org. You can also leave us a message at (215) 297-4254.