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, this question relates to the intersection between shabbat, someone's work life, and interpersonal relationships, how they deal with other people. The person who wrote this question is a doctor -- I'll be curious to hear from you after if you think the question applies more broadly, or if this is really a physician-specific situation.
Rav Eitan: Okay.
Rav Avi: Alright. He writes: "I am an emergency room physician and I work in a group with around 50 other physicians. The vast majority are not Jewish, and of the small number of Jewish physicians in our department, I am, as far as I know, the only shabbat-observant one. I am unable to categorically avoid being scheduled to work any shifts that include shabbat. In a typical month, our scheduling system assigns me approximately two or three shifts that occur on shabbat. I then try to swap shifts with my colleagues when possible, and here is where the questions arrive." He has several questions, I'm gonna read them. "Can I swap with a colleague I know to be Jewish but is not shabbat-observant? Can I ask them to switch, or only accept the swap if they offer it? And if I don't know if a particular colleague is Jewish, must I inquire before offering a swap that includes shabbat?"
Rav Eitan: Okay, really interesting question. Let's start with what you asked, which is how much is this a doctor question, or a more general question. I wanna actually suggest that it's in some ways not a doctor question; I would say, from my perspective, though there are some complicated dimensions to it, my own view is that I don't think someone who is an emergency room doctor should really hesitate to just work their shabbat shift from a mitzvot perspective. That is to say, if we're just thinking about what constitutes a violation of shabbat or not, I think we can and quite frankly should embrace the notion that doing this kind of work falls squarely under the category of pikuach nefesh doche shabbat, that saving a life pushes off the observance of shabbat, and, you know, many poskim, many authorities have tried to sort of define the edges of that -- great, it's one thing to say that, you know, you're actually treating someone who's about to die, but what about when you're writing up notes on their chart, and what about when you're doing all the other sort of mundane and waiting around stuff, that there's very strong basis for the notion that all of those side activities can and must be treated as just a kind of external zone, a kind of, you know, periphery of the core activity of what you need to do to maintain an institution that's there to save people's lives. And therefore, it's totally acceptable and even mandated to do those things on shabbat, and I don't think from a doctor's perspective this should be considered a violation of shabbat potentially that needs to be avoided.
Now, there might be all kinds of other reasons that a person would rather avoid working on shabbat, which have to do with lifestyle or a doctor's insane schedule if they don't have shabbat, feeling like they don't have the sort of space to recharge, and that's their only time to connect with Jewish rhythm, and that I totally support. But I wanna say off the bat, in some ways where I think this question, rubber really meets the road, is in all kinds of other professions where there's a notion of, well, things are getting done on shabbat here, but they're not really justifiable under Jewish law.
Rav Avi: So let me stay with the doctors for one more minute. It sounds like what you're saying is, here he doesn't have to swap away from shabbat, but he might want to, and in the instance that he does want to, in his particular profession, it's actually okay for him to switch with another Jewish doctor because that Jewish doctor isn't in violation of shabbat either when they work on shabbat?
Rav Eitan: So I think that's technically right. That is to say, there's not -- if it's something you would be prepared to do, then on some level you're saying it's something you'd be prepare to say any Jew is able to do, and therefore, you know, swapping in or out, to the extent that it's really just about a matter of convenience, it's something like, look, I normally would work on shabbat, but it turns out that's the only time I really get to see my kids for reasons having to do with my schedule. Or, I have a particular study group that I like to go to, that if I don't go to that I don't have the time to do it. To the extent it's not about my avoiding a violation but there's affirmative things I want to do that day, and it's in that sense parallel to wanting to swap with someone on the Tuesday of my child's graduation, then yeah, there's no real different positioning of one Jew or another. It shouldn't be around the axis of, and this is what we'll get to in a second, their shabbat observance is less important than mine, or at least that is a much more complicated question.
Rav Avi: Right. Okay. So, if he accepts the premise that he himself would actually be fine working on shabbat, then he can actually trade without concern necessarily too much about the other person being Jewish.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's right. And again, maybe we'll get to doing another episode of talking about some of these issues of what are you allowed to do or how do we think about what's the full range or what you have to do differently when you're on call on shabbat, but that set of issues having been resolved, then yeah, the swapping should really not have anything to do with questions observance.
Rav Avi: Okay. So now, let's take the same question in other professions. This person is now a barista or a lawyer or a accountant -- tell me where that takes us.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and I'll add even higher -- I got, actually, a version from this question not submitted to the show but, you know, personally someone who is a supervisor in actually a very high government capacity, where he has a number of deputies that he has to hand things out to, and there's stuff that goes on, you know, people are gonna do work on shabbat, or sometimes it might even be like there's two days of Rosh Hashanah, and he's gonna be taking off, and one of the things he would do is hand that out to deputies. And then it turns out that, like, one or two of his deputies are Jewish, and can he assign them work going into Rosh Hashanah in the context of something where he knows, he kinda feels like he's asking them to do that. So there's no question that, let's say, the work there was not necessarily on a sort of level of national security or other things where you might be able to justify anyone doing it on shabbat, but the normal work flow of how it gets done is coming in conflict with what almost feels like a kind of imperialistic encroachment on this person's decision of how they observe Judaism.
Rav Avi: Right, right. And it sounds like in both situations, the one written here and the one you're describing, there's an element of can I put my observance of shabbat over, well, you know, something I wouldn't want to do on shabbat, can I ask you to do it on shabbat?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's right. So, this is a great example of, it's a question about shabbat, but it actually has nothing to do with shabbat; it's really about our responsibility for other people's observance. It's just being played out through the lens of shabbat, but you could imagine this playing out in any number of other areas. And in that sense it's really a discussion about the halakhic category of lifnei iver lo tichten mishol, not putting a stumbling block before the blind, but understood rabbinically to not being a meaningful accomplice to someone else's violation of Jewish law, and in some ways the subcategory of misaeya lo aver averah, what it means to kind of assist someone in performing some kind of transgression, which is a kind of lower-level, rabbinic-level offence. But the concern of lifnei iver, not putting --
Rav Avi: Not setting someone up.
Rav Eitan: Not setting someone up for a spiritual, religious transgression is understood to be a Biblical-level prohibition that's quite serious. So, the way this comes up initially is actually in the Talmud. There's a case of talking about, let's say you have someone who's a Nazarite, who's a nazir, they've taken an oath that includes not drinking any wine, okay? And then you're sitting there with them and they say, can you pass me that cup of wine? Right? They've kind of decided, it seems, to break their oath in some way -- it's not your oath, it's not imposed on you, but you're confronting someone else potentially doing a violation, and you are now going to hand it to them.
Rav Avi: You're the enabler.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And the text says, initially you may not hand it to them, because that's a violation of not placing a stumbling block in front of the blind. You're enabling them to do it. The Talmud then raises all kinds of challenges and says, but that can't be because of this reason and that reason, and ends up constructing this case much more narrowly, where it says yeah, you're not allowed to hand him the wine, but only if you're sitting on two sides of the riverbank and he's on one side and the wine's on the other, and without you getting it to him, there's no way he can access it. That is to say, unless you are the exclusive portal for him getting this, then actually you're kind of just being polite, but you're not actually enabling him to do something he couldn't do on his own. And the only place where at least the Biblical-level prohibition kicks in, according to this Talmudic passage, is when the transgression would only be possible with your involvement, then you're obligated to step back. But to the extent it's just more convenient for him not to get up and walk to the other side of you, you're allowed to pass it.
Rav Avi: I like it a lot. It's like a distinction between not being an enabler and not being a jerk.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. There's some element there of at least saying you can absolve yourself. Now, this had, you know, was, I would say, much more significant in the course of Jewish history for its economic and practical considerations for Jews, rather than just to enable people to get along; in particular what you have in the Middle Ages is a lot of Jews who go into the business of selling various Christian paraphernalia to Christians, specifically things that would be used in the context of Christian worship -- crosses and all kinds of things that were religious articles, Jews were essentially part of, like, the mercantile trade around those things. And a question would come up, well, if Jews consider Christianity to be a form of foreign worship or idolatry, which is itself a disputed topic, but if I, you know, really think that, like, this person who's my neighbor, I don't really think they should be bowing down to a crucifix, can I sell it to them, or am I enabling them to basically do an act of idolatry which here, even though they're not Jewish, non-Jews are also forbidden under Jewish law from engaging in idolatry. And relying on a very kind of tight interpretation of the Talmudic passage we just talked about, you have a position that comes up in the Mordechai, Rav Mordechai ben Hillel in the 13th century in Germany, where he says as long as the Christians can also buy the crucifixes from other non-Jewish vendors, the Jews can go into that line of business too. And it's the same logic, which is to say, you're not really enabling them to get a crucifix; you're just making a profit off of entering a market that exists with or without you.
Rav Avi: Yeah. So, it invites you into the broader world a little bit, actually, using that interpretation or that answer.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. It's starting to imagine or it forces you to kind of distinguish between where are cases where you are actually the linchpin of a certain activity because of your relationship with this person, as opposed to where are you kind of a cog in a much larger wheel that is spinning with or without you. Alright, so that's kind of what comes up. The Shulkhan Arukh, Rav Moshe Isserles cites that position, and that lenient reading of the Talmud becomes fairly standardly accepted in Ashkenazi circles, and the Ramah and the Shulkhan Arukh gives his imprimatur to that view.
So the next interesting turn this takes is with the Shach, Rav Shabbtai haKohen in 17th century Lithuania. He is reflecting on the fact that actually in the medieval period, there was a dispute as to whether we should read the Talmud the way we did earlier -- should we really read it as any case where the person has equal access to performing the sin, then your role is irrelevant even if the Talmud claims that that's Biblically in the clear? Different authorities disputed whether there was any kind of rabbinic prohibitions, like, yeah, it's not a full violation of placing a stumbling block before the blind, but we can't allow you to behave that way. That was a matter of dispute. But the Shach says this lenient view on Jews selling crosses, that's fine according to all views. Why? The debate was only about cases of other Jews, where maybe when it's a Jew doing some kind of transgression, even if you're on the same side of the river, so to speak, and you're playing an insignificant role, maybe it's still inappropriate for you to be playing even the symbolic role of passing over, you know, the item to them.
Rav Avi: Meaning, don't sell crosses to Jews.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, but that everyone would agree, says the Shach, that there's no problem in being in a sort of market situation and selling when the person who's potentially doing the transgression is not Jewish, or a mumar, or an apostate. That is to say, a Jew who though born a Jew and though technically covenantally bound by everything, has decided to step out, and has basically become a Christian and therefore they're buying a cross from you, the Shach says that person too, you don't have to worry about. Now, this is sort of passing comment, but what it opens up in a shocking way is the question of whether different Jews are positioned differently based on whether they've made resolute choices to abandon large chunks of Jewish observance. Meaning, the Shach has sort of begun to suggest here, maybe, that it's one thing to talk about manning your relationship and your involvement with someone who's Jewish and transgressions; it's another thing to talk about someone who's not Jewish or who has abandoned Jewish observance.
Rav Avi: So this sounds pretty extreme to me. I'm gonna bring us back, for a minute, to our question at hand. It feels to me like what that's talking about is saying when you walk into a church, you don't need to go around wondering if people are Jewish -- it's almost like if you know you have a Christian colleague who covers for you on shabbat, and then you discover that his mother was Jewish, it's not up to you to say you can't cover for me on shabbat anymore because your mother was Jewish, if you've always known that this person was a more practicing Mormon and they think of themselves as a Mormon, it's not up to you to worry about their Judaism. That feels very different to me than your colleague who is a Reform Jew who sometimes goes to shul, sometimes not, is more than happy to cover your shift.
Rav Eitan: Okay, you're right. And to get there, you have to take the next startling step in this conversation, which is taken by the Dagul Mervavah, Rav Yechezkel Landau, in 18th century Poland, Bohemia. He responds to a comment about apostates, as you say, like someone who's become a practicing Christian, but you happen to know that they have Jewish ancestry. And the Dagul Mervavah says, well, that can't really make any sense. It can't be that we would classify someone differently for being an apostate; at the end of the day, they're a Jew, and there's no basis for treating them any differently under Jewish law, so how could the Shach say this? And the Dagul Mervavah says something striking. He says it's not really a category of an apostate; an apostate is just an example of a Jew who is mezid, who is deliberately, wantonly, and with full knowledge saying, I don't care about this restriction. And what is the point, says the Dagul Mervavah? The whole concern of lifnei iver, of not placing a stumbling block before the blind, is think about the image that's used there. Someone who's blind doesn't see what's in front of them. You're putting a stumbling block in front of them and leading them astray.
Rav Avi: It's actually manipulative, not just enabling.
Rav Eitan: But if the person can see, there's no real prohibition about putting a stumbling block in front of someone who can see -- maybe it's annoying, but you're not actually taking advantage of them, and if they see you while you're putting down the stumbling block and nonetheless decide to walk towards it, well, that is their responsibility. Says the Dagul Mervavah, if you understand what this prohibition is about on the spiritual and religious plane, what it means is don't take advantage of someone who is spiritually vulnerable, who is experiencing a moment of weakness, who might be talked out of what they're going to do, and cavalierly treat their transgression as unrelated to you and the role you're playing. That's when it's key that you not be the linchpin of this transgression. But if this is a person who very clearly and with self-understanding says, I don't observe x, the Dagul Mervavah suggests here that at least according to the Shach, the whole prohibition of lifnei iver does not apply to such a person; they've made their decision, that's their business about your observance, you have your commitments, and sure, you shouldn't incite them to violate things, but you don't have to worry about kind of withdrawing and recoiling from any possible role you might play that doesn't stop them from doing this thing.
Rav Avi: So in that case, I can say hey, can you cover for me next Saturday, but maybe I shouldn't say, on August 20, would you be able to cover, and hope that you don't realize that that's actually a shabbat, or something -- that would actually be, you know…
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I think what you're touching on now is the next stage, which is, okay, so if I eliminate lifnei iver, doesn't that open up the possibility of saying, let's just use some crass, simple terms here -- religious Jews can ask secular Jews to cover for them or can tolerate the possibility of secular Jews doing things for them on shabbat, because even if you disapprove of the way they're behaving, it's not your responsibility in that moment to stop them. So it does seem that the Dagul Mervavah would lead to that place, at least in a context where, let's say, you are not, as you suggest, explicitly saying --
Rav Avi: Right, you're not the boss.
Rav Eitan: -- to someone Jewish, I am asking you, demanding you to do this on shabbat, right? Because it's still a prohibition for them as far as you're concerned. But it would potentially open up the possibility of, I throw something out to an open list, who's willing to cover for this? If someone steps forward and says, I'm willing to do it, it would seem according to the Dagul Mervavah's frame you're not obligated to then say, oh no no no, I can't let you do that, because then I'll be an accomplice to your sin. They've known what date it is, they signed up for it, and they accepted it.
Rav Avi: And that's okay, even though you know beforehand that they're Jewish, that the situation, you can set that up to happen?
Rav Eitan: Well, the setting up as opposed to --
Rav Avi: Or you can accept the --
Rav Eitan: -- accepting them is the line here. There it goes, I think, to a complicated place. Rav Yitzchak Herzog, former chief rabbi, Ashkenazi rabbi in Israel, first chief Ashkenazi rabbi of the period of the state. He confronts this Dagul Mervavah and this Shach, and he's thinking about it in terms of the Israeli army. And he is specifically engaging with the problem of religious soldiers wanting to swap out some of their duties with secular soldiers so that they can go home and be with their family. Now, putting aside all the aspects of the army's operation that are supposed to be in keeping and in accordance with halakhah, right, such that in theory there's not supposed to be any violation involved there, it's clear that at least when Rav Herzog is writing, there is a sense that not everything is exactly always following that standard.
Rav Avi: Or in any event, like you said with the doctor, they may want to be home -- they have more of a value on being home with their families, maybe, on shabbat.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. And, you know, there's clearly a suggestion in the air, based on the Shach and the Dagul Mervavah, well, what do you want from them? Like, I wish they weren't secular, but they are secular, they don't care about this, why should I take it on the chin and not at least benefit from the fact that, you know, they're willing to do this? I mean, if I'm already gonna have to work with heretics, I should at least get some benefit out of it, right? You know, some notion of that. And it's fascinating to see how Rav Herzog goes totally bonkers at this suggestion, and says you absolutely cannot allow this. You cannot have an arrangement where religious Jews are asking non-religious Jews to do things on shabbat, and he says that would make it seem as if we have made peace with the notion that there are two kinds of Judaism, both of equal value: religious Judaism and secular Judaism. Okay?
Now, aside from we could have a long discussion about that specific piece, what Rav Herzog is, I think, confronting -- it's very compelling to me here, is it's one thing to accept certain ad hoc situations that come up. It's another thing to set up a system where you essentially acknowledge -- here in the context of, you know, the Israeli army -- oh, it won't really work to have religious Judaism take ownership of what this situation is supposed to look like, right, and he says actually in very vivid language at the end, the impression that happens if we set things up this way, it's as if, G-d forbid, we're content that they should be our shabbos goys, a topic that we took up in an earlier segment. They're like my deputies, as if they're not even Jewish, and they're sort of outside of the picture.
And one of the things Rav Herzog is saying you will create is a notion that the terms of the covenant and the expectations of mitzvot are actually totally relative and sort of idiosyncratic narratives of each person, and there's no broader claim which any internal discourse of halakhah would make which is, no, this is actually a system that speaks to the entire Jewish people and expects things of them. And one of the burdens, Rav Herzog says, and certainly he's talking about, you know, a Jewish Zionist context -- we'll transfer it back to the United States in a minute -- one of the burden that devolves a kind of religious Jew is to have a kind of vision of, these mitzvot are supposed to actually work for and in relationship with the entire Jewish people; I can't use the excuse of people who are not operating within that discourse as a kind of, you know, pressure-release valve in order to make my life easier. There's a kind of segmenting of the population that he deeply resists.
Rav Avi: Part of my understanding of why it's okay for religiously observant Jews to serve in the emergency room is because that's a job that we value so deeply, right? We don't want to say, oh, if everybody was an observant Jew, we would have no emergency room. That wouldn't work; therefore we want to allow and maybe even encourage Jews to also be able to be emergency room doctors. So it sounds like Rav Herzog is struggling with the question of not wanting to say some Jews are obligated in halakhah and other Jews are not obligated in halakhah. He's not willing to accept that as a premise. That is actually the premise that we accept in America, when we have Jews and non-Jews, where we say the Jews are obligated and the non-Jews are not obligated. So if he's trying to create an army that could, in theory, work if everybody was a halakhic Jew, do we have the same obligation in America to create a society that in theory could work if everyone was a halakhically observant Jew?
Rav Eitan: So, yeah. You've hit here, I think, on the difficulty of transferring Rav Herzog directly to, let's say, an American context, because one of the things that's different, of course, is Jews are a minority in the United States, and don't get to define the terms of the culture, the rhythms of the calendar -- here are all sorts of things where it's just not plausible in the same way, even if it would be ideal from a Jewish perspective, that you could set things up, theoretically, in a way that conforms certainly with all aspects of shabbat observance in a way that it is much closer to theoretically possible if not fully theoretically possible in a Jewish-run society institution. And in that sense, that's where I think the calculus is a little bit different, and this is where I want to sort of find a balancing space between the Dagul Mervavah and Rav Herzog. Because they both, I think, say something important.
The Dagul Mervavah, I think, makes a point that you can't fully avoid, which is to say it's hard to be responsible for changing someone else's behavior when they have made very clear choices about how they want to live their lives, and it's actually not reasonable to expect you to be defined by and drastically limited by those other choices. To the extent that basically you've got a doctor's group that has 50 people in the group, and there's eight Jews in it. And to the extent that it was just up to you, it would be perfectly fine if the only 42 people who answered the general call you put out for a switch, you know, were the non-Jewish doctors, but it turns out that some of the Jewish doctors pipe up. But you're not playing any role in influencing their religious life -- the Dagul Mervavah is saying, just like those cross sellers in the Middle Ages, it's a little crazy to tell you to not be able to take advantage of the normal protocols of your job, which I presume include people for all kinds of reasons asking to switch in and out. And to drag in policing someone else's religious behavior is a little bit absurd, and sort of off the point of what this mitzvah is even supposed to be about.
However, what Rav Herzog reminds us is -- I actually think two things. One, not all interactions are that way. That is to say, there might be people that you work with who actually have struggled with the question of shabbat observance their whole life, or they grew up always wanting to do it but never saw a viable pathway towards it. You might actually be playing some kind of mentorship role with that person, you might be a role model with them. They may not be as securely all figured out in terms of what they're doing, and it's extremely important, I think, from a religious perspective to be very aware of that relationship when it exists, and then to figure out, okay, not only how do I avoid being an agent of getting this person to, you know, to sin, but I think in some ways to a deeper place, how can I actually be a model of bringing this person closer to mitzvot in some way? And the risk of the Dagul Mervavah's approach is, you can just sort of write someone else as ah, they're an apostate, or they're a willing violator, so they're in a different category from me. That's lesson one: try to sort of be aware of the relationships that are different.
Lesson two is really remembering that the whole project of religious observance is ultimately not just about creating a space that is comfortable and meaningful for me, but is actually projecting out some broader vision of what observant Judaism is supposed to do in the world. And that means both being, you know, open to all kinds of people and being able to kind of share that message in all kinds of ways, but it also means taking seriously what it means for the Jewish people as a whole in all of its parts to be kind of, like, accountable to that message. And here's where the employer piece, or a place where someone has more direct responsibility for assigning things, I think does become tricky. That is to say, someone who is actually in a position of power where they can schedule out how various things happen -- I'm not saying they should be using their job to make sure that the maximum number of mitzvah points are being racked up on their watch, but it may be appropriate for them to think about ways in which yeah, I would not go out of my way to assign, you know, this Jewish member on my staff this work on Saturday.
Where I think it becomes more complicated, and this was really the question that I got -- what if I'm not really assigning it at all; it's this person was appointed to be undersecretary of such-and-such, that job description includes this, I'm just delegating it to that position, that position now happens to be occupied by someone who is Jewish but doesn't observe shabbat -- do I have to sort of end run around all the protocols of the department in order to avoid that? That feels like where the Dagul Mervavah may actually speak in important ways to saying that may be beyond the bounds of what you are expected to stop. There's a work flow that already put that person in the line of responsibility, but to the extent you're generating new work flows or coming up with new tasks, you may have an opportunity and a responsibility to exercise the levers of power at your disposal to minimize the ways in which Jews are working on shabbat.
Rav Avi: There's something that I really like about the very simple and yet somewhat profound idea of saying not all of these situations are gonna be equal, who is the actual individual that you're working with? And something that is really striking to me is that it almost could be a call to say, well, ask them. You know? When you're wondering whether it's okay to ask someone to work on shabbat, to even just flat-out say to the person that you're supervising, how do you feel about, you know -- or maybe, to maybe even flat-out say to the person that you're supervising, would you like me to avoid giving you shifts that are on shabbat, or giving you assignments that work over shabbat? And give the person a chance to say, of their own volition, no, I don't care about that, or oh, well, now that you mention it, actually I do sometimes get to go to kabbalat shabbat if I don't work late on Friday, so it would be great if I could work late on Wednesdays instead. And maybe that's a way of actually discovering who the person is and where they fall on that spectrum of totally decided versus someone who you don't actually want to be, you know, handing a glass of wine to, because it turns out they're a Nazir.
Rav Eitan: Right. No, I agree that on some relationship level that there's a lot to be recommended for that. It obviously starts to kick in its own challenges of, then you're in a situation where as opposed to not stopping them, you've asked them do you care about doing this thing on shabbat, and they say no, and then you say great, I'm handing it off to you, and then are you back in the Rav Herzog dilemma?
I agree, really, with what you said, which is I don't think there's a silver bullet on this; I think there's very much a kind of assessing -- what I like about, you know, the sources I've found on this is that you really find the two different perspectives articulated here, and as I think has come out over and over in our discussions and the questions and answers we've explored, usually the best answer you're gonna get is, here are the two ways of thinking about it, and how do I now thoughtfully apply those two perspectives in proper proportion based on the context? And never kind of let go of either value. And here those two values are don't delude yourself that you're gonna make someone completely redo their religious calculus overnight, or that you're really as critical to this process as you think, and also don't give up on a vision of the Jewish people as one actually being called on to observe mitzvot, to observe shabbat, to, through their stoppage of work on shabbat, teach the world a deep lesson about what it is to manage our time and create sanctity with them.
Rav Avi: Thanks.
Rav Eitan: Thank you.
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.