Rav Avi: Hi, welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times! I'm Rabbi Avi Killip here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Alright. How are you today?
Rav Eitan: I'm good, Avi, how are you doing?
Rav Avi: I'm tempted to introduce this next question by saying we have a hipster shabbat question, although you'll probably point out to me that this has been very relevant to especially young children but also adults in many other contexts as well. It's a question about riding bikes on shabbat. So the question is: "Is there a problem with riding a bike on shabbat? Does it make a difference whether you're riding to get to a place like to shul or to a friend's house that's just too far to walk, versus riding with your kids for pleasure?" And then they have a sort of additional question that I am curious to answer, which is "Does it matter whether or not other people in your neighborhood tend to ride bikes on shabbat or not?" Like, is this an accepted practice, and how would that play in?
Rav Eitan: Interesting. Okay. Well, let me start by asking you on this, one: why do you think it would be forbidden to ride a bike on shabbat?
Rav Avi: I — two things come to mind for me. I don't know if they're answers that I intuit or that I heard somewhere. I think that growing up I was always told, don't ride your bike on shabbat because if it breaks, you'd try to fix it, to which I always responded, I wouldn't know how to fix my bike anyway, so I'm not at risk for that.
Rav Eitan: Lest you fix it. Great. Okay.
Rav Avi: Right. And the second is some sort of concept that I, in my mind, link to a concept of eruv, although I don't know if other people always do, which is that you don't want to go too far too fast on shabbat. You know, I think of the concept of eruv as there's some sort of anchor that is supposed to keep us essentially at home on shabbat, and if a bike allows me to get 25 miles away, you know, to a simcha in the next town, that that maybe is — I don't know whether it violates a legal, but maybe a spirit of shabbat for me, in terms of you begin and end shabbat in the same basic location. So I don't know. I'm curious to hear whether either of those come up for you.
Rav Eitan: Alright, good. Those are good. Let's throw out a few more that I've heard. How about making tracks in the dirt? That's another one sometimes you hear.
Rav Avi: What kind of roads are you biking on?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, exactly. Not on sand. But, you know, you go over some softer patches of earth or whatever it is. That's another thing you'll sometimes hear.
Rav Avi: Yeah, that's a good one.
Rav Eitan: And, yeah. Definitely the ones that you raised as well. I'll say this. Here's a funny incident from my kid's time in school in Israel. So, they're here in a religious school, and a they handed out before Yom Kippur a sheet, for kind of reviewing, like, what do you do on Yom Kippur, what do you not do on Yom Kippur? And, you know, on the, like, you know, permitted, obligated, like, what we do on Yom Kippur, it'll be things like, you know, a lot of prayer, bowing down flat to the ground, you know, all these different kinds of things that reflect — wearing white, et cetera, et cetera. And then on the side of the things that you're not allowed to do, there's things like eating and drinking, and a picture of a bicycle.
Now, this is funny for two reasons, right? What it's reflecting is the contemporary Israeli reality, and particularly striking in Tel Aviv, and I'll get back to that later, which is the major thing that people do on Yom Kippur, let's say in Tel Aviv, many people, is they bike. They go out on their bikes and the street's completely shut down, and there are no cars whatsoever. It's fairly remarkable — I'll come back to that in a bit. But what these teachers are responding to is, oh, there's gonna be tremendous pressure, you know, on your average religious kid in Tel Aviv to go out with everyone else and bike, and so they want to be very clear the bike is not allowed. But of course it creates this other different kind of absurdity, which, you know, my wife noted when we brought home the sheet, which was, oh yes, the traditional Yom Kippur restrictions on eating, drinking, and biking. Right? It's sort of — this totally bizarre thing of there weren't bicycles — maybe different kinds of buggies, but what we know as a bicycle has basically only existed for 100, 100 plus something years.
And so how do we even, you know, think about this? In that sense it's a technology question, it's similar to some of the umbrella stuff we took up on an earlier episode. But it's also, what are the categories that you use to think these things through? And as we'll see in this example, the categories you use can be wildly differently definitive in terms of how you think about the conclusion.
Rav Avi: Right. It makes me think a little bit about how for a lot of modern Jews, shabbat can be almost entirely defined as a day when you don't use your cell phone, or maybe even more broadly as a day when you are disconnected from social media, which is, like, obviously, you know, for our ancestors shabbat was not a day when you didn't do social media; it was a day when you didn't do labor, you know? And so we have this very, you know, this very clear, like, cell phone disconnection definition.
Rav Eitan: Our ancestors were all in a lifelong social media fast.
Rav Avi: Exactly, exactly. There was no distinction for them.
Rav Eitan: And I feel like maybe they were a lot happier. But that's another story. So how do we think about this, right? I mean, let's take some of the things that you raised and see where does that even come from? Maybe you'll come to fix it. Maybe it'll break and you'll fix it. It's not a made-up thing; that has an antecedent in the Talmud. In fact, that's the reason given for why you're not allowed to start making all kinds of loud clapping, banging, and dancing noises on shabbat, is it might end up basically to leading to bringing out musical instruments, musical instruments could then break, and then you're gonna end up fixing them. We're not gonna talk about about the musical instrument case —
Rav Avi: And therefore I shouldn't use my bicycle! Sounds perfectly logical to me.
Rav Eitan: It's — right. It's a little bit of a stretch, but, you know, the idea is we see from here that when dealing with objects that might break, we have a concern about them. Indeed, if a chain comes off a bike, it becomes completely unusable, and there is a reasonable argument that if a chain is off a bike, it's forbidden to put the chain back on the bike, because it's basically taking something broken and fixing it, and to the extent that that is a plausible outcome, that the bike could get, you know, broken in some way, and you would then need to do something that's forbidden on shabbat, you should stay away from it.
Okay. That's all well and good — the problem, of course, with that explanation is, well, what about, like, a tricycle? It would seem like a tricycle might be a similar concern, or maybe even a baby stroller, something might break, or something could fall off, and we don't see anyone rushing to forbid the baby stroller for sure, but not even kids being on a tricycle. So that's our first sign that, well, that seems like it might be a reasonable thing to be concerned about, but it's not clear we're applying it consistently. Alright? That's one. Another issue, which is one I raised, which you see people talk about, which is not making tracks.
This relates to, you know, a source in the Tosefta and in the Talmud which says you're not allowed to drag a bench along the ground if it is for sure going to make a furrow, it's gonna, you know, dig in the dirt. And so maybe the problem with a bike is, it's impossible that you'd have an entire bike ride where you're never gonna go over any kind of soft earth or something like that, and as a result you're gonna make some kind of track in the ground, and that's not allowed, we can't allow that on shabbat.
Okay — that one is probably even dismissible on its own terms, because you're not intending to make it, and you might not make it, et cetera, but here too, we don't see people on those grounds very seriously forbidding, you know, kids from playing sports on, you know, a dirt field, I mean you'll hear people raise that too, but there's a lot more acceptance of other things where it might disturb the earth, and we're not worried about people walking there. And certainly you never hear people saying, oh, you should never push a baby carriage except on a paved surface.
Rav Avi: I was gonna say, I think the stroller is a good example, you know, definitely based on the amount of dirt that can sometimes be tracked into the house based on the stroller, it's obviously making those grooves in the ground.
Rav Eitan: So, you know, that's another piece where, not clear the reason totally stands up even though, okay, it seems like maybe that's an okay reason, but then we don't seem to actually enforce that across the board.
Rav Avi: Okay, so what's left?
Rav Eitan: Well, so I would say in the spirit of those kinds of reasons, there is one pathway that opens up, which is to look at all those sort of, well, lest you do this and lest you do that, and say truth be told, those aren't really concerns, or they're not really concerns more than anything else, and therefore go ahead and use the bicycle. Right? That was the position of the Ben Ish Chai, who was a great rabbi in Baghdad. He wasn't talking about the kinds of 21-speed bikes we're talking about today, which I'll get back to in a second. But he's talking about, you know, one of these — it's a question that comes to him from I believe Bombay, in India. And it's essentially, it's like a rickshaw, it's like, you know, using this to get someone across town, and can that be used on shabbat, can you go on one of those on shabbat.
And he basically says there's no text obviously that talks about this specific thing, and all the things would seem to be concerns of, hey, maybe, you know, you'll end up having this problem. And he's like, those aren't really a problem. And therefore he says if you're in an eruv on shabbat, so there's no issue of transporting the object, you know, beyond where you can carry things around, of course it's permitted to use that on shabbat. He even suggests that you can use a thing like that outside of the eruv when it's a d'var mitzvah, when it's like doing some really important mitzvah, it might be like making it to minyan, but certainly to things like hearing shofar on Rosh Hashanah or something like that. He basically says yes, it's okay. So you'll often hear the Ben Ish Chai quoted as oh, he permitted a bicycle on shabbat.
And yes, that is a view that exists out there, and I think has to be understood as taking seriously the only issue being, well, maybe it'll lead me to this, and maybe it'll lead me to that, of the sort brought up in the Talmud about other things, and concluding, I don't think it's gonna lead me to that, or it's not leading me to that more than other things that we don't forbid. And therefore, yes, if the chain falls off, you can't put it back on, but you don't have to not ride the bike in the first place because the chain might not fall off. Now, this is missing something.
Rav Avi: It sounds like he's coming from a place of permitted until proven forbidden.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. I think that's a hundred percent right. Now, the virtue of that is, it sort of takes seriously the, you know, well, what are the reasons that we might raise, and if they're found wanting, then you permit it. What it lacks a little is trying to understand, well, why are there so many Jews and so many rabbis who would allow their little kid to ride a tricycle but not their big kid to ride a bicycle? Are they just being idiotic, you know? Or is there some implicit element that they're getting at. And here, a close look back at the Talmud goes back to one of the things that you talked about even as it's kind of complicated.
So, the Mishnah in Beitzah says you're not allowed to ride an animal on shabbat. Now, on some level, the plain sense of that reason would seem to be, your animal is supposed to rest on shabbat, and if you're riding on it, you're not allowing it to rest. It's almost like a law that doesn't require explanation. But the Talmud, because it's very interested in trying to fit all of the things that are forbidden on shabbat somehow into a relationship with the 39 categories of melakhah, of sort of formal physical labor that get developed over time in rabbinic literature, wants to see is there a way we can fit this in with some other Biblical prohibition? Because riding on an animal, of course, is not really physically creative, just like riding on a bike is not physically creative in any meaningful way. The Mishnah on some level seems to forbid it because it's some kind of atmospheric problem with shabbat, or in this case, you know, it's the animal but it's also what are you doing riding an animal. The Talmud wants something that's more anchored in a physical prohibition.
Rav Avi: So we're taking a prohibition that emerged from one paradigm of shabbat and trying to fit it in logically into what is really a different paradigm of shabbat.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And the Talmud's initial suggestion here is, oh, the reason you're not allowed to ride on an animal is because you might leave the t'chum. You might leave the shabbat boundary, which is something we could talk about in another episode another time, which is the idea of not going beyond more than, like, a kilometer beyond the outskirts of your city. People who live in the Northeast Corridor don't even know what this concept is, because you just sort of can go all the way from, like, Boston to Washington, D.C., you know, from house to house.
But, you know, still in a lot of parts of the world and in a lot of parts of the world in the ancient world, yeah, it's just a very well defined individual city, and you're not supposed to go beyond it, you know, on shabbat. And the fear is, you get on the animal — oh, you'll go outside the t'chum, outside the shabbat boundary. Now the Talmud actually tears that down, and it says, well, why would we make a, you know, a decree, a kind of restriction, a fence around that — the whole prohibition of going outside the shabbat boundary is only of rabbinic force. It's not a Biblical-level prohibition that we should be so, you know, extra cautious around it. And it says yeah, that's not the reason for riding an animal; actually the reason for not riding an animal is you might rip a branch off a tree and beat it with it. Okay? Now, that's another one of those explanations which, when understood on its own terms of, oh, how could we fit this into the different categories of forbidden labor, is a nice organizational device. If you try to take it seriously as the reason behind the prohibition of riding the animal, you'll clearly kind of go off course, because as, you know, the Arukh Hashulkhan and some later authorities point out, it's not as if if you tie your hands behind your back you're allowed to ride the animal, because you're not gonna grab the tree off the branch. So, you know, this is an example where —
Rav Avi: In essence, this is almost the opposite approach of the Ben Ish Chai, right? Because where I said he's saying permitted until proven forbidden, this is really an action that they know is forbidden, and now we're coming up with the reasons why it's forbidden. It's the exact opposite approach.
Rav Eitan: That's right. Because the Mishnah says, they have a ruling where it says you're not allowed to ride on an animal; there is no text that says you're not allowed to ride on a bike. So the question is, what's the underlying category? Now, what I think is interesting here is, the Talmud does shoot down formally this notion of, well, the problem is it might take you beyond the shabbat boundary. But I actually think in passing mentioning it, this may actually get to a deep sense of what part of the prohibition was and has been about, which is exactly as you formulated it — too far too fast. That is to say, not that it's actually a concern you are going to be taken out of the shabbat boundary, but this is the kind of thing that takes you out of the shabbat boundary, which means it goes too far too fast.
And that then starts to make perfect sense of why people might treat a bicycle different from a tricycle. Because on the level of making tracks in the dirt, or whether it's going to break, it's not really all that different. But on the level of speed, it is dramatically different. And that is actually one of the things I think people instinctively feel about the bicycle, those who are, you know, concerned about it, the atmospheric dimension of simply being on a thing that again, goes too far too fast, is what bothers people. It clearly was not of overriding importance for the Ben Ish Chai, and I think we have to respect and honor and understand that. But also to the extent that there's a pretty dominant practice among people who are already meticulously following rabbinic law for 25 hours on shabbat not to bike — this is probably the underlying value that that's capturing.
Rav Avi: So you're saying there is, you sort of threw in there at the end that there seems to be among most people who consider themselves observing shabbat that they would not ride a bicycle. I'm curious, you know, the person who wrote this question and specifically says that in their community riding a bicycle on shabbat is very common, it makes me think of your story of Tel Aviv, you know, it's sort of a joke, the streets are filled with bikes. So my follow-up question is, does it matter? Does it matter if I live in a community where everybody is biking or where nobody is biking?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So, I think it does matter, and I want to tell it from two angles, and then come back to Tel Aviv story. First of all, I think it matters in the direction of, if someone's in a community, a well-defined community that has some kind of clear norms around it, where bikes are not really ridden, I don't think it's so simple to say, well, I hold by the Ben Ish Chai and that's what I do. This goes to the general principle of d'varim hamutarim, permitted things, things you think are permitted, v'acherim l'hagu bahem isur, other people treat them as forbidden, iata reshai l'hatiram bifneihem. You're not allowed to sort of wantonly permit them in front of those people. We've talked about this in an earlier episode.
This is a notion of, you have a certain degree of responsibility to larger communal norms to not sort of flagrantly disrupt them when people have a reasonable expectation that they're not going to or shouldn't be disrupted. There's always fine lines here, and who gets to actually, like, shut down a street, and actually demand that someone dress a certain way, there's all kinds of issues here that I'm not claiming are simple. But I think a sort of healthy respect for the notion that part of the way we construct religious standards and religious commitment is by creating spaces where people reinforce the behaviors and reinforce the taboos that are important to us, bestows a certain degree of responsibility on people who are outside of that consensus to be thoughtful and not sort of wantonly destructive of that religious zoning.
And in that sense, I think, again, to the extent there's a sort of well-defined community where not riding a bike is a norm, that's not the place I would choose to, you know, play out an ancestral practice that, you know, already permitted riding a bike. That's from one angle. From a second angle, I think it's important to say that yeah, you know, the Ben Ish Chai permitted this. And it's important not to sort of cast illegitimacy and doubt over that practice when its done in a context that either is well-defined in the other direction or that's in a lot of environments that Jews live in, which is sort of general urban environments that don't have a clear character, where lots of different people are coexisting and no one really has any kind of expectation around who is or is not doing what. And I think sort of protecting the space for someone who rides a bike to be considered shabbat-observant is also important to me, because I don't want to completely run that opinion out of town, even as I would want that person to not just sort of be eh, that's just the stupid stringency, I'm not even gonna think about it, but to say huh, maybe I should think about that, maybe it is too far too fast, and I want to reevaluate, you know, how I think about it as well.
Rav Avi: There's something about this question of bike riding on shabbat that I think people who grew up with a shabbat-observant practice, whether they considered bike riding within that practice or outside of that practice, makes a big difference just in terms of how it feels, you know, that someone who grew up riding bikes on shabbat or someone who grew up watching someone ride bikes on shabbat, it will feel to them so obvious that to not do it, you know, would feel like a real chumra for no reason. And vice versa, if you really grew up without this practice, it could feel totally foreign and almost even alarming to see someone riding their bike on shabbat.
Rav Eitan: That's right. And what I want to also add here is, I think context and what it is trading off against is enormously important here. And here I want to go back to my experience this Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv. Which I'll never forget — it was really remarkable. We went to Kol Nidre and we were, you know, with everyone doing basically the same thing that we were doing. A lot of people go to Kol Nidre in Tel Aviv, you know, whatever their background. And we came out of shul and then we went for a nice walk, you know, there's nothing really more to do, right, after Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur night. You're not going home to dinner, it's a little too early to go to sleep. So we went for a nice, you know, mile and a half walk, or something like that. And you go through the streets of Tel Aviv, and there are no cars. It is full of families going around on their bikes. And we're walking as a family, and you know, my daughter turned to me and said, you know, Abba, this is really kind of weird. Like, I'm not sure I feel totally okay about this.
And my response to her was, first of all I agree with you, there's something odd about this, there's something sort of overwhelming about all these people doing this same thing which we wouldn't necessarily be doing, you know, nevermind on shabbat, but let's say certainly on Yom Kippur, even though the formal restrictions are no different. The formal restrictions are no different, but there's something, you know, even the mood of Yom Kippur is like, this frivolous activity, et cetera. But then I said, but you and I are comparing it to walking. But stop for a minute and recognize that for almost everyone here, this is instead of driving. And in that sense, this — I have to tell you, the night of Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv was one of the most sort of sacred Jewish scenes that I have seen in that sense, from a certain angle, where you actually saw an entire city without any coercion and any intervention, voluntarily shutting down the streets because it was Yom Kippur, and everyone being out on their bike.
And when you sort of recognize that, that has a different effect of sort of how you think about the Ben Ish Chai and thinking about the practice itself. Is it part of sort of, eh, some general, you know, activity of, yeah, anything I can find to permit, et cetera, et cetera, I'm going to do, where then maybe it's like, hey, let's think about what the bike might bring that's problematic. Or, is the bike somehow part of a regime in this context in Tel Aviv, but I think some people the way they grew up, yeah, it's really meaningful, like I would never have dreamed of getting into a car on shabbat, but of course we biked, and actually that in some ways totally fit with, like, the shabbat atmosphere that we were creating. That just makes a big difference in terms of sort of evaluating, honoring, respecting, and thinking about the place of this or any other practice of that sort for that matter.
Rav Avi: Yeah. That's really powerful. It raises for me another concept that we've talked about on a different episode, which is the idea of shinui, the idea of that on shabbat you want to do things a little bit differently, and that for some people a bike ride may be a, oh, I like to go for a bike ride on a Saturday and a Sunday, in which case there's no shinui there, there's nothing special about shabbat. But if it is, you know, I would otherwise drive to shul, but now I'm trying to be more observant so I'm gonna ride my bike, that that really could be a shinui and a really powerful spiritual practice way that would enhance shabbat and not be a desecration of shabbat.
Rav Eitan: So, happy trails, whether during the week or on shabbat in the context of community and text and practice and all the things that we looked at here.
Rav Avi: Yes. And bike safely, whichever day it is.
Rav Eitan: Exactly, that for sure.
Rav Avi: Thanks.
Rav Avi: Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at halakhah@hadar.org. Or you could leave us a voicemail message at (215) 297-4254.