Andrew Bellinfante: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times! I'm Andrew Bellinfante, sitting in for Rabbi Avi Killip as we record live from the Limmud conference here in the UK! I'm here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. So this question, also at the cutting edge of technology, we are coming up into a world where so many things are at our fingertips because of the advancements in technology, and one of the obvious places we can go with a question is, what happens on shabbat when we have amazing technological devices? So this person writes: "For many years at the shabbat table, when an unanswerable question arose, I would often say, we really need a shabbat Google. Well, now perhaps there is one: Amazon Echo." Amazon Echo is this device where you can basically call out, sometimes it's called Alexa, and you can say, hey Alexa, play this song for me from iTunes or Spotify. Or you can ask a question and it'll search Google. It just sits there and listens, and it looks up on Google by itself, and then it spits out an answer to you, it has a voice built into it. "So, would this be permissible on shabbat? Is waking the device, so to speak, like flipping a switch? Or should we think of this device as always on, since it's always listening?"
Rav Eitan: Really interesting. Okay. So, this is one where I think we both have to kind of break down into components and maybe creatively apply some old categories to new circumstances.
Andrew Bellinfante: Categories, your favorite topic!
Rav Eitan: I love categories. Let's — alright, let's say it this way. Let's try to sideline some of the things I don't think are ways out of this one. You might have a temptation to say, well, I'm not doing anything, like, I'm just talking, right? I'm just using my mouth, and that's not doing anything. That I don't think is a way out, right? In other words, using your mouth to do something, certainly physically to do something, right, like in the Talmud Yerushalmi Reish Lakish says if you blow glass on shabbat into a shape, that's a full-blown violation of shabbat under the rubric of building and constructing things, even though you didn't do anything with your hands, right, maybe you didn't touch anything — just that action is enough. So, the fact that something is being done — if we were to determine that by speaking you are doing with the force of your sound waves, you know, something significant, intentionally, that shouldn't be happening in the world on shabbat, you wouldn't have an out just because you didn't use your hands or sort of do something in that way.
The question, I think, is how do we think about this thing? You know, one tempting precedent to use here, which is a good one, though not perfect, is the notion of asking a gentile to do something on shabbat. Right? So it's well-established in Jewish law that you can ask a gentile to do certain things that are of great need and minor infraction on shabbat. So, in other words, if the thing being done is really a low-level sort of penumbral concern and you are, you know, you're asking someone who's not Jewish to do it and you really need this in some way, then, you know, there should be no problem in asking them.
Andrew Bellinfante: I have to ask you to pause and just give us an example of what that might look like.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, a standard example a lot of people will use in places like Manhattan, they'll say to climb up to the 20th floor is a completely, you know, exhausting activity that's gonna wipe me out; I need to get up there to sleep and to have my shabbat meals, et cetera — I'm pushing an elevator button, even if someone considers that forbidden on shabbat, everyone agrees that's not, like, a core shabbat prohibition, having a box go up and down on a string is not actually — hopefully more than a string — is not a violation of some core physical activity on shabbat — okay, there's a light going on, or this or that, but that's a kind of minor prohibition, a great need — if there's a non-Jewish doorman, you can just say, can you please press 20 for me. Okay? That would be the sort of thing. So, you know, I think you could reasonably say that, like, Amazon Echo shouldn't be treated any more stringently than, you know, a gentile assistant in that way.
However, it's hard to imagine what the great need would be in these cases. And I think this also goes to thinking about, well, what are we doing with this device? It seems like the questioner is taking about resolving heated debates over trivia at the shabbat lunch table, but, you know, you can imagine a whole range of things — my understanding of this kind of device, it can be used to control all the lights in your house, it can be used to do all sorts of things that automate things. It seems pretty clear to me, anything that this device would do that would be a forbidden action for you to do with your hand, the fact that you're speaking it and asking the machine to do it doesn't make it any more permitted. That's fundamentally happening with your knowledge, with your agency, being done in the way that's meant to happen, and we wouldn't allow that to happen with even someone who was not Jewish in that sort of context.
Andrew Bellinfante: You are saying, if I went onto my computer on shabbat, typed the same question into Google as if I had asked it from the shabbat table, to Amazon Echo, that is the same action?
Rav Eitan: Well, so here's where I want to get to the question. Because if we're talking about, let's say, you know, we can control the heat in the house through Amazon Echo, so that's talking about raising the temperature of a furnace, building up a fire on shabbat in all kinds of ways, it's unquestionably, in classical rabbinic thinking and practice, forbidden to do that on shabbat. And I'm first starting off by saying, the fact that you're speaking it to a machine doesn't make it any less happening on your agency, and therefore that would be forbidden. But there's any number of other things that happen with Amazon Echo, which I don't think you can fairly classify as necessarily being a melakhah, a sort of forbidden action in and of its own terms.
So you can talk about the ancillary pieces, but for instance, looking up information is not forbidden on shabbat. Right? Like, if you have an encyclopedia on your shelf, you're allowed to pull it down and look it out. Culling information from someone else's brain is not forbidden on shabbat, you ask them a question, they essentially search through their electronic database and spit you out an answer through speech. The actual work that's being done with asking this machine to consult a database and then to bring it back to you is something we do all the time on shabbat with people and books. So, then I think the question is, how do we think about the mode of interaction with the machine, the person talked about it as my speaking sort of flipping a switch, and then how do we think about the actual content that's being engaged with here? On the first side I'm inclined to think kind of creatively — I don't know if "leniently" is the right word on this, but to think in terms of what's actually happening here. This is a question we're going to be revisiting more and more with more and more technology, is how do we think about sensors and machines that are always on, that then respond to our presence. This happens in a basic way of, let's say, walking through moving doors, hotels, you know, have all sorts of things automated in this way, lights going on, security cameras, all sorts of things.
One of the ideas that's being developed now by more and more thinkers on this front, and the leader has really been Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch of Ma'aleh Adumim in Israel, has been to say, you know, there's two ways of thinking about how sensors work. I think we touched on this in an earlier Responsa Radio episode. One way is to think oh, the machine's off, and when I move in front of the sensor or I do some activating thing, I'm turning it on, and that's a problem on shabbat. The other way to think —
Andrew Bellinfante: And people agree that that is forbidden?
Rav Eitan: No, I'm saying that's one way of thinking about it. Rav Rabinovitch comes along and says that's a totally incorrect way to think about what a sensor does. What a sensor does is to take a machine that's on, and when it senses you are gone, it's programmed to shut itself off. When you come back, it goes back on. In other words, in this sense, even though it sounds a little counterintuitive from the experiential perspective, he would say a sliding electronic door is always open, until you're not there, at which point it closes, rather than thinking of it as being closed and then you go and open it up. That is to say, the mechanism, the program is sort of always running. There's probably a reasonable case to be made that the waking device here is not really turning something on; this thing is on, it's listening, you at that point say something, and the question is then, basically, are you doing something problematic in that interaction?
My own instinct, though I want to think about it more, is I'm not sure I would root my problem with this, which I do have a problem with it, which I want to get to in a minute — I'm not sure I'd root my problem with this in the waking of the device or the notion that I'm turning something on. And I'll come back to why that might be relevant in a minute. What strikes me as more problematic here is, what are we doing when we're asking these questions of Amazon Echo? And there's two kind of precedents that are analogues that come to mind when I think about this. First is, there's a notion of shabbat on staying where you live, and staying local, and not going outside of the techum, the shabbat boundary that is sort of beyond the borders of civilizational life. It's a kind of analogic usage of that, but there is something here about going into a database that's not the brain of the person sitting at your table, but some global network of information, that feels like it's maybe going beyond the techum, it's going beyond the shabbat boundary.
I remember one of my study partners years ago suggested this was the reason he thought it was forbidden to talk on a telephone on shabbat. Not because of electronics, not because of anything like that; because it's taking you to, like, another place, and there's actually some deep notion already rooted in the Torah — on the seventh day everyone should stay where they are. Something about thit that feels like there's the shutdown of information from the outside on shabbat actually feels like it's more important to us than it's ever been before.
Andrew Bellinfante: Right. And you could apply that principle actually to books also: whereas the internet might have infinite possibilities at the types of answers or resources that it could provide, a book also has a back cover. At some point it ends, in the same way that a human brain does.
Rav Eitan: That's a great way to put it.
Andrew Bellinfante: That limitlessness matters.
Rav Eitan: That's right. The internet lacks the bookends of my bookshelf in that way. And it makes it perhaps less shabbat-conducive. The second thing is something that's sort of obscure and we think of as, like, totally in the dustbin of practice, many of us, but I wonder if these kinds of questions will force us to revive it: a notion in rabbinic literature that it is forbidden likro shtareh lidrotot b'shabbat, it is forbidden to read secular documents on shabbat. Now, this has been a raging debate of people who, can you read the newspaper, and what kinds of things — this too I think we talked about in an earlier Responsa Radio.
But there's sort of a notion there of, not all kinds of information are really appropriate to read on a day that you're trying to construct as different. And I think one of the things that speaks to me about being nervous about using Amazon Echo in this way is, does it just sort of plunge us into what feels like a predicament we have not yet figured out how to fully manage, which is simply being overwhelmed by content and information? This is increasingly part of my experience on shabbat, in a way that wasn't even like five years ago — I feel, in my withdrawal on shabbat, how much I'm being deluged with content during the week. It's great, all the people who are listening to this podcast who, like, may have never met us, they're in some other part of the world, and they're sitting while they're doing something else and they're having this content crammed into their head — I don't know that I really want them to hear that on shabbat. And I'm not just talking about the technical issues of electricity — maybe that's the day when you process what you already know on some level, or at least limit it by the bookshelves or this, or at least limit it to things that have some sacred valence. And here's where I want to go back — what I think might be a different question is, if we got to a point where Amazon Echo could serve as a chevruta for someone who wanted to learn Torah on shabbat, who is isolated from anyone else that they could learn with, I'd be open to thinking about that question. Because I'm less bothered by the technical piece here, and much more about what is this gonna bring into our shabbat lives.
Andrew Bellinfante: I don't even know what to say to that! I mean, it's a beautiful image that I'm conjuring up, of what it might look like for someone who might not have access to Torah in any regular way, let alone shabbat, to actually use that for something that feels so shabbosdik at its core. There's something beautiful about the image of a chevruta in a way you and I are right now sitting across from each other learning together with all these other awesome people in the room and all the people who are listening to us in the far reaches of the world as you mentioned, and I'm enjoying that process, and that's a process that I would partake in on shabbat. And so the idea that this technology, even though it proposes tons of problems in our world for all different reasons having to do with Jewish ritual and otherwise, that it could be used as a tool for engaging in Torah learning, seems to be a really beautiful thing.
Rav Eitan: So we'll see, we'll have to see where this takes us.
Andrew Bellinfante: Thank you.
Andrew Bellinfante: Do you have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at halakhah@hadar.org. You can also leave a message at (215) 297-4254.