Andrew Belinfante: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Andrew Belinfante, 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. We would love to get some questions from the audience! Does anybody have a pressing halakhic question they want to bring to Rabbi Ethan Tucker right now?
Rav Eitan: So let's open it up — we'll take, you know, two or three together, we'll see the best we can do. Please.
Speaker #1: I actually emailed this in to Responsa Radio once —
Rav Eitan: This is your chance to corner me!
Speaker #1: I was just wondering, really, about, sort of, pikuach nefesh-adjacent activities. So, I actually emailed in about the Good Samaritan Suicide Hotline in the UK, and using something like that on shabbat. But there are other activities we could imagine also, like maybe a 999 or 911 operator picking up the phone for an emergency call, or the support staff in hospitals, things like that, that are sort of — they're not actively saving someone's life, but they're just integral to the potential of saving a life.
Rav Eitan: Great. Another, please.
Speaker #2 (Daniel Eisenberg): I was recently in Madagascar with the small Jewish community there, and there was a thunderstorm, and in unison the community all said the bracha over thunder, and they then asked me — the storm went on and there was another storm later in the evening — how many times do you have to say the bracha over thunder? Is it once a day, once for every 30 days, what are the parameters?
Rav Eitan: Great. Yeah. Please.
Speaker #3: On the theme of social intelligence of the previous two questions you just answered, at some point, our generation is going to get to the point where electricity and technology will be so integrated in our lives, it will be impossible to live without it. And then, you know, it starts by using electricity on shabbat, things like that — it'd be literally impossible to live without our technology.
Rav Eitan: Great. Let's start with those three, and we'll hopefully get to one if not two more rounds.
Andrew Belinfante: Great, I just want to make sure we heard all the questions on the podcast, because there are people in the room who are not close enough to the microphone. The first question was about — one of the examples given was suicide helplines or hospitals, and the ways in which we use technology to actually give people access to better health or to save lives in some way.
Rav Eitan: And how much we should allow, make allowances on shabbat for things we would otherwise consider a violation of shabbat, but they're sort of at the gray area of, the person is not about to die right now, but they might be, or you're not sure, and you don't know where that goes. So, two things here that I think are helpful for this. Look, it's a cardinal principle — even the doubtful possibility of saving a life trumps shabbat; you don't sort of first do some calculus of making sure 100 percent that the person is going to die unless you intervene before you intervene. That doesn't mean it's not a weighty responsibility to draw that line, but it does mean the bias is certainly on that side of the ledger.
I think it's fair — look, those who are involved in this work can say much better than me — I think it's fair to say someone who calls in to such a helpline is already at a significant place of desperation and difficulty. I'm sure there is a range, but I would imagine it's not the kind of line where people are just calling because they just need someone to talk because they had a really bad day. There's some deeper issues there. And certainly you as the person who's responding may well, in any of those calls, be picking up for that person. This is to say nothing also of whether the prohibition of picking up a telephone and speaking on the telephone really should be understood as a core violation of shabbat; there were early poskim, early people first dealing with the telephone who actually said it's permitted to talk on the telephone. That did not, at the end of the day, win out among observant Jewish communities being careful for 25 hours, you know, to refrain from all sorts of physical activities, but it is important when adjudicating questions like this also to sort of keep in mind that when we're talking about, you know, practices that we wouldn't normally do on shabbat, there is also a difference between lighting a bonfire and answering a telephone.
That said, I think another text that's really important for understanding how we might think about the limits of this — it's not entirely generalizable, but it gives you a direction — the Mishnah talks about and the Talmud talks about the things you do for a woman who's giving birth on shabbat. And it says, among other things, you can light a candle for her. And then the Talmud says, well, that's totally obvious; I mean, obviously you can light a candle, why does it even say that? And the Talmud says, well, it's to tell you that you light a candle for her even if she's blind. Now, what could she possibly have need of the candle if she's blind? And the answer is, she will feel better about the other people attending to her being able to see better, and it'll put her mind at ease, and that ultimately may have a serious impact on the success of the birth, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, there's a particular sort of hyper-fear around women giving birth, alright, which we could take apart in all kinds of ways and gender theory ways, but there's at least two things that are just in a practical way: one, there's a sort of concern that, you know, things suddenly play out in crazy ways, when people are giving birth. I think that this starts already from the narrative anchor of Rachel — they're going along, everything's fine — suddenly she has Binyamin, drops dead, right? So you don't know what's gonna happen in that moment. And of course there's a child whose life is at stake here, so you're dealing with two people in that way. That said, it shows you that the standard for thinking about what it means for someone's life to be at risk for the violation of shabbat can extend even into places that start to cross the line into the psychological realm.
So that's what I would think about that — I think, yeah, overall it would seem to me, you know, a context where that work is being done and it is known that that work saves lives, you don't need to be thinking about whether the individual caller is that person whose life you're gonna save, because you can't do the work without having the open line for them to call it.
The blessing over thunder, we've got an interesting question about how many times do you do that in a given storm. So that's easy, actually — sources lay out that the standard there is nitpazrueh habim, if the clouds scatter. That is to say, one storm, one blessing over thunder. And this is reflecting that it's not actually about — so even if it's the same day, right? You would say it twice. But in a given storm it's one thing. And that is to give you a sense that it's not just, wow, I heard a really loud sound, that was overwhelming; it's actually the whole experience of the storm. And like many standards like this, I think it's really beautiful with that, with blessings and the laws around them, the ways in which they're not just, oh, you have to say such and such, but they're meant to actually inculcate a sensitivity to the experience.
And what I like about this standard is it's an experience that's like, take in the storm. You know? What is it like to go from a time where there wasn't a storm to now there is, and now it's clear? And then the sort of threatening piece of, what does it mean for a storm to have cleared, and then to have come back again? But technically the clouds need to scatter, you need to see clear sky, and then have it come back. What was our third question?
Andrew Belinfante: The third question was about artificial intelligence, and the emerging world of AI that we are coming up against as Jews, and, you know, halakhically minded Jews.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. We did an earlier episode that talked about electricity more broadly. I would say your question about the, what seems to be the growing integration of electricity into all aspects of life is part of what needs to motivate us to take the conversation away from electricity and towards the uses and consequences of electricity. So, for instance, rabbinic sources don't say it's forbidden to use your hands on shabbat, because that's the thing that carries a hammer; they say don't use a hammer to hammer in a nail. When electricity first comes to human society, you know, it is a blender, and a light, and sort of these distinct appliances which are overwhelmingly things that do things that are forbidden by any definition, reasonable definition, on shabbat, and so it's very easy and effective to just throw a taboo on the entire topic.
And that's the initial instinct that quoted the Chazon Ish before, quote him again to basically say, circuitry is what's forbidden. Right? Creating and breaking a circuit, those are acts of construction and, you know, disassembling things that are forbidden on shabbat. Rav Shlomo Zalman Aurbach, another great Israeli posek in the 20th century, I think had sort of the foresight to realize that might not be a wise way to go with thinking about this. And he essentially said, really, you want to know the problem with electricity? Nothing. The problem with electricity is what we use it for, and then we have to have a much more significant but actually more rabbinic conversation of, this is allowed, this is not allowed. What's the meaning — to take things away from flipping a switch, and that's the problem, to what happens when I flip this switch? So I think we have to be careful.
One of the other reasons I think that's important is, if you actually forbid electricity across the board or you ground your whole language of prohibition in electricity, you may end up having people go to the other extreme, of then saying well, we have to permit electricity now, and then people start using electricity for things that they really shouldn't be using it for on shabbat. So I think it's a really, it's a pressing question, we're gonna have to see how that plays out. Right now I think our goal is to lay the groundwork of the discourse to set ourselves up for success.
Andrew Belinfante: 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.