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?
Let's take another round, please.
Speaker #1: Just thinking about pikuach nefesh, I want to ask a difficult question about whether there's any difference between a Jewish life and a non-Jewish life.
Rav Eitan: Great, yeah.
Speaker #2: This is a topical question about lighting Chanukah candles, and in particular to me as a photographer, but we are told we're not supposed to benefit from the light of Chanukah candles. How does that apply to taking photographs of them?
Rav Eitan: That's a good one. Okay, yeah.
Speaker #3: You talked before about the idea of chevruta with Alexa. Have you resolved the issues about whether people can take part in a service through the internet from home when they're sick?
Andrew Belinfante: So, you're saying, like, live-streaming shabbat services, something like that? Okay. Do you want me to repeat some of the questions?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, why don't you do that?
Andrew Belifante: Okay, so we've got some amazing audience questions. How do we deal with pikuach nefesh, the concept of uprooting Jewish law to save someone's life, or you can frame it in a different way if you think that's not good, when it comes to a Jewish person versus a non-Jewish person?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, alright, so this is the kind of question where you can say, oh my G-d, how is there even a question, right? How can you even be raising this? And we are here at Limmud UK and I just taught a session this morning that touched on this very obliquely, though we didn't really get to go into it. This is a question with a long history — I'll just do a brief, hopefully still justice. The notion, the premise of the question comes from a place where the Talmud actually just seems to assume that you don't violate shabbat for a non-Jewish person's life. It already displays some discomfort with the application of this, primarily through the lens of being afraid for Jewish self-preservation, how Jews will make it through the world if they're known as the people who don't pick up the rubble to save you when it's a Saturday afternoon, and very quickly develops a notion of an exemption mishum eivah, the idea that basically, well, of course you would do that if you were worried that this would turn the non-Jewish world against you. But where does it even come from?
So, yeah, in a certain uncomfortable way, it comes from a place of saying the act of observing shabbat is more important in certain ways than human life. I put it that way because I think it's important to remember it's not self-evident that one would save a Jew's life on shabbat to violate it. This itself has a long history in Jewish law, because after all, what's the punishment for violating shabbat in the Torah? It's the death penalty. It's not self-evident that you violate a law that carries the death penalty in order to save someone else's life. What you do eventually come to is a notion of, well, okay, but if someone's life is at risk, you can save them, but there's competing rationales as to why that should be so. And at least some of the rationales are, well, isn't it better to save the person's life by breaking shabbat in order to enable them to observe many more shabbatot in the future?
But that really only makes sense for someone who will observe shabbat, which will write out, of course, gentiles, but might also write out non-observant of shabbat Jews, and in some very touchy conversations, might rule out someone who is terminally ill, or who is no longer able to actually make the judgement to save shabbat. That is to say, it's not actually even clear from the internal discussion if this is a statement of ontological human worth that entitles you to have shabbat saved for yourself, or whether it is about somehow your interaction with the practice of shabbat. At the end of the day, on the Jewish side of the spectrum, it seems to tilt more and more towards the ontological worth piece, or at least the value of life. Shmuel in the Talmud says the imperative for breaking shabbat in those circumstances is vachai bahem, you are supposed to live by these commandments, valo sheyamut bahem, and not condemn yourself to death. In American legal idiom, this is, the US Constitution is not a suicide pact. So there's some sort of notion there of you, you know, you value the person.
And that, then, rightly stirs up in some later times a sense of, well, if that's already gonna be the way we're gonna think about it, how can we possibly be treating gentiles differently on this front? And the most prominent person to articulate this is Rabbi Menacham Hameiri in fourteenth century Provance, who comes along and says yeah yeah yeah, all those passages in the Talmud that are about letting a non-Jew basically die under a pile of rubble — that only refers, basically, to the violent barbarians who would have let us die under a pile of rubble. Okay? Now we can question whether that's a standard we even feel totally comfortable with — this goes to the debates today of how do we treat terrorists who become injured in their own attacks, and do we save them, et cetera, which goes to some of these questions.
But in any event, says the Meiri, if I were to save a Provencal Christian on shabbat, it would not be because, only because I'd be afraid they might come after me, but because the Talmud's not talking about decent, good people, and therefore that whole category doesn't apply to them. Now, since him, I think, it's been interesting — there's been some degree of uneven acceptance of his approach. I mean, for the most part, his approach was simply not known. But in the modern time when it becomes known because his manuscript gets rediscovered and people re-engage with him, you have some people — I would put myself in this camp — who just, in a full-throated way, embrace that logic, and that's the way I think about it, and that's certainly the way I would tell everyone they should behave who would ask me.
But there have been others who have said no, I'm less comfortable with that — in practice, I will of course save any human's life on shabbat, but I'm more comfortable with leaving the rhetoric as one that is mishum eivah, because it may bring some kind of shame to the Jewish people. And they'll defend that by saying, I'd rather a more conservative response that doesn't shift all the categories around — who knows, maybe, you know, maybe some of these conversations are more complicated than people think. But my answer to you would be yes, you save any human being on shabbat, and that's some of the background of how I would see that as continuous and faithful to the tradition. What else have we got? Chanukah candles!
Andrew Belifante: The second question was about not just Chanukah candles, but photographing Chanukah candles when you're not supposed to take benefit from Chanukah candles.
Rav Eitan: This is a really good one. I'm not gonna do it justice; this is one I really feel like I'd need to look into and see what other people have said. I'll offer you this. I mean, one of the things you'd have to engage is what counts as benefit, right? Generally in Jewish law, benefit more or less clusters either around physical pleasure in some way — so eating, or, you know, anointing one's skin with a cream, or various things that you can sort of measure in some way — and even, though this is sort of, I think, on the edge, right, reading by the light of a lamp. But there's still a sense of, like, my senses are benefitting from this. Or, making money. Right? I actually turn a profit. So that's an interesting question — kind of, is it forbidden to, like, make money off of a great photo of a Chanukiah? I'm not sure what the answer is to that. You know, you could maybe — I don't know. What do you think, Andrew? What's your instinct?
Andrew Belifante: First of all, I like that you were stumped. I have to say that, number one. Do I think you should — well, I would say, I don't think — I'll say this personally, I don't think that there should be money to be made off of any ritual observance. There's something that feels not totally, like, religious or observant to me about that. I feel like that actually — in order for that to be fully ritualized or sacred in my life and meaningful to me, it actually has to exist in and of itself for itself, and I don't think that making money off of a photo of Chanukah candles is actually the way to do that. On the other hand, it's an amazing thing that half of my Snapchat, you know, story right now is people lighting Chanukah candles all over the world. I love that I get to see my friends in different parts of the globe lighting Chanukah candles. You know, they're not making money — Snapchat might be making a profit somewhere, but my point being, I want to feel like that ritual lives and breathes in and of itself for me, and it doesn't need to be for anyone else. But I also take great pleasure in knowing that I am in communion with other people around the world who are Jewish and who are celebrating Chanukah right now that I don't actually get the opportunity to be with in person.
Rav Eitan: Right. Look, I think at the end of the day, probably — and again, as I said, I'd want to look into whether anyone's dealt with this — I think at the end of the day, the inclination of how sources would be likely to think about this would be to say even if you made a killing off of that photo, you're not benefitting from the Chanukah candles, you're benefiting from the photo of the Chanukah candles. Right? And in that sense there would be sort of a sense of when we talk about not benefitting from them, what we really mean is in the room at the moment not using them in some functional way. I mean, there is something actually kind of nice where you could make an argument that of course the main thing you're supposed to do is see the Chanukah candles — this is certainly true of the things in the Facebook feed. The way in which the Chanukah candle-lighting in the Facebook feed are one of the modern manifestations of pirsumei nisa, of publicizing the miracle, in a way that our earlier sources could never have thought of. So in that way, taking the picture, to the extent that it is in some way sharing that image with more Jews and more people in the world, maybe it's even a hiddur, some kind of, you know, beautiful way of doing the mitzvah. It's a great, great question and angle. Okay.
Andrew Belifante: Do you remember the last question?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, go ahead, say it.
Andrew Belifante: The last question was, you know we're talking about Alexa a little bit earlier, and Amazon Echo and the emerging technology, the artificial intelligence question. The last question is, what happens when that technology or those services actually give us more access to ritual? So, a contemporary example that we see a lot is people setting up a camera in the back of their shul before Friday afternoon, they leave it running for 25 or 26 hours, you know, to cover all ends of shabbat, and people who are at home who might not otherwise have an opportunity to come into the shul to daven get access to hearing the Torah being read or davening musaf with their friends.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Can I just ask to clarify the question, is there a shabbat dimension to this question, or no, this is in general?
Speaker #3: During shabbat.
Rav Eitan: During shabbat, okay. Because we could ask two questions. I think it's important to note we could ask two questions about joining remotely. This will probably take us to the end here. Two questions we could ask. The first is kind of a question of, is it appropriate to join someone in a ritual space virtually from afar? In other words, forget about shabbat, okay? The classic place where this would come up. This already comes up, Rav Moshe Feinstein is asked a question, basically can you read megillah on Purim, which is never on shabbat, for someone over the phone? And he says yes. Okay? That's gonna come down to, basically, the question of how you understand the process of what's going on when you're hearing something like that from a distance, far away.
That's more or less a debate between Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Ovadia Yosef. Rav Moshe Feinstein thinks that a microphone really just brings the voice of the person speaking into it to a faraway place, and you're functionally hearing their voice. That is to say, he really buys in — he's not really thinking about the physics of it; he's thinking of the experience of it. That's what it is to hear someone, you know, speaking in that way. And as long as it's live, right, he wouldn't allow you to listen to, like, a recording of the megillah, but as long as it's live, then sure, the fact that it travels through these things, as long as the voice stop,s you know, when the person stops talking, that's effectively just like the person speaking to you from really far away, and you can hear them because of this device.
Rav Ovadia Yosef will have none of that, and he says no no no, like even if you go into a synagogue where they're reading the megillah through a microphone, you've gotta sit in the front row, because otherwise if you're hearing what's coming out of the microphone, you're hearing sound from the person's voice that was then broken down, re-assembled back together, and then put out through the speaker. Which is, of course, a more accurate way of talking about the physics of what's happening, even though it doesn't quite go with the experience of how we understand what's happening. So, there's some degree of sort of, like, the joining in that way, that will hinge a little bit on that question. And that then can spill you into some interesting questions about what it means to join — like, can you be part of a minyan in some way across that divide?
Andrew Belifante: I was also gonna ask, you know, if you're making a zimun for birkat hamazon and you're in a dining hall, a large dining hall, maybe you're at summer camp or a school or something, or a cafeteria — the fact that you need a certain number of people to actually make that happen and one of them is on a microphone, does that then no longer count?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And here, actually, I remember years ago seeing a responsum on this by Rav Avraham Reisner, who wrote this for the Conservative movement's law committee, where he came up with what both intuitively makes a great deal of sense to me but is also grounded in a lot of sources, which was the line he drew was to say to constitute a minyan you've gotta be in the same room. I mean, even if someone is right outside that door there and they can hear me perfectly but they're beyond the doorway, you're not allowed to count that person as a tenth, unless they're in the space. And therefore creating a minyan virtually outside of physical space — you can't do that. There's actually something about the act of creating a minyan that requires sharing physical space in the same structure. But, he said, there are other sources that talk about how someone can be walking outside of a synagogue and hear what they're saying inside, and answer "amen." And that they should answer "amen," and they should say "yeheh shmeh rabbah" to kaddish, and all that stuff. And he said that notion is grounded, even there, in the principle of even an iron wall cannot divide between Jews and their heavenly parent.
So as long as the Divine Presence has been brought down into some physical space through a cluster of 10 adult Jews, then however word of that getting out reaches someone, you're sort of right there. And he said, so therefore if there's already a minyan and then you're hearing it over the telephone or over the internet or any number of things, you should respond. You should actually consider yourself present, and recommended that, for instance, someone who is homebound and it's difficult to get to synagogue but they wanted to say kaddish, he even toyed with maybe the possibility of that. That's, of course, more problematic because it requires other people to answer. But the notion that you could actually sort of join in and answer "amen" to someone else's kaddish and have done something meaningful — that's there. On the shabbat front, yeah, that really pulls us back into some of the electricity question, and the question of microphones and all of that, and whether those issues of a microphone being on and all of that on shabbat should be considered you acting on the thing, or it being sort of there and alert.
I'll just note, again, the place where a lot of this discussion about electricity plays out is Rav Shlomo Zalman Aurbach, who I've mentioned before, among other issues that he takes up, talks about the microphone on shabbat. And his conclusion is, the microphone vis-a-vis it being an electric object is not really what the concern should be. The concern there should be the generation of noise on shabbat, the generation of creating something that projects out in a louder way on shabbat — there's all kinds of sources that talk about actually shabbat being in some ideal senses more of a quiet day. This actually seems to be part of, not entirely, but part of the concern around at least some musical instruments on shabbat, is the idea that they make noise. And he says this is ultimately the concern around the use of a microphone. I think there's all kinds of ways in which that actually accurately describes the way in which a microphone affects and changes the atmosphere in a room, in a way that I think for many people is intuitively not in keeping with the sort of shabbat environment they're trying to create.
But once you put it in those terms — it's not about the electricity but about the atmospherics and the noise pieces — it ought to lead you to kind of think a bit more creatively and with more nuance about, okay, well, what are the circumstances where either I can avoid the noise problem, or whether the noise problem is outweighed by something else. And here, on the latter front, there is a notion embraced by Rav Moshe Isserlis in the Shulkhan Arukh that the hashma'at kol, of generating excessive volume through objects and things on shabbat, can be overridden in cases of tremendous need. So the notion of at least engaging a conversation of, in a community where there are people who are hard of hearing or there's you know, sort of no way for them to join a service other than from home, is there a way in those circumstances to make some accommodation if the only issue is hashma'at kol — there seems to be a reasonable conversation to be had. And the the other thing, of course, which Rav Moshe Feinstein himself already grapples with, is the physics of a microphone and hearing aid are actually really the same, right? Just one, you talk into the microphone and it blasts it to the whole room, and the other, you talk to the person and this speaker blasts it into their ear. Rav Moshe says no way on the microphone, but of course it's okay to have the hearing aid, or even if maybe it would be great if people didn't have hearing aids, if they do have them, you can certainly talk to them.
He's grappling with the different sort of experiential piece, and that's where all sorts of other things — we're getting a lot of technology stuff, thinking about what it would look like to maybe not have a microphone in a synagogue, or at least not amplified sound, but to maybe have a hearing loop where everyone who is not tuned into the hearing loop is not experiencing anything different in the space, but sort of under the radar there's a projection of that sound. Those are the kinds of conversations I think that in an increasingly electrified and creatively electrified world has to take on. And it's another great example of digging down into what is the substance of what we're concerned about here, as opposed to just, oh my G-d, that's a machine, I can't touch it, is ultimately, I think, going to yield us better, more thoughtful, and more halakhically aware results. I think we're gonna leave us there. Want to give us our closing?
Andrew Belifante: We're gonna wrap up there. I want to thank you for your thoughts and your wisdom for the day. Thank you, in the audience, for all the questions — like we said in the beginning, it's a real pleasure to be here at Limmud in the UK. Responsa Radio is a project of the Center for Jewish Law and Values at Mechon Hadar, and is produced by Jewish Public Media, which produces, curates, and creates excellent Jewish content.
Rav Eitan: Thank you very much, Andrew! And thanks to all of you!