It tells us to remember that the Lord of the Sabbath created the world, but says nothing about how much you can carry or how far you can walk on that day.īut instead of seeking the Lord of the Sabbath, a system of works has grown up. While the fourth commandment has a lot to say about who created the world, it has zero to say about eruvs and Kevlar. The eruv system highlights the strange nature of manmade religion. The freeway closure may disrupt our car culture, but that it would not disrupt the eruv. When it was announced that the freeway would be closed for the weekend, engineers also announced that they were going to rig a contiguous cable around the construction zone to maintain the eruv. The 405 is the most traveled freeway in LA, and the stretch between the 10 and the 101 is not only its most congested section, but is also the West side of the eruv. But if an 18-wheeler broke through one portion of it, the information tree spreads the word that the eruv is down, and all plans for Saturday are off. If the eruv is intact, a system of text messages/emails conveys the news to subscribers. Every Friday afternoon a designated Rabbi takes to the air in a bright yellow helicopter, and flies around the perimeter of the eruv. The answer is the Rabbis in the sky program. How do you know if you are able to drive on the Sabbath? Now, if an eruv gets broken-say a car crashes through a median or into one of the poles holding up the cable-then the entire eruv is null and void. But for the most part, the eruv simply borrows the barrier of the freeway. In some areas it drifts away from the freeway and dodges through, above, and around neighborhoods. In LA the eruv consists of the median of the 101, 10, and 405 freeways. But in LA, our eruv is a system of Kevlar cables and-this gets us back to our car culture-freeway medians. All that is required for an eruv is an unbroken barrier, and most of the world simply uses fishing line or rope. New York is pock-marked by tiny eruvs which string together small bands of houses. Thus Los Angeles has what certainly must be the largest eruv in the US. The Jewish communities are no exception to this SoCal trend. Well, Angelinos love their cars, and Californians have never met a fad that we can’t take to an extreme. If you circle an entire village with cords, then you have created zip code that as far as the Rabbis are concerned is one “house.” Thus you can drive freely inside of the communal area, aka the eruv. If you lasso a group of houses together, then you have a communal area, where the people inside can move freely. The original idea behind the eruv was this: if you take string or rope and tie your house your neighbor’s, for the purpose of the Sabbath the two become one. This loop hole gradually grew and grew, and eventually gave way to the eruv system. But there is a way out: The Talmud allows that if you share a meal somewhere, the location of the meal becomes a Sabbatarian extension of the house. Life under the strict Talmudic Sabbath restrictions is practically unbearable and functionally impossible. Essentially, the restrictions are so fastidious and elaborate, that Jesus rightly described them as “heavy burdens which are hard to bear.” MacArthur wrote, “With all of the regulations, keeping the Sabbath required more work than the other six days.” On the Sabbath, you are not allowed to drive (along with a myriad of restrictions on distance traveled and the like). In addition to weight restrictions there are travel limitations. At one point or another, people were forbidden from wearing sandals with two straps (one strap is fine flips in, Tevos out), carrying enough ink to write a sentence, or transporting more food than would normally fit on a spoon. Of course, like all things Talmudian, this is an over simplification, and they have changed throughout the years. This system essentially forbids carrying anything on the Sabbath. Because God forbid the Israelites from working on the Sabbath, the Talmud-not content to simply leave the concept of work up to the conscience-created an elaborate system to protect people from accidentally working on the seventh day. There is perhaps no contemporary illustration of the folly of man-made religion as absurd as the eruv, and if you are unfamiliar with an eruv, you are missing out. But of special note, Carmageddon did not even disrupt LA’s elaborate eruv network. Carmageddon came and went, with no serious delays or deaths attributed to the temporary pause on LA’s car-craved culture.
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