What religion does to people.
To be fair, that’s pretty close to describing the Jewish faith. One fundamental tenet is that God put loopholes there on purpose, and it’s the rabbis’ duty to debate legalistically to extrapolate what he meant based on what he said. That’s why they’re called laws. (I was raised jewish, for the record)
One common one that most people have heard of by now since they went viral on youtube a couple years back, is eruvim. Since there’s a bunch of rules around how much effort you’re allowed to exert on the sabbath (e.g. you’re not allowed to move anything from inside your house to outside, or to carry anything heavy more than about half a meter while outside), people hang a wire, called an eruv (plural eruvim), encircling an area ranging from a small neighbourhood to several city blocks to the entire island of Manhattan, proclaiming it to be one big “home”, allowing practicing Jews to do anything they’re only allowed to do at home, anywhere inside its area.
Another fun one that has a lot of ramifications is that we’re not supposed to “start a fire” on sabbath, and rabbi have traditionally declared that turning something electrical on or off is “starting a fire”. Because of this, jewish hospitals have elevators that run constantly between floors so people can just walk on without actually pushing a button and causing a circuit to close. Or lightbulbs; for the longest time, the “solution” was just to leave your lights on all saturday in case you needed them, or maybe spring for electronic timers, or just get your goyim buddy to come over and turn em on for you, but with the modern prevalence of LED bulbs, there’s now jewish smart lights called “shabulbs” that have internal shutters which cover the LEDs without actually extingishing them, so you can turn it back “on” again without breaking the rules. Some places even sell ovens with a shabbat mode so they stay slightly warm all day and never turn all the way off, don’t show the display screen, and don’t turn on their internal lightbulb when you open them after sundown on friday! All this because there’s a rule against starting fires.
Maybe I got a bit off topic, but my point is, In some ways you might say that finding loopholes in Abrahamic law is practicing religion lol
I can just imagine having parents care about any of this and being SO annoyed by it. Worst I got as a kid is going to church on christmas before opening the presents. (We do presents on the evening of the 24th)
I’ve heard stuff like this several times from different sources over the years, but I’m still not convinced it’s not some elaborate collective prank. It reads like something written by Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.
That’s super interesting. I was not raised Jewish at all, but I’ve heard an expression “making a fence around the Tora.” At least as it was explained to me, the idea is that we don’t really know what the exact line is for what we’re supposed to do, so we’re just going not even get close to the line so we know we’re definitely okay.
To me, that seems like the complete opposite of what you describe. Do you know if that’s a different interpretation/sect/denomination or if I’m misunderstanding and those loopholes are the fence around the Tora?
In the Netflix show Unorthodox there’s a scene where a girl wants to go out but bunch of neighbours standing at the exit tell her that eruv is broken so she has to go back to her apartment and leave her bags. There’s no explanation given but I’ve read about the eruv thing in the past so I knew what’s going on. I felt smart.
didnt some religion have a concept where since they believe god infallible, any loophole in the rules must therefore be intended, possibly as a reward for the cleverness of finding it? I forget which one that was
