Breaking Down the Sabbath Walls

Shabbat is designed to be a day of rest, relaxation, and communal prayer.  Due to halakhic restrictions on their carrying items from one place to another, however, observant Jews can become prisoners in their own homes.  The rabbis, therefore, wherever they could, came up with a way to circumvent this issue: the eruv.  The word literally means “mixture”; and views on the eruv are themselves mixed and hotly debated.  The Yeshiva University Museum now has an exhibition devoted to the eruv called, “It’s a Thin Line: The Eruv and Jewish Community in New York and Beyond.”  The museum launched the exhibition with a day-long symposium reflecting the debates that the eruv has occasioned.

Among the Sabbath laws is an injunction against transferring an object from a private to a public space or moving it within the public space itself.  The prohibited activity is often simply called "carrying."  The activity is heavily regulated, and the rules are complex.  Halakhic literatures are occupied by questions of how to define a public or private space and what constitutes a transfer.

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