Q&A: Gets Tangled Up on the Sabbath and Manages Fine on Weekdays. What Should He Do?
Gets Tangled Up on the Sabbath and Manages Fine on Weekdays. What Should He Do?
Question
A dear Jewish friend of mine founded and has been running for many years a large medical center that heals many patients.
Most of his doctors and staff are non-Jews.
He trusts them, and they do their jobs excellently and save lives.
Besides managing the medical center, he also serves as an ambulance driver in his city and doesn’t give up his shifts when his turn comes.
Sometimes that is on the Sabbath.
When he drives an injured person or a woman in labor on the Sabbath,
he of course does not let the non-Jew sitting with him in the ambulance drive; rather, he drives himself,
because on the Sabbath there is a halakhic ruling that in a life-threatening situation one may not rely on a non-Jew.
A friend of ours pointed out to him that this comes out absurd.
On a weekday he trusts the non-Jews in the medical center and entrusts Jewish lives to them,
but on the Sabbath he suddenly does not trust that same non-Jew and drives the ambulance himself…
My friend didn’t know what to answer and said, what can you do, it is indeed funny, but that is the Jewish law and that is what his rabbi told him.
What really should be done?
Answer
You can tell him to open a savings account. When the Temple is rebuilt, he’ll be liable for a nice fat sin-offering for desecrating the Sabbath.
I’m saying that tongue-in-cheek, since there is permission to desecrate the Sabbath for the sake of a sick person, so there is no prohibition if a Jew drives. But there is also no prohibition if the non-Jew drives, and that is even preferable (use the least severe option first).
In general, Jewish law does not determine facts. Jewish law determines norms given the facts. Jewish law cannot determine that a non-Jew cannot be trusted. That is a factual question. It determines that if you do not trust him, then you should act in such-and-such a way, or tells you to check carefully whether it is in fact right to trust him.
So if in practice he trusts the non-Jews in the hospital, why shouldn’t he trust them with driving? On the contrary, in the hospital they can easily cause harm without anyone knowing. In driving, what is the concern? That he will get into a car accident? Especially when he himself is also sitting in the vehicle. What kind of nonsense is that?
Jewish law also says not to get a haircut from a non-Jew, because he is suspected of stabbing you with the knife. I hope he checks his barber and asks him for a conversion certificate or proof that he is Jewish. By the way, at the beginning of the second chapter of Avodah Zarah it also says that it is forbidden to go to a non-Jewish doctor, and he is causing all his patients to stumble in this severe prohibition, and even putting them at risk, Heaven forbid.
I hope he runs his hospital with more common sense, and that his rabbi gives instructions differently, in a more logical way.
There is a line of reasoning among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) that one should specifically have a Jew do it, so that in other cases people won’t come to look specifically for a non-Jew and thereby end up in danger.