Q&A: A Public Health Risk on the Sabbath
A Public Health Risk on the Sabbath
Question
Hello Rabbi,
A Jew who observes the commandments is walking in a field on the Sabbath, and he sees that a large sewage pipe has burst open and the wastewater is flowing onto the ground and being absorbed into it. The Jew knows that there is no concern that this contaminated water will immediately reach the drinking water. But he knows that it will reach the groundwater reservoir and contaminate it. To make the matter more dramatic—the water is rich in heavy metals.
There is no immediate danger to life here, but there certainly is a future danger to public health. What should that Jew do—call on the Sabbath the person responsible for maintaining this pipe, or wait until the Sabbath ends?
All the best
Answer
In matters of public health, Jewish law treats even remote cases as danger to life. The source for this is the law of a metal ember in the public domain, which may be extinguished on the Sabbath. According to the Geonim, even a Torah-level prohibition of extinguishing is permitted, because a danger to the public, even if indirect, is considered danger to life that justifies desecrating the Sabbath. Of course, for the details one has to examine each case on its own merits. But that is the basic answer in principle.
Discussion on Answer
Rabbi A., may he live long. First, with all due respect to Rabbi Google, he is no substitute for familiarity with the sources and with Jewish law. Second, here too we are dealing with future harm. At some point in the future, someone will come across the ember and be injured. There is not currently any concrete person whom the ember is “pursuing.” Therefore, what I wrote stands.
Hi Michi,
Your answer on the second topic puzzled me, and I couldn’t settle my mind until I googled the topic of “a metal ember”
and found:
Maimonides
Extinguishing and kindling with a metal ember
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Cohen
Emissary of His Holiness the Rebbe — Sacramento, California
Maimonides wrote in Laws of Sabbath 12:1: “One who heats iron in order to temper it in water—this is a derivative of kindling and he is liable.”
And what is relevant to our issue:
And this can be explained based on what Migdal Oz brings from Rabbenu Chananel to explain in the Talmud why it is permitted to extinguish a metal ember in the public domain so that the public should not be harmed by it, while it is forbidden to extinguish a wood ember. And this is his language: “For extinguishing a metal ember while it is hot— it is black, and one who sees it thinks it is cool, since it does not have the redness of a glowing ember, and so people may be injured by it; therefore it is permitted. But a wood ember, if its redness has gone, it has already gone out, and if it still has redness, everyone who sees it keeps away from it. In any case, no person is harmed by it, because the black one has already gone out and from the red one people keep their distance,” end quote.
And therefore the Jewish law is speaking about present harm [in the sense of: “do not place a stumbling block before the blind”], whereas my original question referred to the future!