Q&A: Electricity on the Sabbath
Electricity on the Sabbath
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask why electricity is forbidden on the Sabbath when it comes to an electrical device that does not explicitly involve one of the thirty-nine categories of labor, like an incandescent bulb and the like.
I heard that some want to argue that this follows from the authority of the sages,
but this is not at all clear to me, since nowadays, since the destruction of the Sanhedrin, the sages no longer have any real authority to enact decrees and the like. And even if it is a custom, that is also not at all clear, because there was hardly enough time for the prohibition on using electricity to become practiced to the point of being considered a custom. And even if it was practiced, it is a mistaken custom—because everyone thinks it is indeed forbidden by the Torah, following rabbis who claimed that it is. So it is not appropriate to call a custom that was based on a falsehood a custom.
Answer
On the Sabbath there are also rabbinic prohibitions, not only Torah-level categories of labor. Creating something new is a rabbinic prohibition, and the halakhic decisors who forbid electricity on the basis of creating an electric current did not innovate a new prohibition; they interpreted an existing rabbinic prohibition from the law of the Talmudic text. Today no sage has any authority to establish anything new. This is a question of interpretation of earlier prohibitions, whether Torah-level or rabbinic.
Discussion on Answer
Opening an umbrella is an old discussion, and quite a few halakhic decisors wrote that it is only a custom. A custom too has weight in Jewish law.
However, see the Shulchan Arukh regarding a Jerusalem hat with a broad brim: http://etzion.org.il/he/%D7%97%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%AA-%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A2-%D7%A8%D7%97%D7%91-%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%91%D7%A9%D7%91%D7%AA
Regarding the authority of sages in our time—what about enactments such as the ban of Rabbenu Gershom? Or enactments for extracting money from one person in favor of another, or an enactment to exert pressure by shaming a person, which were enacted during the exile?
Such enactments can be valid as custom and as guidelines for a religious court (which operates by virtue of their agency).
As for the ban of Rabbenu Gershom, it is not at all clear that these were new enactments. In the responsa Chayim Sha'al (Palagi), he argues that everything was already forbidden beforehand, and the novelty was only the ban. Beyond that, the force of the enactments comes from the agreement of the community as a whole. Extraction of money is valid by virtue of communal enactments, which have authority over monetary matters, and likewise enactments to separate people from prohibition.
According to the Rabbi, is it permitted to use an umbrella on the Sabbath?
Surely the Rabbi is familiar with the Noda B'Yehuda's prohibition on the grounds of making a tent, and Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach's and the Chazon Ish's rejection of that, and the comparison of an umbrella to a folding chair, which may be opened on the Sabbath. In our umbrellas there is not even any fastening of the metal that turns the umbrella from unusable to usable, as the Biur Halakhah explained in clarifying the difference between the forbidden umbrella and the permitted folding chair.
The Chazon Ish (and following him Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchatah) concluded this with: "The sages of the generations of blessed memory made a fence, and they prohibited the umbrella"—see there in his words that the entire prohibition is a fence established in the last 300 years.
[By the way, from this also emerged the somewhat strange Jewish law that on the Sabbath it is forbidden to open an umbrella, but it is permitted to open a sunshade fixed in the yard, or to open the cover of a baby carriage, on the grounds that about this the sages of the generations decreed, and about that they did not..]