a house made of fishing line
I never knew about eruvs until today.
Observant Jews, for those who don't know, have to follow some pretty strict rules about what they can and can't do on the sabbath. It's a "no work" holiday, and they get very serious about what they can and can't do. There's two separate rules for what you can do in your own home, and what you can do outside of the home.
Like... you can't carry your keys around outside of your home. You can't flip a light switch. For some you can't rip toilet paper. You know, work.
So it blew me away today to read a Harper's Weekly article/diagram about an eruv. Evidently there's this idea of a "shared space". You just string up some lines sectioning off an area, and then it's a sort of shared structure where jews can be basically "at home", thus, able to perform the home based tasks on sabbath. The Harper's article is about a big one covering much of the island of Manhattan.
I was blown away. How strange, I thought, until I googled and saw that there's probably one in every major city in the US. It would be interesting to get a google maps layer with all the eruv's in the country on it. I wonder how many square miles of eruv there is in the whole country. I wonder if I'm in an eruv.
Comments
The eruv (or at least one eruv) in Seattle is in Seward Park. They extended it to cover my mom's house when she moved near it. I've heard that eruvs are holdovers from ghetto walls, but some people dispute that. I'm no historian, so consider it a rumour.
Your tinyblog is neat.
--Dylan, Rachel's friend.
Posted by: Dylan | March 23, 2007 3:20 PM
There's an eruv in Seattle, in Seward Park. It was set up a few years ago.
The URL for info, and the map, is: http://www.seattlevaad.org/Eruv.html
The website gets updated with news of any damage (such as weather damage) to the system of wires and fences that constitutes the eruv.
Posted by: Karen Anderson | March 23, 2007 11:51 PM
when I stayed in a kosher building for four months, I learned it sat in one of these idstrics
Posted by: Dad | March 24, 2007 2:34 PM
I can respect people's religious beliefs.
I know they take their faiths seriously, and doing stuff like this is important to them.
Not in a million years will I understand stuff like this. It's just not the way my brain works.
Posted by: Graumagus | March 27, 2007 10:39 AM