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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I remember attending a tech conference years ago in Dearborn, Michigan. One of the speakers was a devout Jew from NY City. On Saturday he taped the lock open on his hotel room so he wouldn't need to use a key.

This drove hotel security nuts and one of the conference admins had to get involved because the hotels employees who were all Arabic did not accept his explanation. They were certain he was up to something shady.

He and his wife had brought extra food and invited the conference admin and myself to dinner in their room. I remember it as a very special night and I am still friends with them to this day.

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There are hotels and apartment blocks that have physical locks as well as the swipe card. So you can use the physical key on the Sabbath.

So turning a key to open a door isn't work, but pushing an elevator button is?

Yes. There are several explanations for this, but the most popular ones are:

1) Making fires is prohibited work. Activating an electric switch causes a spark, which is kind of like a fire.

2) We have a tradition of considering using electricity to be work.

3) This is stupid, not using electricity is more work. Just push the button.

4) This is stupid, but having a day when we aren't all on our phones is nice, so let's keep all of the silly rules to not lose that

> Activating an electric switch causes a spark, which is kind of like a fire.

So is walking on a carpet and removing your sweater and almost anything involving fabrics and motion.

Is it really a useful definition of "fire" and "spark"? Most people think of those as different things. Fire implies oxygen, you put out fires with heavy blankets or with nitrogen gas since time immemorial. Sparks, as in tiny plasma discharges, does not require oxygen and can not be put out the same way.

We are talking about religion here. Don't try to rationalise it.

There's an important distinction between "thing that happens even if you don't intend it" and "thing that happens because you intentionally caused it" (and the even more subtle distinction between "beneficial side effect of thing you intended" and "neutral/negative side effect of thing you intended").

ie intentionality matters.

I recently heard that an apartment block near me cannot have automatic emergency lighting or fire sprinklers retrofitted incase there is a fire on a Saturday.

Forget about burning to death or falling down pitch-black stairs and breaking your neck, it is apparently more important that electrical circuits are not energized or a valve is not opened on a saturday!

Absolutely absurd.

I am indifferent to people stringing up wires to lie to themselves. They are not "invisible" and the poles they are on are an eye sore in my part of London and also attract negative attention (e.g. people put palestinian flags or stickers etc on them). But whatever.

What I do have an issue is that someone's religious beliefs are preventing basic fire safety protections for everyone else. We in London/UK are rightly getting a lot of fire protections retrofitted to older apartment blocks because of the Grenfell disaster [1] - this is not some hypothetical thing, its a real problem in older buildings and it disgusts me individuals can veto fundamental basic fire protection for everyone else in their building just because of their own personal beliefs, despite being totally willing to go along with this Eruv sleight-of-hand.

Fire does not respect religion.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

Ah, but it would be forbidden to start the fire on the Sabbath, so there would be no need for sprinklers!

If I were in a situation like that I would reach out for advice to some religious authority the person in question trusts.

There are widely accepted fairly common sense exceptions for saving lives. [1] That could maybe apply to an automatically activating fire sprinkler. Only someone well versed in the scriptures could say for certain. (And only they would be believed anyway.)

Even about the emergency lighting one can probably find a workaround. For example could it be wired so it is always on via a timer during shabbat?

The point with discussing these with a religious authority is manifold. They might better know how to mediate. In both directions! They might explain to the engineers what is and isn't a sticking point. Similarly they could explain if a given technique is permissible to the person who worries about them. Or alternatively they might have heard solutions others have employed in the past previously.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh

I think I'd prefer that they just say "deal with it - this is real". How many different sets of beliefs do we need to accommodate? How many "mediations" do we need to do to use fire sprinklers?! What if they are incompatible? Whose religion "wins" if one stays one thing but one says the other?

The solution is obvious: religion and beliefs should not be a factor in these sort of things. We in the UK are a secular society with strong separations between state and religion, so this sort of behaviour should be treated for what it is.

> We in the UK are a secular society with strong separations between state and religion

You might want to look up who's the Supreme Governor of the Church of England

>Forget about burning to death or falling down pitch-black stairs and breaking your neck, it is apparently more important that electrical circuits are not energized or a valve is not opened on a saturday!

This is literally bogus. Nothing in Judaism prevents automated systems! That's the entire point of "sabbath mode" in elevators for example, and it's perfectly normal and usual to set electrical things to work on a timer on the sabbath.

Whoever told you this was utterly wrong and ignorant. There is no rabbi who would have agreed with this, WITHOUT the "you can ignore mitzvot to not die" corollary that others point out.

A fire alarm is a perfectly normal part of a kosher home. Maybe reconsider how much you trust the person who said this to you.

But they're not automated are they? If there are e.g. motion-triggered emergency lights, and you move and they come on then BAM! You did some work.

> because the hotels employees who were all Arabic did not accept his explanation

I feel like I would expect Arabs to be the most likely to accept this? Abrahamic religion that also still practices all sorts of ritualistic stuff in a region with a historically high Jewish population?

At my last employer I remember a Muslim coworker explaining the fasting thing they do to me and the two of us having a small bonding moment after mutually understanding the whole denial of self thing (I'm protestant.) I think people under appreciate the potential for that kind of thing.

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