Meanwhile in place of power, cable, and phone lines there is a related 18 mile translucent line hung in order to turn the entire city into one big happy home called a *eruv* -- following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter. [0]
(Also pedantic, but it’s not the entire city: there’s a Manhattan eruv that covers a large part of Manhattan, while Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have separate smaller eruvim.)
There have been some big fights about the topic: https://traditiononline.org/unpacking-the-iggerot/
Although from what I understand, Moshe Feinstein wasn’t opposed to eruvim in principle, he just viewed them as an inappropriate for a city like NYC
> following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter.
but I don't think that "there is no 'high court' at all" is one, for believers.
(Each movement has its own beis din, but there is not “high court” that unifies religious rulings across them. Which is why an eruv created by one group is often considered invalid by others.)
https://voices.sefaria.org/sheets/144163?lang=bi
(Talmudic interpretation doesn’t stress this story because it shows how much Jews love to argue, or because they can win arguments against God. It stresses the story because it demonstrates that the law has been received (“It is not in heaven”) and thus does not need to appeal to God. This, inter alia, is why nobody asks God for their opinion on eruvim.)
It also has a status page! https://eruv.nyc/
Jews think of the law differently. The law came directly from God- therefore, it is free from errors. If there are loopholes you can find in the law, God put them there for a reason and won't be mad if you use them. Some people even think that God put the loopholes in there as a reward for careful study of the law. Jews also don't think that there is eternal damnation in Hell facing anyone who defies the law, so I suppose the stakes are lower than for Christians so they can afford to be stricter.
Like a lot of the rules are very fuzzy in their origin. The whole kosher business comes from a passage about "Not boiling a kid in it's mothers milk". I think most people would interpret that much more literally and you couldn't kill a child goat (kid) and boil it in it's mothers milk; and probably also extend it to other animals like cows. But I'd still think that killing a kid and putting a slice on cheese on the meat would be fine.
So if somebody is going to be obtuse with what you can do it seems like it'd be good fun to figure out all the ways around it.
Stuff like disease (i.e. most of the other rules about kosher animal prep including 'inspection',) allergies (shellfish ban), heck even pasteurization (going back to the 'boiling in milk', what are the odds that the milk hit the right temperature all throughout versus only some of it boiling, which in fact could encourage certain bad bacteria to grow, let alone whatever's in the likely uncooked meat being able to feed off the whole thing...)
A much weaker form compared to missions where people go out into the real world and get insulted and retreat back to the safety of their religion.