treading on wine presses on the sabbath, and bringing in sheaves and lading asses; as also wine, grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the sabbath day…. There dwelt men of Tyre also therein which brought fish, and all manner of ware, and sold on the sabbath unto the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem.” Horrified, Nehemiah complained to the city fathers, “What evil thing is this that ye do, and profane the sabbath day? Did not your fathers thus, and did not our God bring all this evil upon us, and upon this city?”
And so, Nehemiah tells us, he brought in his henchmen to block merchants from entering Jerusalem’s gates. “And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut, and charged that theyshould not be opened till after the sabbath: and some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should be no burden brought in on the sabbath day.”
To understand how unneighborly it was for Nehemiah to shut the city gates, you have to know something about the city gate in the biblical world. It was much more than just a gate for going through or keeping out. “It was also the ‘center’ (even though at one side) of the city’s social, economic, and judicial affairs,” one historian writes. The city gate and the street behind it functioned as the speaker’s corner, the town hall, the law court, and the marketplace, all at the same time. That Nehemiah (or whoever wrote his book) understood the Sabbath as a way to winnow his people from the neighbors becomes clear when you read the story immediately following it—in it, he yells at the intermarried Jews and plucks their beards to prevent future intermarriage. After that dramatic illustration of his dislike of outsiders, Nehemiah brings his story to a close. His second-to-last verse goes like this: “Thus cleansed I them from all strangers.”
7.
N EHEMIAH’S SHUTTING of the gates made the Sabbath a geographical construct as well as a temporal one. The Sabbath, a day set apart, became a city enclosed, and a nation withdrawn into itself. Nearly a millennium later, the rabbis of the Talmud turned the Sabbath into a more modern space, a place both enclosed and open. They developed a body of laws whereby, by following certain prescribed procedures, a community could construct a boundary marking off a Jewish neighborhood for the duration of the Sabbath. In lieu of a gate, the laws called for a wall, but not the impermeable kind of wall that surrounded Jerusalem. This was not a wall of brick or clay or stone. This was to be a notional wall—a wall concept, you might say, a boundary marked by thin wires strung from pole to pole high above the head. This wall-like entity they called an
eruv
, which in Hebrew means “mixing” or “commingling,” since an
eruv
brings together entities otherwise kept apart on the Sabbath. (Technically, the word refers tomany acts that “mix” or “commingle” the forbidden with the permissible, not just this particular symbolic wall.)
The Bible wished upon its readers a very localized, confining Sabbath. Biblical law forbids Jews to walk very far or carry anything on the Sabbath from one domain to another. They are not to carry from the private domain, or home, to the public domain, or street, or the other way around, or between two private domains, and so on. The rabbinic
eruv
sweeps away these restrictions by bundling together assorted city spaces—apartment buildings and alleyways, courtyards and front yards—and recategorizing them, within limits, as one large private domain. (Busy public thoroughfares don’t qualify.) The
eruv
advanced the legal fiction that all the Jews in a neighborhood live in one big
heimishe
Jewish household.
The potential for claustrophobic self-sequestration contained within this idea is, of course, enormous, and was often realized during the course of Jewish history, but
And so, Nehemiah tells us, he brought in his henchmen to block merchants from entering Jerusalem’s gates. “And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut, and charged that theyshould not be opened till after the sabbath: and some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should be no burden brought in on the sabbath day.”
To understand how unneighborly it was for Nehemiah to shut the city gates, you have to know something about the city gate in the biblical world. It was much more than just a gate for going through or keeping out. “It was also the ‘center’ (even though at one side) of the city’s social, economic, and judicial affairs,” one historian writes. The city gate and the street behind it functioned as the speaker’s corner, the town hall, the law court, and the marketplace, all at the same time. That Nehemiah (or whoever wrote his book) understood the Sabbath as a way to winnow his people from the neighbors becomes clear when you read the story immediately following it—in it, he yells at the intermarried Jews and plucks their beards to prevent future intermarriage. After that dramatic illustration of his dislike of outsiders, Nehemiah brings his story to a close. His second-to-last verse goes like this: “Thus cleansed I them from all strangers.”
7.
N EHEMIAH’S SHUTTING of the gates made the Sabbath a geographical construct as well as a temporal one. The Sabbath, a day set apart, became a city enclosed, and a nation withdrawn into itself. Nearly a millennium later, the rabbis of the Talmud turned the Sabbath into a more modern space, a place both enclosed and open. They developed a body of laws whereby, by following certain prescribed procedures, a community could construct a boundary marking off a Jewish neighborhood for the duration of the Sabbath. In lieu of a gate, the laws called for a wall, but not the impermeable kind of wall that surrounded Jerusalem. This was not a wall of brick or clay or stone. This was to be a notional wall—a wall concept, you might say, a boundary marked by thin wires strung from pole to pole high above the head. This wall-like entity they called an
eruv
, which in Hebrew means “mixing” or “commingling,” since an
eruv
brings together entities otherwise kept apart on the Sabbath. (Technically, the word refers tomany acts that “mix” or “commingle” the forbidden with the permissible, not just this particular symbolic wall.)
The Bible wished upon its readers a very localized, confining Sabbath. Biblical law forbids Jews to walk very far or carry anything on the Sabbath from one domain to another. They are not to carry from the private domain, or home, to the public domain, or street, or the other way around, or between two private domains, and so on. The rabbinic
eruv
sweeps away these restrictions by bundling together assorted city spaces—apartment buildings and alleyways, courtyards and front yards—and recategorizing them, within limits, as one large private domain. (Busy public thoroughfares don’t qualify.) The
eruv
advanced the legal fiction that all the Jews in a neighborhood live in one big
heimishe
Jewish household.
The potential for claustrophobic self-sequestration contained within this idea is, of course, enormous, and was often realized during the course of Jewish history, but
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