Comment by MichaelAza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelAza | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a non-observant Jew and have several observant friends. I always joke with them that Jews are the first hackers, finding ways to circumvent their own religious laws.

Some other clever hacks "exploited" by Jews over the years:

* Say a door needs to be opened by a button. For some reason which I can't quite remember right now, you can't just press the button to open the door, but say that after you press the button there is a random wait befroe the door is opened, then it's OK.

* You can't light fire on shabbat and, by some logic, that also means you can't close an electrical circuit. But say you have a door that requires a keycard to open. You can't put the keycard next to the reader because that will cause a circuit to close but if you were to press a button that turns off the card reader for some random amount of time (which is OK) and then just happen to put your card in range, when the reader turns itself back on it will recognize your card and open the door.

* You can't create permanent things on shabbat and that includes writing. But, say you have to write for some reason - you use a shbbat pan with ink that evaporates after several days (hence, is non-permanent).

There are lots of theese hacks, and even a whole R&D center dedicated to them[1] in Israel. Funny stuff.

[1] http://www.zomet.org.il/ (Hebrew)

My favorite is Eruv[1], which in my neighborhood and others in NYC is tiny thin wires strung between streetlights to "enclose" a neighborhood.

In some of our big storms recently many of the wires have come down, limiting people's mobility.

To call all this hackery "circumvention" is not accurate ... one way or another, in building & using tricks to live with them, you are being "observant," by remembering and practicing the rules. Remembrance being a key part of faith.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv

My take on eruv is that it's one of several elements in Jewish law designed to create and foster communities. Community is crucial to Jewish survival. So among other things:

- You need 10 adults to have many important prayer services

- You need to eat kosher food -- which is only feasible when there's a critical mass of other Jews around

- Women need to go to a ritual bath once a month; it's only feasible to have such a ritual bath if you live near other Jews who help to fund it

- You can't carry on the Sabbath unless you have an eruv around your community, in which case you can carry within the community.

These, together with other rules, have the effect of encouraging Jews to live near other Jews, which helps to strengthen the community more and perpetuate the tradition. I think that much of Jewish law is aimed at this underlying goal. When a rule conflicts with this goal, it's considered desirable to find a way around the rule, such that the community's centrality and strength win out.

It's not really a circumvention, but I'd call it a hack indeed (i.e. an ingenious solution[1]). It works by modifying the subject of the law. I.e. Jewish law forbids carrying objects between public and private domain on Shabbos. What is considered private and public domain has quite clear definitions. So using that method (of connecting areas with some wires or ropes) one changes the status of the area in light of the law from public to private domain. I.e. the law applies all the same, but its subject is different, so carrying becomes permitted.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

This also leads to incredibly interesting (or funny) situations. A coworker of mine uses a simple/trivial timer, plugs it in the power outlet and therefor predetermines some things that Should Happen on Shabbat.

Now, if there's a brown-out for say 3h and you're not allowed to interact with that thing until Shabbat is over, you .. get interesting side effects and have to reschedule the daily life.

> I always joke with them that Jews are the first hackers,

There's a reason why ethnic Jews tend to concentrate very strongly in hackerdom.

They were the first wiki editors as well -- consider the millennia of rabbinical commentary attached to the Talmud.

> consider the millennia of rabbinical commentary attached to the Talmud

How does this differentiate Jews from any other culture with writing?

Consider the Odyssey, a classic example of a Greek text.

The Odyssey was codified and passed down through generations in Greece. People write about the Odyssey, but almost no one has writted linear commentaries for it.

Lets compare that to the Talmud. The Mishnah is the core of the Talmud, and it is a collection of oral law written down (in about 200 C.E.) by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. Like the Odyssey, it is unchanged and has been transmitted through the generations.

However, its story does not end there. The next generation of Rabbis writes the Gemara. The Gemara is a collections of more oral law from the generation of the Mishnaic Rabbis, along with debate about the laws in the Mishnah, trying to find proofs for laws, trying to deal with problematic laws, clarify vague laws, and so on. The Mishnah and the Gemara make up the Talmud. (Note that there are actually two versions of the Talmud, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud. They have the same Mishnah but the Gemara is different. The Babylonian Talmud is more complete and therefore more widely studied).

Skipping forward a few years, the Rabbis of the middle ages start to comment on the Talmud. Rashi commented on the entire (Babylonian) Talmud, and so did the Rabbis of his grandchildrens' generation. Meanwhile, other Rabbis, such as Maimonadies (I'm sure I spelled that wrong), were trying to extract the laws from the Talmud (a daunting task because not all discussions were resolved). Even very recently, Rabbi Steinsaltz wrote his commentary on the entire Talmud. The cycle of commentary never ends.

Are you really saying that the Talmud is comparable to the Odyssey, but not to Plato? I'd expect, since you're talking about a philosophical tradition, that the reverse would be more accurate. Philosophical commentary abounds in the Greek tradition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_Plato

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_Aristotle

Commentaries were also written on Homer, but as the Iliad and the Odyssey are literary rather than philosophical works the commentary takes a different form. Here are a few selections from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_scholarship#Classical_... :

> Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the "Poetics", with regard to the difficulty with some of his language. Aristotle’s main study of Homer did not survive. It is listed in Diogenes Laertius' "Life of Aristotle" as "Six books of Homeric problems."

> Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but the development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals: (1) Analyzing internal inconsistencies within the epics; (2) Producing editions of the epics' authentic text, free of interpolations and errors; [and] (3) Interpretation: both explaining archaic words, and exegetical interpretation of the epics as literature.

> there was also a fashion for allegory, especially among the Stoics. The most notable passage is a scholion on Iliad 20.67, which gives an extended allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods, explaining each god as symbolic of various elements and principles in conflict with one another, e.g., Apollo is opposed to Poseidon because fire is opposed to water.

The difference is that with the Odyssey and Plato, commentaries on the work are not considered part of the work. The commentaries on the Talmud are considered part of the Talmud, including inheriting the Talmud's status as law -- making the Talmud very much a living document.

We make a device, and have a Shabbat version. It is operated normally by a switch, and when you set it to Shabbat mode the switch stays open and just lets a trickle of current through, not enough to move the device but since the circuit never closes you aren't doing any work when you then operate the switch.

Just so people know, you can view that site in English as well.

http://www.zomet.org.il/eng/

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