Sunday, October 17, 2010
TRAIPSING THROUGH THE EXHIBIT HALL: The National Museum of American Jewish History is set to move from its tiny digs at a Center City synagogue to a striking new structure on Independence Mall, joining Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center at this central tourist location. But will it be open on Shabbat? The Philadelphia Inquirer's Michael Klein explains the solution the board of directors reached.
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Quite the interesting compromise, though I* think the not running credit card transactions until dusk might be realllly on the razor's edge when it comes to whether or not you're working on the Sabbath (after all, you have to take the info down somehow in order to run the transaction later, right?)
ReplyDelete*I have no dog in this hunt, not being Jewish, but Sabbath work laws and their interpretations fascinate me.
There's no question that they're violating Shabbat in several ways by having the museum open (except if they're only hiring non-Jews for Shabbat hours, which brings up some interesting BFOQ-type questions) - the measures they're taking are symbolic. It's a compromise between doing nothing or being closed, and I like it.
ReplyDeleteThere are ways to write things temporarily which would work - there are Shabbat-friendly Sudoku sets, for example, which are little grids and then 81 number tiles to put in their places. So you could have the gift shop workers pulling out tiles to write down people's names, card numbers, purchase amounts, etc. Probably still a transaction.
But it always comes down to the letter and the spirit of the law, and how much weight you're going to give each, and as the old joke has it, the number of opinions is always equal to or greater than the number of Jews you ask.
Yeah, Christina's first reaction when I was telling her about this was to question who the heck is going to be staffing the museum and gift shop anyway.
ReplyDelete(And the Sabbath-friendly Sodoku sets is a wonderfully elegant workaround, just the kind I like hearing about.)
Nice use of 'traipsing'.
ReplyDeleteThe few times I've ever kept Shabbat entirely (as opposed to what we do now, which is "not-at-all-adly"), when I spent a year in Israel, we used to play cards and then keep score by opening a book to the page number of the amount of points, instead of writing it down. This, along with keeping on a hall light and opening or closing the door to get light in the room, and the special no-tear toilet paper, was pretty nifty. It really makes you appreciate how different Shabbat is from the rest of the week.
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