Religious Work-Arounds

I just finished reading an article about a New Jersey town attempting to prevent local Jews from extending their eruv.  What's an eruv you ask?  To answer that question you have to go back to Talmudic and Rabbinic law which interprets the laws and strictures in the Torah. The principle in the Torah is that the Sabbath is a day of rest and that no work is to be done on it. That sounds pretty simple, but people being people, they needed clarification, they needed a definition of what "work" included. There are thousands of words written delineating what work is, but what is relevant here is the section that defines "carrying any object from a private place (like your home) to a public place" (like the grocery store or even the synagogue) as work. "Objects" are further defined as anything other than the clothes on your back, including your house keys, pushing a baby stroller or even an umbrella. Obviously this would cause problems if strictly adhered to. A "solution" had to be found; and by "solution" I mean a way to technically observe the rule while simultaneously getting around it. This work-around involved attaching some physical extension to the home that enlarged what would be considered the "private" space. In earlier times Jews tended to be segregated from the Christians and the walls of their ghetto served to separate what was inside (private) from what was outside (public). In modern times the extension usually takes the form of wires attached to utility poles, enclosing the neighborhood, or in some cases a whole municipality. So what you have is a fairly simple commandment: "Rest, i.e. do no work", that has been complicated beyond belief, but rather than admit that the rules are ridiculous, and say "we're just not going to do it", ways to get around the rules while technically obeying them are devised. Orthodox Jews can still claim to follow The Law, while being able to circumvent it in order to live their modern lives.

Lest you think it's just those crazy Jews who do things like this, I was involved in a Christian fringe group a few years ago that interpreted a verse that said "Owe no man any thing, only to love" as a prohibition against any kind of debt. While not as labyrinthine as the Talmudic rules, this organization, The Way International, had all kinds of rules about what was debt and what was not, but were very firm about prohibiting their members from having bank loans. This obviously would cause a problem  for anyone wanting to buy a home, since it is unlikely that anyone other than the very wealthy would have enough cash on hand to buy a home without securing a loan. What some Way people did was convince a non-Way family member to buy the home and sell it to the Way family member in some complicated deal that they convinced themselves wasn't debt. I never understood this maneuver, since you were still in debt, just not to a bank. The most creative debt avoidance move that I saw involved a guy who was buying his home from his parents a little at a time. Rather than call it a loan, he called it partial ownership. If he paid them $10,000 on a $100,000 home, then he owned 10% and they owned 90%. If he paid an additional $20,000, he now owned 30% and so on. He peddled this theory to Way leadership, but we never found out how well it worked since his parents died in a car crash and he inherited the home outright.

Finally, there's the example of the annulment. Some churches are against divorce and even consider it adultery if a divorced person remarries. But there is a loophole, the annulment.  A marriage that is annulled is treated as if it never existed. While I can imagine circumstances where a church might want to make an exception to their no-divorce rule, (e.g. underage bride or groom, diminished capacity, human trafficking) I know personally of situations where an annulment was sought and granted simply to recognize a divorce and get the couple back into the church's good graces. We don't believe in divorce but we'll grant you this divorce as long as we don't call it a divorce.

What are we to make of all this? These are just a few examples that have popped up in my news feed or in conversations recently. I think that in general people like to talk the talk and put their holy books and pronouncements by holy men up on pedestals, but when it gets in the way of what they really want to do, or if it becomes inconvenient, they still want to talk the talk without walking the walk.