levite

I'm not saying that they would actually put it in those words. But the fact is, I have known plenty of Orthodox girls whose mothers would absolutely massacre them if they were to lose their virginity, but who know that their sons are almost certainly not virgins, and their reactions are, "just don't disgrace the family." There is a famous sugiya (a section of text) in the Talmud, in the second chapter of tractate Hagigah, that says, "if a man is overcome by his needs, and cannot focus on learning Torah, he should go to a town where nobody knows him, dress in black, and go do whatever he needs to do [i.e., get laid] in secret, and then go home and go back to studying Torah." From the point of view of traditional halakhah, men should control their sexual needs, but if they don't...that's a shame. If women don't control theirs, it's shameful, disgraceful, and potentially fraudulent, if they don't disclose their status on marriage.

As for the rest, that's just the attitude, I'm not saying anyone has formalized it as doctrine.

Yes, indeed I am!

---------- Post added at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:24 PM ----------

Yeah. I never said it was a good idea....

So Sticky gave a pretty good rundown of this. I might just want to sum up: eruvim (pl) are artificial enclosures that make it permissible to carry or otherwise transfer belongings, or to move things. On shabbat, one is prohibited from moving items from one's personal domain (inside the house, for example) to the public domain (for example, it would be forbidden for me to be standing by my window, and pass you a slice of cake if you were standing in the street outside my window). And once outside, one is prohibited from carrying items anyplace, or even picking them up. For legal purposes, a walled city, or part of a city that is a completely walled enclosure, is deemed to be a private domain, and thus one may carry and so forth inside it.

An eruv is a gorgeously designed legal fiction. By the norms of halakhah, a door is considered to be part of the wall it is in, not a hole in the wall. Therefore, halakhically, one could in theory construct an entire wall of nothing but doors. Which is what an eruv is. By running a wire or string along the tops of tall posts (like telephone poles), a de jure wall of open doors is created. This wall of nothing but open doors qualifies as a legal enclosure, making the area within halakhically a private domain, meaning one can carry within it.

To be effective, many Jews within the area must give their approval that they wish the eruv be there; and some must commit to helping oversee it (both physical oversight, to be sure wind or rain hasn't damaged or torn down the wire, but also maintaining it, as to be effective at least two or three families must pool some resources, indicating that this domain is private, but jointly shared. Some food usually suffices for the shared resourced).

Sticky is correct in that most towns with eruvim get them as the result of a local committee of rabbis who oversee things like that. But they need not come from there. Many communities have independently built and maintained eruvim, either in areas the local rabbinical committee has been unable to secure permission to make an eruv, or in neighborhoods where the ultra-Orthodox don't trust the local committees of rabbis to make or oversee the eruv properly. In theory, any group of people can put up an eruv, initiate its effectiveness, and oversee it, so long as they are familiar with the halakhot (pl) pertaining to eruvim.

You're 100% right, of course. But I prefer to separate Zionism, which is usually used specifically to describe the modern political movement, begun in the mid-1800s, to establish, somewhere in the world, a national homeland for the Jewish people, from the eternal connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and their millenia-long yearning to return there. Zionism as a 19th- and early-20th-century political movement was always dominated by a socialist, deeply secular rhetoric. It embraced the notion of a Jewish people independent of Jewish religion-- which personally I question-- and advocated the advent of a Zionist national entity for reasons having nothing to do with the traditional teachings of the Jewish religion. Religious Zionism existed, sure, but it was always a minority movement, until late into the 20th century, well after the establishment of the State of Israel.

I am a religious Zionist, so clearly I support the State of Israel, and I believe that at heart, it doesn't matter what all those socialists thought, the establishment of the State of Israel is of some religious significance. But I am not, in theory, invested in the form of the State, or the makeup of its populace, or how religious its society is. I think that it is a first step on a long, long road to the messiah coming. But it's only that first step. It is only important in that it brought Jews back to live in the Land of Israel, speaking Hebrew, a country of free Jews on our ancestral homeland, acting as a shield for the rest of us by keeping a free space for any Jew to flee home, if need be, acting as our sword by keeping a strong Jewish army to remind people that Jews will no longer be anybody's prey, and keeping the torch of Judaism burning in the center of the Jewish world.

But socialism means nothing to me, and it was everything to political Zionists before the State was established. They couldn't care less about God, and I couldn't care more. It was a fortunate coincidence that their goals and the goals of many religious Jews met and ran parallel for a time. The great poets of Judaism who wrote about the eternal longing of Jews for the Land of Israel, and the City of David were not thinking about nationalism or post-Enlightenment geopolitics, but about God, covenant, and spirit.

I understand the desire to conflate the two, but I think it's important to keep them separate.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)