Illustration
Photo: CD Bank
Gadgets help Jews in modern world
If as a Jew you are observant but modern, scientists, rabbis are developing gadgets - and workarounds - to meet your needs
At a modest cottage in a suburb of Jerusalem, the Institute for Science and Halacha, founded in 1965, has found a way for religious physicians to write prescriptions on the Sabbath, when such activity is banned by ritual law.
Want to be an astronaut? But how to observe the Jewish Sabbath, which stretches from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, while traveling in a spacecraft orbiting the earth 16 times every 24 hours? The institute found an answer.
"The Torah (Jewish law) was given to us 3,500 years ago in the desert," said 73-year-old Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Halperin, the institute's executive director and chief theological scholar. "Each generation takes up the challenge to apply it."
The Sabbath is one of the major issues it has dealt with. At least a third of today's 5.4 million Jewish Israelis are religiously observant, a growing community with ever-more pressing demands for accommodating edicts on Sabbath observance.
Applying the principle of "grama", or indirect action in the ancient biblical language Aramaic, Halperin and his team have come up with gadgets for observant Jews to carry out vital tasks while still not violating the Sabbath strictures.
One example is the Sabbath phone. A microprocessor in the device is configured so that the user does not break an electric circuit - a banned activity under ritual law - while dialing.
Creative answers to other questions have been found using Halacha, Hebrew for the 3,000 year-old compendium of Jewish law. Doctors can get around the writing prohibition by using special pens whose ink disappears in a few days. Only permanent marks are considered taboo.
And despite minimal resources, the institute's engineers are currently using a simple bicycle pump to create a wheelchair powered by compressed air rather than batteries. A doorbell being developed by the facility also works on air pressure instead of electricity.
'God's intended design of creation'
Halperin dismisses any notion of theological cheating.
"If there are loopholes in the Torah they are there for a reason," he said, stroking his flowing white beard.
The institute says its solutions have been used by Israeli corporations and a hospital in Jerusalem. It also recently helped El Al Israel Airlines tackle the issue of transporting corpses - a problem for members of Judaism's priestly caste, called Cohenim, who are banned by ritual law from coming in close proximity to the dead.
Orthodox Jews had threatened to boycott the airline if the matter was not dealt with.
The institute found a solution by wrapping thick corrugated cardboard around the coffin in the shape of a house. That way, the body is considered enclosed and unable to "spread impurity", making it acceptable for Cohenim to travel on the same plane.
Then there is space travel. Israel's first astronaut - Ilan Ramon, who was among the crew killed in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster - had sought guidance on how to observe the Sabbath in orbit.
Halperin ruled that any would-be space traveler should fix the time of blast-off and calculate the day and hour of the Sabbath from then on.
Rabbi Mordechai Nissim, a scholar of Jewish law, said: "We do not see technology posing a threat to Judaism, we see it as part of God's intended design of creation. Therefore we are meant to engage technology as part of our mission."
