There is a picture of my wife and me, taken almost twenty years ago when we were still dating, which I think of as a Jewish version of "Whistler's Mother." In this photograph we are standing in the classic Whistler's Mother position (though dressed in early 90s grad student casual rather than New England farmer) but instead of a farm implement I am holding several wooden dowels which are attached to many lengths of string. The picture was taken at the end of a weekend campout at the Vermont redoubt of the Bread and Puppet Theatre. This wonderful company has (or at least had) an annual summer residency at their home base, and two weekends during the summer they put on a veritable puppet-a-palooza of edgy and amazing puppetry. The shows were free (and they gave out free homemade bread and garlic spread - hence the "Bread" of their name) but you had to get there. This generated an annual ritual in which neighboring farmers rented out spots on their acreage to folks who wanted to make a weekend of it, set up a tent and then walk on over to the day-long goings on at the outdoor puppet and theatre festival.
One summer we, together with some friends from our community in Boston, made the trek up to the rolling hills of Vermont (which does look somewhat like a Ben and Jerry's ice cream container) and pitched our tents in the middle of a field with several hundred other folks. We arrived Friday afternoon and planned to stay through Sunday - hanging out on Shabbat, and then trekking up to Bread and Puppet Sunday morning. We had several tents, much food and about ten folks, all of whom were somewhere along the scale of Shabbat observance.
This last little fact could have ruined our trip.
One of the defining halakhic or legal characteristics of Shabbat is that one is not allowed to carry from inside to outside. The usual nomenclature is that one is forbidden to carry anything from a private domain to a public domain. This prohibition is grounded in a Rabbinic reading of a verse in Exodus (15:29): "Let no one go out from his place on the seventh day." The Hebrew for "go out from his place" is al yetze. With a deft midrashic rereading (which changes the vowels but not the letters) the Rabbis read: al yotzi - "let no one take out." Thus was instituted one of the regulations which became a hallmark of the Shabbat. Space on Shabbat is defined differently than space during the week. There is, as it were, a Shabbat map, in which inside and outside define the flow of people and their things.
This map could render Shabbat almost unworkable. Think of the things one would not be able to do. One could not bring a prayerbook to the synagogue. One could not bring food to lunch. One could not bring an infant to the Temple. Shabbat, however, is defined by its "cannots." There are thirty nine different categories of activity which are prohibited on Shabbat. At first this seems to be an overwhelming imposition. However, the point of Shabbat is, as the commandment in the decalogue states, to be like God and not do anything. "For six days did the Lord make the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in it, and rested on the seventh day." (Exodus 20:11). For this reason "You shall do no task" on the Sabbath. Once one has created the Shabbat map by not doing any activity that is prohibited, then everything that one does (eating, sleeping, talking) becomes a Shabbat ritual. This manner of doing nothing is the sign of being like God on Shabbat. We commemorate the fact that God created the world in six days by doing what God did on the seventh day - nothing.
At the same time, the Rabbis recognized that Shabbat was also a communal ritual. Making it immensely difficult to pray together or eat together or study together was counterproductive. The same Rabbis that legislated the prohibition of carrying on Shabbat, also legislated a way to convert "outside" into common property and therefore permit one to carry from one's house to a neighbor's or to bring one's children to the synagogue. The mechanism by which they did this is called an eruv.
The word eruv means a mixture, and though in common parlance it is often referred to as the Shabbat boundary, it is actually the mechanism by which separated domains, different insides and outsides are actually mixed together. While this usage of the word seems to go back to the Community Law of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the second century BCE, it is the Rabbis in the third century CE Mishnah who gave the ruling substance.
The eruv (there are actually a number of different kinds of eruvim [plural of eruv], but that is a different story) which allows one to carry from inside to outside is made of four symbolic walls each constructed of two posts topped by a cross-beam. The "cross-beam" can be made of almost anything, and is often some type of rope or wire (depending on how large the eruv is). Eruvimcome in all sizes - from the backyard eruv I put up at my mother-in-law's house so that we could bring food outside to eat on the picnic table, to the Los Angeles eruv which covers something like five hundred square miles. (This latter marvel makes use of the existing freeways as symbolic walls.) This large eruv mixes the various domains together to form one domain, and then allows the Sabbath observant to carry from inside to outside.
The brilliance of the Rabbinic Shabbat as an urban phenomenon is that it allows Jews to mentally map exclusively Jewish geography while simultaneously sharing that geography with all manner of non-Jews. The eruv, further, allows Jews to symbolically map that territory to the extent that its status is changed from inside to outside - but this is only obvious to those in the community. Therefore, in Los Angeles, when I walk down my street chatting with my non-Jewish neighbor, I am walking in Shabbat while he is not.
Which brings us back to a farm in Vermont.
When we got to our campsite (a generous term) we took out our dowels and marked off an area large enough for all our tents and food (we also used a car as a "wall") and then we drew the string over the dowels and affixed it. Our little part of the large field was then a "common domain" for Shabbat. We ate and sang and chatted and hung out - and, of course, we prayed and studied - and generally lived in Shabbat while all or most of our neighbors were not. This very permeable boundary (there was no problem in crossing in or out as we and many others did) allowed us to be among and with others of many faiths and creeds (we were next door to an RV of Trotskyites who flew an upside down American flag) while still being firmly grounded in Shabbat.
In a sense the mental map of Shabbat, which allows a Jew to live in a multi-ethnic megalopolis while also living in the space of Shabbat is a paradigm for the larger project of committed Jewish living in contemporary times.
Shabbat shalom.