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Thought for the Day: It's Friday Night, All Your Food is in the Oven, and (Ahem) Someone Forgot to Set Shabbos Mode...

We recently acquired a new oven -- combination of stimulus check and spending much less money on travel this year. It is a double oven, so we now have a milchig and fleishig oven. Interestingly, when we went to Abt to look for ovens and noted that we were only interested in ovens with Shabbos mode, their search page has a check box specifically for that feature. We've had the oven for a few months and it is quite nice.

One of my jobs on Friday afternoon is to set the oven before leaving for Shul. I set the top oven at 170 degrees to keep our challos warm and set the cook time to turn off the oven a few minutes after צאת הכוכבים/halachic nightfall. I set the bottom oven -- with soup/main/kugel/veggies/etc -- to 215 degrees to keep everything piping hot for the meal, and the cook time to turn off 10 minutes after the top oven. That gives me time to say קריאת שמע, then pull the challos from the (now off) top oven with plenty of time to welcome the Shabbos, say kiddush and motzi -- and by the time we have eaten our first כזית of challah, the bottom oven goes off and I can pull out the soup while leaving the remainder of our food to stay warm. Life is good.

A Friday night or two ago, I came home from shul, did a bit of learning until nightfall, at nightfall said קריאת שמע. All on schedule and according to plan. As I was finishing קריאת שמע, though, I heard "ding" (or "beep" or "buzz"... whatever) from the oven indicating that the top oven had turned off. "Perfect timing," I thought, then ... "but, wait... ding? Doesn't Shabbos mode cancel all noises and such?" Oh, darn, Darn, DARN! I forgot to set Shabbos mode! Aaargh... so I suppose we'll be hearing that "ding" (or "beep" or "buzz"... whatever) all Shabbos! 😢 Umm... If it is not in Shabbos mode... oh no... that means that the oven light will come on if I open the oven door and all of our food is in there!! 😭

Take a deep breath or 10... I can get non-Jew to open the oven doors and take everything out, right? Well... I tried that. The two homes of non-Jews I know on my block were empty/unresponsive. Go ranging around the neighborhoods to invite some strangers into my house at night? Even without a pandemic raging, that really smacks of NOT GOOD IDEA.

Think, think, think... Open the doors myself with a שינוי/un-normal manner? No, the lights in the oven have filaments, so that means opening the doors with initiate a פסיק רישא/inevitable chain events that ends with violating a Torah prohibition. No amount of שינוי is going to make that one permissible to be executed by a Jew. (Though the Jew who would do such a thing on purpose would be liable for execution. I kill myself.🤣)

The problem here is that the lights have a filament, which makes turning on the light tantamount to igniting a fire in the eyes of halacha. Oh if only we had lights without at filament that operated on a completely different principle and were not actually fire. If only, if only... Wait! There is!! LED lights do not, in fact, have a filament. In the eyes of halacha turning on an LED light is not a Torah prohibition, but a Rabbinic prohibition. A Jew is, in fact permitted to violate a Rabbinic fence by way of a שינוי in certain situations. For a non-critically ill patient is one such situation. Saving one's entire Shabbos s'uda is another. No, one is not required to eat cold peanut butter sandwiches to avoid that fence. Notice I am no longer saying "transgress", that is because violating a Rabbinic fence by way of a שינוי is no longer called a transgression.

Moreover, extinguishing a light is also a Rabbinic fence. Cool! I'll just pull out the cord from the wall -- by crooking my elbow around the cord, which is muktzeh (the cord, not my elbow) -- and I have the necessary שינוי and also removed the action an additional step from the Torah prohibition: (1) extinguishing, and (2) the light is LED (non incandescent). Before you ask, yes, I did go over all my options and actions with R' Fuerst on Sunday and agreed that I had taken the best course of action, given all the constraints. (In fact, the dayan's face lit up as he told me that the coming week's shiur would discuss this very situation.)

Baruch HaShem, I was able to enjoy a beautiful Shabbos s'uda, save my marriage, and remain Shomer Shabbos. Not a bad night's work, eh?

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