Skip to main content

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?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thought for the Day: אוושא מילתא Debases Yours Shabbos

My granddaughter came home with a list the girls and phone numbers in her first grade class.  It was cute because they had made it an arts and crafts project by pasting the list to piece of construction paper cut out to look like an old desk phone and a receiver attached by a pipe cleaner.  I realized, though, that the cuteness was entirely lost on her.  She, of course, has never seen a desk phone with a receiver.  When they pretend to talk on the phone, it is on any relatively flat, rectangular object they find.  (In fact, her 18 month old brother turns every  relatively flat, rectangular object into a phone and walks around babbling into it.  Not much different than the rest of us, except his train of thought is not interrupted by someone else babbling into his ear.) I was reminded of that when my chavrusa (who has children my grandchildrens age) and I were learning about אוושא מילתא.  It came up because of a quote from the Shulchan Aruch HaRav that referred to the noise of תקתוק
Post a Comment
Read more

Thought for the Day: Love in the Time of Corona Virus/Anxiously Awaiting the Mashiach

Two scenarios: Scenario I: A young boy awakened in the middle of the night, placed in the back of vehicle, told not to make any noise, and the vehicle speeds off down the highway. Scenario II: Young boy playing in park goes to see firetruck, turns around to see scary man in angry pursuit, poised to attack. I experienced and lived through both of those scenarios. Terrifying, no? Actually, no; and my picture was never on a milk carton. Here's the context: Scenario I: We addressed both set of our grandparents as "grandma" and "grandpa". How did we distinguish? One set lived less than a half hour's drive; those were there "close grandma and grandpa". The other set lived five hour drive away; they were the "way far away grandma and grandpa". To make the trip the most pleasant for all of us, Dad would wake up my brother and I at 4:00AM, we'd groggily -- but with excitement! -- wander out and down to the garage where we'd crawl
Post a Comment
Read more

Thought for the Day: What Category of Muktzeh are Our Candles?

As discussed in a recent TftD , a p'sak halacha quite surprising to many, that one may -- even לכתחילה -- decorate a birthday cake with (unlit, obviously) birthday candles on Shabbos. That p'sak is predicated on another p'sak halacha; namely, that our candles are muktzeh because they are a כלי שמלאכתו לאיסור and not  מוקצה מחמת גופו/intrinsically set aside from any use on Shabbos. They point there was that using the candle as a decoration qualifies as a need that allows one to utilize a כלי שמלאכתו לאיסור. Today we will discuss the issue of concluding that our candles are , in fact, a כלי שמלאכתו לאיסור and not מוקצה מחמת גופו. Along the way we'll also (again) how important it is to have personal relationship with your rav/posek, the importance of precision in vocabulary, and how to interpret the Mishna Brura.  Buckle up. After reviewing siman 308 and the Mishna Brura there, I concluded that it should be permissible to use birthday candles to decorate a cake on Shabbo
Post a Comment
Read more