Presumably they also went to non-Jewish doctors if they had a medical emergency on the Sabbath.
Nitpick: Jewish law permits and in fact requires the breaking of Biblical commandments if someone's life is in danger (exceptions: idolatry, murder and breaking sexual taboos). In fact, there's an old Jewish joke that I think gets at some of the moral weirdness you're bringing up here:
A Jew and his Christian friend are sitting down for dinner at a restaurant. The Christian recommends the cheeseburger, but the Jew says that, since he keeps kosher, he's forbidden from eating any meal with both meat and dairy.
The Christian asks whether the Jew would eat a cheeseburger if his life depended on it, and the Jew says that Jewish law allows someone to break a ritual law if zir life is in danger. So the Christian draws a handgun, points it at his Jewish friend, and says "Order the cheeseburger, or I'll shoot!"
After dinner, the Christian puts his gun away and apologizes to the Jew. "You know I never would have shot you," he says. "I just wanted to see what you would do. Please forgive me."
"Forgive you?!" asks the Jew. "Of course I won't forgive you! Why didn't you make me order the bacon burger?"
In conclusion, if your morals make you wish someone would come along at gunpoint and force you to break your moral system, you may also be in error :)
Everyone's favorite quotation from the Confessions of St. Augustine: "Grant me chastity and continence ... but not yet."
using terminology from my goodhart's law post, In most religions, G is to be a good person and G is the bunch of laws to be followed. The presence of Shabbos Goyim anywhere in your process is a very serious case that your Gs are flawed.
Nice Post and Nice discussions.
If we could charge users just a little bit of money, just a fraction of the cost of running their programs, we could probably do this. Then people wouldn't be so cavalier about running a program repeatedly that takes 500 CPU hours each time you run it.
But we can't, because we're an academic institution. So that would be evil.
You mean like the academic journals that charge subscription fees?
But it's still not at all obvious why academic journals cost so much.
Sure it is. Subscriptions are mostly paid for by institutions, rather than individuals. Any given article effectively has a monopoly on it's own content, so once a university has subscribed and the profs are used to getting free access to that content, it's politically difficult for the university to un-subscribe. Then the journal incrementally increases the prices. Soon, the university's accounting department is on the losing end of a frog-boil.
That proscription is just wrong, in exactly the way you would expect laws written by uneducated tribal people to be wrong.
There's nothing wrong with assuming that in the ancient past people were less educated than they are now, and the general claim "religious beliefs are stupid" has been proven to the LW community's satisfaction. You, though, are making two claims that go far beyond these truisms: (1) that uneducated tribes are stupid in some specifiable pattern X, and (2) that "don't lend interest" exemplifies pattern X.
I wish you...
In regards to your postscript, it's certainly possible that the use of Shabos goyim by Orthodox Jews is logically consistent, but it doesn't stop there! One of, to me, the most fascinating examples of this sort of patching is Shabbat technology. The example that always strikes me is the Shabbat elevator, which is quite common in Israel. Basically, it's a normal elevator, except that during the appointed period of time it operates in a much different manner: constantly cycling through the floors and stopping on every single one. This way 'observant' Jews ar...
I'm not sure why you picked hasidic. It sounds like you are confuing hasidic with haredi which is roughly speaking the general ultra-orthodox population. The hasidim are a specific strain of orthodox Judaism which arose in the last 1700s. But many haredim are not hasidim. In any case, the Shabbat goy has nothing to do with either the larger category or the smaller category. Note also that neither category describes all of Orthodox Judaism.
You are incidentally correct that orthodox Judaism does not believ that gentiles have to obey the Torah. However, I'm ...
I've talked with an Orthodox Jew who thought the Shabbos goy was very contrary to the spirit of the law-- he said (I haven't verified this) that Shabbos goyim were first instituted in north-eastern Europe where keeping a fire going in the winter was a matter of life and death, and therefore required-- but that Shabbos goyim were eventually employed for matters of mere comfort and convenience.
The Amazon example doesn't seem to be that illustrative of the concept you are trying to get across, mostly because the reason academic institutions don't sell computation is that they aren't set up for it, not that commerce is considered evil. They have no problem charging for other services, such as tuition.
Here's a better one: police, military, and government in general. Everyone in that role has slightly different moral codes than the rest of us, in that they are able to legitimately employ violence in various forms, and for the most part we are willing to cede that role to them. The government is our shabbos goy, although too often a master rather than servant.
I find it fascinating that the original post's "We need a jew" was unacceptable, but the modified post of "We need a Shabbos goy" is perfectly fine. Especially because in the original post the moral failing was the christians', whereas in the modified post the moral failing is the jews'.
And even more so because I too feel emotionally motivated to dislike and down-vote the first while supporting the second, specifically because the first one feels anti-semitic and the second doesn't... even though the opposite seems to be true.
Perhaps it's because the term "we need a jew" signals ownership, resulting in objectification and degradation of the subject? We need a Robin Hanson in here!
I wonder if the low rating of this post is because people are more touchy about Jews than they are about Christians. People here think it's fine to criticize Christianity all day. Shouldn't it be equally acceptable to criticize Judaism? (I criticized both.)
I'm going to put up 4 replies to this comment, in matched pairs for karma balance. If you vote, vote on both comments in a pair. Comment if you found one pair harder to vote on.
ADDED: Wow, the results surprised me. I would have found it hard to upvote "Judaism is stupid". My brain would direct it, but my finger would protest.
I see - If people use "Jew" to mean "the agent you need to help you work around problems in your morals", the negative association bleeds over onto the word "Jew", even though it's the Christian (in the money-lending example) who's committing the error.
Writing is more memorable when you use emotionally-laden terms, but also riskier.
I used the term "Christian" a lot, too; and implied the Christians were the ones at fault. But that wasn't uncomfortable?
I'm thinking how to reword it so that it doesn't go flat, but so far nothing comes to mind.
Is there an existing term to refer to the person you use to commit your sins for you? Scapegoat isn't right. Is there a word for a person hired to operate electric devices for you on the Sabbath?
In looking for the answer to this, I found this absolutely wonderful page explaining different rules about the use of electricity on the Sabbath. Studying it would make an excellent preparation for law school. Here's a quote:
...It is forbidden on the Sabbath to set the alarm of a battery-operated transistorized alarm clock or a wind-up alarm clock even though the alarm was wound before the Sabbath. The reasons
Is there a word for a person hired to operate electric devices for you on the Sabbath?
Shabbos goy.
When I first saw it under that title, before I read the article, I read it as contrasting with "Sufficient Jews" or possibly "Contingent Jews".
I'm still enjoying imagining what those could possibly mean.
This is a nice and unexpected parallel. I think I may notice more instances now that I know the general pattern. Thanks for writing it up.
The orthodox jewish position is consistent with using shabbos goyim. They maintain that the jewish nation was created for a specific purpose ("light to the nations", whatever that means) and their legal (vs. moral) code is the result of this setup; it is only meant to apply to the jews. There is a separate body of law "seven laws of children of Noah" that are universal, and much closer to a "moral code". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
My funny story, though cannot confirm that it's true, was about a very capable shabbos goy who after some years turned out to be jewish.
If your morals require you to use the services of someone not adhering to your morals, you may be in error.
It's also interesting to see how people patch around failings in their reasoning instead of fixing them.
Interesting, but I don't understand how Amazon helps you. If you release your software in a form that users can easily upload and run on EC2, presumably you'll have to simplify the dependencies anyway (Sybase, huh), so users can just as easily run it at home. Or am I missing some part of the story?
If we could charge users just a little bit of money [...] But we can't, because we're an academic institution. So that would be evil.
I doubt very much that the people who made this decision were considering the moral implications. Far more likely, they decided based on economics. It sounds like a good decision to me, from what you've presented here.
I really don't think it's appropriate to equate a business decision with religious craziness, not without more evidence that they're behaving irrationally.
I had heard that Christians at some point were forbidden from charging interest on loans, and I had heard that Jews at some point were forbidden from charging interest on loans, but finding out that Jews were allowed to charge interest to Christians but not to other Jews and vice versa was a WTF moment for me.
In Orthodox Judaism, based on Biblical passages, the Sabbath was given to Israel. As you mention non-Jew's are neither expected nor encouraged to keep the Sabbath.
That being said, despite the popular notion of a "Shabbos Goy" it is generally forbidden in Orthodox Judaism to benefit from a gentile's violation of the Sabbath. One is certainly forbidden to tell a non-Jew to break the Sabbath.You are not allowed to have a non-Jew turn on the light for you and he did it without being asked you may not utilize the light. While there are some excepti...
My experience with Amazon cloud has been rather positive. Very much unlike my experience with live sysadmins, who are all terrible human beings by nature of their job. I'd really rather not go off the cloud ever.
Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:36, and Deuteronomy 23:20-21 forbid Jews from charging interest on loans to "your brother" (other Jews). (This is to me the most convincing argument against Judaism and Christianity, because it's too simple to argue around. That proscription is just wrong, in exactly the way you would expect laws written by uneducated tribal people to be wrong.)
Roman Catholics believe they must follow the Old Testament laws, except for the ones they don't have to follow; but during much of the middle ages in Western Europe, this was one of the ones they had to follow. They interpreted "your brother" as meaning "brother Christians". So Jews could lend to Christians with interest (and, presumably, Christians could lend to Jews). This was convenient for everyone. The Jews were necessary to work around an irrational moral prohibition of the Christians.
Of course, the Jews had to take on the guilt of violating the moral code, even though it was for the benefit of the Christians. (This was also convenient; it meant that after some Jews had loaned you an especially large amount of money, you could kill or expel them instead of paying them back, as the Spanish monarchy did in 1492).
Later on, some orthodox Jews hired goyim to turn lightswitches and other electric devices on and off for them on the Sabbath. They're called Shabbos goy, the Sabbath goy (thanks, Alicorn!).
JCVI is considering moving from an on-site hardware grid, to cloud computing. There are lots of reasons to do this. One is so that Amazon can be our Shabbos goy.
We develop lots of bioinformatics software that we're supposed to, and would like to, give out to anyone who wants it. But if you don't have 800 computers at home, connected using the Sun Grid Engine with a VICS interface and using a Sybase database, with exactly the same versions of C++ and Perl and every C++ and Perl library that we do, you're going to have a hard time running the software.
We can't put up a web service and let anybody send their jobs to our computers, because then some professor is going to say to their freshman class of 200 students, "Today, class, your assignment is to assemble a genome using JCVI's free genome assembly web service."
If we could charge users just a little bit of money, just a fraction of the cost of running their programs, we could probably do this. Then people wouldn't be so cavalier about running a program repeatedly that takes 500 CPU hours each time you run it.
But we can't, because we're an academic institution. So that would be evil.
So we need a Shabbos goy. That's Amazon. We can release our software and tell users, "All you have to do to run this is to get an account on the Amazon cloud and run it there. Of course, they'll charge you for it. They're evil."
(The Amazon cloud is evil, BTW. They charged me for 21G of RAM and then only gave me 12, and charged me for 24 1GHz processors and gave me about 1/4 of that. I spent over $100 and was never able to run my program; and they told me to stuff it when I complained. But that's another story.)