The theological debates around this new form of shinui (“change” or “modification”) are as detailed and pedantic as one would expect. One online text, including a section titled rather ominously “If a Man is Thrown on an Infant,” goes into great detail whether exerting the effort to move weight can be considered, in itself, an action. Here the issue is whether riding an elevator places one in a passive or active role, taking into account circuitry, energy, and gravity. Just to complicate things further, the light indicator moving from floor to floor is considered by some authorities to be a transgression of the “Biblical prohibition against kindling a fire on the Sabbath.” One recent court case in New York was initiated by a group of Jewish students who attend school in a building bereft of a Shabbos elevator. In the legal documents the un-kosher conveyances the students are obliged to contend with are described as “anti-Semitic.”

Celebrated folklorist and secular Jew Alan Dundes did not mince words when he titled his own book on the topic Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character. In this book-length study, Professor Dundes argues that the Jewish character is culturally and historically drawn to ingenuous workarounds. “What then are we to make of a society that insists, on the one hand, upon retaining a large set of admittedly very restrictive practices but on the other hand has skillfully devised a remarkably imaginative set of ways around these very same practices?” According to Dundes, Sabbath subterfuge is partly an inevitable response to the intensely patriarchal nature of the Judaic religion, and partly a historical record of thousands of years of oppression. Certainly we cannot pretend to know if God is angered by the conceit of the Shabbos elevator, or if He chuckles at the elaborate nature of the solution. But for the professor, any whiff of disrespect or sacrilege is quickly blown away by the sociological effects of their implementation. In other words, this behavior can be viewed precisely as a way of preserving the power of the prohibition, and everything it stands for. The “very existence and continuation” of what some consider cultural cheat-codes “constitute a kind of Sabbath glue that provides a critical adhesive basis for Jewish identity, at least among some elements of the Jewish community.” For just as Dundes insists there is an element of collective masochism in strictly observing all the laws of the Sabbath, there is also a second type of solidarity created by the communal ways that observant Jews cut corners or rationalize transgressions through “counter customs.”

Case in point, the Institute for Science and Halacha in Jerusalem, led by Rabbi Yitzhak Halperin, adopts the mission of rendering social situations Sabbath-friendly through new technologies. These include the Shabbos elevator, telephone, and scooter, as well as “kosher steam” (which, thanks to a few judicious drops of pine oil, allows meat and dairy to coexist in the same public kitchen). Machines thus play the role of the Shabbes Goy, akin to the non-Jewish person asked to press buttons, but outsourced to nifty new contraptions and contrivances. While it is tempting for the secular mind to categorize such devices as merely amusing cases of religious chutzpah, they are in fact the result of a real and profound struggle to balance the need to obey one of the most sacred commandments (“observe the Sabbath”) on the one hand, and to swim with the practical current of modern life on the other. As one commentator notes, “The Jews are not the only people to claim to have talked to God but are, I think, the only people to have talked back to God, to have attempted to bargain and negotiate.” Indeed, for Dundes the neo-Freudian, the Jewish compulsion of talking back and skirting around is analogous to the thrill a child gets outwitting a parent. It is to have one’s kosher cake and eat it too.

Meanwhile, back at my building, it is still Saturday. While waiting for Otis’s contraption to arrive I have had plenty of time to ponder the socio-symbolic clash of worldviews crystallized in the so-called “kosher” elevator. Being forced to wait obliges us to reflect on the heedlessness of our daily activities. In an essay entitled “Celebration,” the Czech media philosopher Vilem Flusser emphasizes the specific elevation of the Sabbath, above the day-to-day fray. For him, as for observant Jews, “the Sabbath is a sector extracted from and raised above the flow of events. It is a temple made of time rather than marble.” In other words, the Shabbos is outside of the normal social flow because it refuses to think of Time as a mere accumulation of productive, profane enterprises. What I simply call Saturday is, for the spiritually-attuned, a precious opportunity to remind ourselves of the blessing and miracle of Being; and to leave more default ways of action for the rest of the week. For Flusser, we moderns have forgotten how to truly observe and celebrate the wonder of co-existence in its pure uselessness or inutility, since for most of us the “leisure time” of a normal weekend still involves different types of labor and/or consumption.