Creating Place, Creating Community: The Intangible Boundaries of the Jewish ‘Eruv’

Abstract

Jewish rulings on the ‘Eruv’ were established within the religious framework prohibiting labor on the Sabbath. On the seventh day of rest, according to Judaism, objects cannot be carried from one place to another except in zones deemed private. In order to overcome these prohibitions, religious texts permitted the demarcation of Eruv boundaries, which expand the boundaries of the private zone into the public on the Sabbath, allowing many daily activities to become possible. Eruv boundaries—its walls and thresholds—are primarily conceptual, agreed upon by consent, experienced through knowledge rather than the senses, and of actual consequence to one community living among others. By allowing for the performance of daily activities on the day of rest, the Eruv binds the working of the body and the concept of privacy to the notion of sacred time. These abstract boundaries allow one to speak of a phenomenological spatial experience that is primarily conceptual. Rather than being tangible physical components in the landscape, Eruv place-making boundaries are time contingent and shaped by human performance. While debates centering on the Eruv have focused primarily on its demographic and urban implications, much of the intensity and fervor of opponents takes place within symbolic and conceptual discourses not often found in public debates over urban boundaries. Primarily addressing arguments by contenders of the Eruv, this study will examine the potency of these ‘belief’ boundaries and the discourses in which they partake, relying on the later writings of Martin Heidegger on place as that which is based on human activity and serves as ‘gathering’ and as a revelation of truth.

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