Interesting Psak: Turning on the electricity on Shabbos

Rav Yoni Rosenzweig, rav of the Netzach Menashe shul in Bet Shemesh, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Hamivtar of Efrat, and one of the rabbonim of the rabbinic organization Beit Hillel has written about a personal experience that required an interesting psak in the heat of the moment (pun intended, as will son be seen).

Rav Rosenzweig was scheduled to be with his students in Efrat for Shabbos this past week. When the snow storm hit and found him with his family in Bet Shemesh, it seemed like alternate arrangements would need to be found. They could not get to Efrat, as roads were closed. Efrat, and the rest of Gush Etzion, was snowed in.

At some point he was told that the roads have been opened, and he and his wife decided they were going to make a run for it, before the roads would be closed again. Sure enough, they made it to Efrat and all was good. Eventually everything was shut down, but he was already in Efrat with his family and students.

You can read the entire piece in his article on NRG. I find it especially interesting that he published his personal experience and decision in such a way that exposes himself for discussion and criticism - specifically because such a thing can turn very personal and veer form being strictly halachic discourse. I am only going to be brief here in recapping what he wrote.

When they got back to their apartment on Friday night after the meal, they bundled the kids up in pajamas and put them to bed. At 3:00 am his wife wakes him up to check on the crying baby. He goes to check, calms her and covers her, and then notices all the electricity is off, including all the lights and the heaters. It was freezing cold. He checks the electricity and finds that the main breaker had flipped - it was not part of a general outage as many had been experiencing. This was a localized problem.

Rav Rosenzweig writes that he sat down to consider his options. On the one hand, turning on electricity and the heaters on Shabbos is prohibited from the Torah. On the other hand it is freezing cold, as it would continue to be during the coming day as well. On the one hand, he writes, he knew they could find a way to survive, either by changing apartments or sitting all day bundled in blankets. On the other hand, he could not get them all up and out to another apartment with heat at 3am in the freezing cold. He was concerned about the children getting sick.

Without getting into details, he writes the general ideas he reviewed in order to come to his decision. The rule set by chazal is that regarding cold everyone is called "sick", which gives certain allowances of leniencies. Combining that with the idea of using a shinui  - turning on the electricity in an unusual manner, there could be room for leniency. As well, electricity is not a direct act, as it is manufactured elsewhere, and turning on the flow of electricity is not the direct prohibition.

Rav Rosenzweig concludes by saying he decided to turn on the electricity. In emergency situations one must know how/when to be lenient, even though in day to day life we have plenty of stringencies.

Right? Wrong? I have no idea. The criticism has been quick in coming - talkbacks, articles, forums, etc. I feel that as a rav, who was even bold enough to publicize what he did and open it up for discussion, he clearly felt justified in deciding that there was an element in danger of the kids getting sick and combined it with the use of a shinui. At a time when the Chief Rabbis were allowing trains to run on Shabbos in order to get people out of the freezing cold temperatures and when they allowed emergency services to continue working on Shabbos to get people out of the freezing cold environments, there is definitely plenty of room for him to justifiably have decided there was an element of danger that would allow the electricity to be turned back on. The truth is, though, that I do not know which part of this is more interesting - the psak itself, of which we only know general details, or his publicizing his experience.

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