Hurricane Halakha

What should you do when disaster strikes?

 

It's Shabbat (the Sabbath). You have your stove on covered by a blech (a metal plate that covers the burners and the controls, and on which food is placed before Shabbat to keep it warm).

Late Friday night, several hours after Shabbat started, police order an immediate evacuation of your neighborhood due to a pending natural disaster like a hurricane, or for some other urgent public safety need.

You can ride in provided buses to evacuate or drive your own car if that is not possible, and for the purposes of this post we will consider either option completely permissable (as they both are in real life, as well).

What do you do about the stove and blech if no non-Jew is around to turn off the stove or if there is no time to ask a non-Jew to do it?

A. Leave it on because it only poses a danger to property.

B. Leave it on because Shabbat cannot be violated to turn it off.

C. Turn it off (with a shinui, an unusual way of doing something, if possible) because fires pose a danger to lives of the firefighters who fight them, and to others if the fire is allowed to spread.

D. I don't know so I would ask a rabbi what to do, even if I had to go looking for one.

E. Despite the fact that no non-Jews appear to be close by, I would spend time looking for one to turn off the stove, even if it meant risking missing the evacuation time limit or causing a non-Jew to do the same.

Answer: No matter what any rabbi might tell you, the answer is C.

Answers D and E are absolutely forbidden without question. Answers A and B are the standard answers given by Orthodox and haredi rabbis, largely because most of them have no idea how the world works, and they answer questions like this with caricatured answers, as if they were living in a mythical, small, all Jewish Polish shtetl 250 years ago.

Comments

[netflix]

if you are the only jew on the block and there are no jews in the fire dept you should leave it on. do what you can to let as many non jews die as possible.

its shabbos!

[Uzi Ben Asher]

Turn the damned thing off, and do so the most expeditious way possible. That's a mitzah; so sayeth Rebbe Uzi. Not turning it off and endangering the lives of people, Jewish or not, and animals is a major chillul Hashem.

Most firemen around my neck of the woods have last names like Donahue.

[Mashiach agent]

"What should you do when disaster strikes?"
its obvious, TESHUVA

[seymour]

"What should you do when disaster strikes?"
its obvious, TESHUVA

Posted by: Mashiach agent | August 28, 2011 at 12:58 PM

call the politicians to recall the gay marriage bill

[seymour]

Answers A and B are the standard answers given by Orthodox and haredi rabbis, largely because most of them have no idea how the world works

they live in a bubble and do not realize or care to real live consequence of their ruling

they will just say this is the ruling it is correct and if people die because of it that is what hashem wanted

[rebeljew]

F. Do as they did with Hurricane Andrew in 1991 and ask the Rebbe to push away the storm.

[Mike Powers]

Nothing here that common sense would not tell you.
But I guess our peopel are so frum , thye lost common sense at least 4o years ago.

[Uzi Ben Asher]

Hurricane Halakha? With Hazel having been retired 57 years ago, I'll petition NOAA (formerly the Weather Bureau) to put Halakha on the list.