Tommy Thompson, You're No Texan
Subject: The Shabbas Goy Addendum
From: Henry W. Hocherman
Date: Mon Apr 3
With all due respect to Culturebox and her Talmudic consultants, the concept of the Shabbas Goy is entirely permissible according to even strict orthodox doctrine. What Dr. Bleich probably meant was that a non-Jew could not receive instruction from an orthodox Jew to perform a forbidden labor on the Sabbath if the instruction was being given on the Sabbath. But the tradition of the Shabbas Goy encompasses the situation where a non-Jew received his or her specific instructions as to what to do (turn a stove or a light on or off on a Friday night, launch nuclear weapons, etc.) before the Sabbath begins. Then, once Shabbas starts, the observant Jew needn't give any further instruction to the non-Jew at all—and the Shabbas Goy merely performs the tasks previously requested without any Sabbath involvement in such instruction on the part of the Jew using his or her services. Thus, a President Lieberman who instructed his non-Jewish staff before the start of the Sabbath on any tasks whatsoever would be acting within the bounds of the strictest interpretation of Judaic law in doing so.
The foregoing is based not only on eleven years of yeshiva study of my own, but my intense desire, at the age of 12, to be President of the United States someday (an ambition long since abandoned, you'll be glad to know). You can bet that I researched that sucker, insofar as Jewish law was concerned, until I had the subject down cold.
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Subject: Who Speaks for the Maids?
From: Fray Reader
