robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (11/05/84)
Driving a car on Shabbath carries a risk of doing many other activities that are not appropriate to Shabbath. My comments here are practical, not far-out worries; before I became Shomer-Shabbat, I went through a period of partial observance in which I was willing to drive a car relatively short distances, but to treat the Sabbath as a day of rest, not spend money, etc. Driving a car on the Sabbath was nerve-wracking in the extreme, and in fact one of the prods that lead me to greater observance. (1) Are you going to have to pay a toll, or buy gasoline or oil? What will you do if faced with an unplanned toll booth, or if you are clearly out of oil? (2) Suppose the car breaks down (say, a flat tire, or a hose breaks) on a busy road. Can you risk leaving the car their and calling road service for after the Sabbath? What will happen to your Sabbath peace as you worry about what is happening to the abandoned car? (3) What will you use the car for? Relying on walking has a wonderful effect of ruling out many otherwise tempting worklike activities. If you use your car, you have to make many other adhoc decisions about whether to drive over to some store "just to look around", or to pick up a non-work book at your office, etc., etc. (4) An accident, even if no one is injured, can invlve yo in all sorts of non-Shabbaty activities that are much more easily avoided if yuo walk. (5) One of the most tempting uses of the car is to drive to services, which gives one a wider choice of places to live, and places to worship. However, if you look at the solutions Jews have traditionally made to this problem, and the wonderful degree of community and hospitality it encourages, you can see that there is certainly collective benefit in avoiding the temptation. By the way, it may sound, from some of my concerns above, as if I lived in a big, dangerous, city, but I didn't. Living in, say, NYC, I imagine my fears would have been tenfold. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison or: decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or (emergency): princeton!eosp1!robison