Deus Vult

Some days it's tough enough being a property manager to the pedestrian mix of laggards, liars and dingleberries that populates my world and phones me with bizarre demands at odd hours, but consider the plight of Henry Jacob, who runs a co-op on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where Orthodox Jews inhabit a substantial portion of his 2,500 apartments.

Hank's life has become more complicated by a ruling issued by a group of prominent rabbis in Israel on Sept. 29 that seems to ban the use of many so-called Shabbos elevators: elevators fixed to stop on every floor from Friday evening until Saturday evening so that observant Jews do not have to press any buttons.

Since the 1960s, when high-rise apartment buildings became ubiquitous, the Orthodox rabbinate has made such elevators one of the few exceptions to Talmudic rules prohibiting 39 categories of activity on the Sabbath, including manual labor or the use of electrical devices. Like flipping a light switch, pressing an elevator button is considered the use of an electrical device.

But the recent ruling, whose signers included Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv — at 99, widely considered the most influential Torah sage of his generation — introduced a caveat based on new technology in elevators. The rabbis wrote that this new technology, which was explained to them by elevator technicians and engineers in “a written and oral technical opinion,” made them aware for the first time that using Shabbos elevators may be a “desecration of the Sabbath.”

Religion sometimes, if belatedly, accommodates the obvious. Witness Pope Benedict's acknowledgment that Galileo was right - 359 years after one of his predecessors condemned GG to house arrest for pointing out the obvious.

I suspect that more malleable minds will come to the fore and we'll have an "up and down turnaround" and the US Senate will retain its ranking as the most prominent bastion of seniority over sanity.