When the machines never stop for Shabbat

On Friday night in Efrat, where I live, the table gets set the way it always has. Candlesticks, challah, the kids scrubbed and hungry. Somewhere over the Judean hills, software is running that cannot tell time, does not know what a Friday is, and would not stop for one if it did. For most of Jewish history, resting on Shabbat was a decision a person made. This year, for the first time, it is a decision a country must make on your behalf, and the rabbis are only beginning to catch up.

A question no rabbi used to get

The questions reaching Israel's rabbinic authorities sound like riddles from another century. If a drone feed is recording on Shabbat and no human watches it, has anyone worked? May a soldier wearing a helmet screen glance at an automated alert on Saturday, and if the answer is no, who takes the shift? The Chief Rabbinate spent this summer publicly wrangling with the army over religious soldiers and military discipline, a fight that made the front pages of the Jewish press abroad. Beneath the headlines sits a quieter problem the old law books never imagined: the machinery of national defense now hums along seven days a week whether or not anyone sanctifies the day.

Try explaining the Sabbath concept to a missile. The interception system that guards Tel Aviv does not distinguish between a Tuesday rocket and a Saturday one, and nobody serious argues it should. When Operation Epic Fury ran its course against Iran, the campaign’s tempo was set by fuel, weather and enemy behavior, not by the Jewish calendar, and its hardest phase began with questions about what comes after the shooting. A country that pauses for Kiddush still needs to keep the software warm.

The old categories stretch

Jewish law is no stranger to this kind of stretching. The tradition that produced the Shabbat clock and the Shabbat elevator, devices that let observant homes keep running without anyone flipping a switch, is now being asked to extend the same ingenuity to national survival. Some answers come easily: defensive systems that operate without human triggering are widely treated like a wall, something that stands on its own. Others stay hard. A human must still watch some screens, and deciding which screens, which humans and which circumstances is a live argument among the poskim, the decisors of Jewish law, right now.

There is a version of this argument waiting for everyone. The same armed forces have had to build rules for how much care machines must take with civilians, an effort that changed how wars are fought, and the Sabbath question is its twin: what do we insist on keeping human, and what do we allow the machines to carry for us? Two countries built on the same textual inheritance, the one I live in, and the one Rhode Island readers live in, will answer differently in the details and identically in principle.

The rest of the world is next

Israel is only the first place where the question became unavoidable, since it is the first place where war, religion and automation all run on the same grid. Every tradition with a day of rest, and every secular society with a notion of the weekend worth defending, will soon face the Israeli predicament in some softer form, when the algorithms that manage deliveries, markets and maybe armies simply never pause. The rabbis working through the problem now, sometimes uncomfortably, are writing drafts of an answer the rest of the world will eventually need.

Back at the table, the meal runs long. The children argue over the last of the challah, the phone stays dark and the hills outside stay watched by something that does not rest. Both of those things are true on the same Friday night, and making peace between them, plate by plate and ruling by ruling, might be the most quietly Jewish thing this country has done all year.

MARK GINSBERG lives in Efrat, Israel, and writes about Israeli society and technology.