What an eruv is, and why towns sue over it

What it is

An eruv is a boundary that allows observant Jews to carry things outdoors on Shabbat. ² The Torah prohibits carrying between a public domain and a private domain, and prohibits carrying an object more than four cubits within a public domain, while permitting carrying inside an enclosed private area. ¹ The Talmud counts four domains for the laws of Shabbat: the private domain, the public domain, the karmelit, and the exempt domain. ³ It defines the public domain as "A main street and a large plaza as well as alleyways, which are open on both ends to the public domain." ³

The whole idea is to make the street count as an enclosure. The rabbis of the Talmud developed a way to treat a larger area as a single private domain by surrounding it, and that enclosure is called an eruv chatzerot. ¹ The Hebrew word eruv means to mix or join together. ¹ Maimonides sets out the older half of the logic: by Torah law, neighbors living in one courtyard may all carry within it, because the entire courtyard is a private domain, and it is a rabbinic decree that forbids carrying there "unless all the inhabitants join together in an eruv before the commencement of the Sabbath." ⁴

Then there is the engineering. Building a solid wall around a town is impractical, so eruv builders rely on the fact that a wall may contain doorways and still enclose an area, and that a doorway is two vertical posts with a lintel across the top. ¹ Utility poles do the work of the posts, and the cables strung between them do the work of the lintel. ¹ Because those cables usually attach to the side of a pole rather than resting above it, a thin rod called a lechi is fixed to the pole to stand in for the doorpost. ¹ The line serving as the lintel has to be the lowest line on that pole, and if it is not, a new line gets strung. ¹ Existing fences can serve as boundary, though ground eroded beneath one has to be filled in. ¹ Bodies of water and cemeteries have to be excluded. ¹

The Third Circuit, which had to look at these objects closely, described lechis as "thin black strips made of the same hard plastic material as, and nearly identical to, the coverings on ordinary ground wires," and found it "absolutely impossible" to tell them from utility wires unless you already know which is which. ⁵

None of this is set-and-forget. Anyone relying on an eruv is obligated to confirm it is intact first, and communities typically have a group that inspects the boundary weekly and sends out repair crews. ¹ Many publish the week's status by phone hotline and website. ²

Why it still matters

Without an eruv, an Orthodox Jew cannot push a stroller or a wheelchair or carry a cane between home and synagogue on Shabbat, which means people with small children and people with disabilities do not get to shul. ⁵

Manhattan is the famous case, and the famous complication. One halachic threshold holds that a space frequented by more than 600,000 people a day is too large to be made private by an eruv, which is why New York has never had a single eruv around the whole city while individual neighborhoods do. ² The argument over Manhattan is more than a century old. Rabbi Yehoshua Seigel built a Manhattan eruv in 1905, and in 1936 Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin ruled it could no longer be relied on, because Seigel had obtained permission for only ten years and because of the bridges since built across Manhattan's waterfront. ⁷ On March 15, 1960, Henkin signed a statement of the Vaad L'Maan Tikkun Eruvin B'Manhattan asserting the need for one, and on July 12, 1961 he wrote that there was a sound basis to establish it, adding that until most of Manhattan's rabbis backed it in writing the permission would apply only in cases of great need. ⁷

The legal fights run in both directions. In Tenafly, New Jersey, a borough of 4.4 square miles and 13,806 people, Orthodox residents put up an eruv in September 2000 with Cablevision's help on poles owned by Verizon. ⁵ At a 1999 council meeting on the subject, one council member cited "a concern that the Orthodoxy would take over," and another voiced a "serious concern" that "Ultra-Orthodox" Jews might stone cars driven on Shabbat. ⁵ On December 12, 2000, the borough attorney raised Ordinance 691, a 1954 rule against placing signs on poles, for what was apparently the first time in the dispute, and the council voted 5-0 to force removal. ⁵ The same poles carried house-number signs, church directional signs bearing crosses, lost animal notices, orange ribbons from a school fight, and Chamber of Commerce holiday displays for roughly six weeks every Christmas season. ⁵ On October 24, 2002, the Third Circuit found no viable free speech claim, since nothing showed the acts were expressive, but held that the borough's selective enforcement likely violated the Free Exercise Clause, and directed the district court to enter a preliminary injunction. ⁵ Our view: the borough left those poles' other decorations alone for six weeks every year and only found the 1954 ordinance the week the lechis went up. That's selective enforcement.

The reverse case is Westhampton Beach, New York, where residents sued to stop an eruv from going up. ⁶ They argued that the 2010 licensing agreements the East End Eruv Association signed with Verizon and the Long Island Lighting Company violated the Establishment Clause, and that the eruv would be "a constant and ever-present symbol, message and reminder to the community at large, that the secular public spaces of the Village have been transformed for religious use and identity." ⁶ The Second Circuit found the plaintiffs had standing, on the precedent that a person made uncomfortable by direct contact with religious displays has alleged a real injury. ⁶ On January 6, 2015, it affirmed dismissal anyway. Verizon and the eruv association are not state actors; the utility is, but its paid licensing agreement served the secular purpose of neutral accommodation, no reasonable observer would read plastic strips on utility poles as government endorsement, and private parties pay for and maintain them, so there is no excessive entanglement. ⁶ The court added that "Every court to have considered whether similar government actions violate the Establishment Clause has agreed that they do not." ⁶

Not every objection has been constitutional. A 1992 proposal for a North London eruv was refused by the Town Planning Committee on the grounds that it would disturb visual amenity, and another fight broke out in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1999. ²

The words you'll hear

Eruv chatzerot. The full name for the neighborhood eruv, an enclosure that joins a number of private and public properties into one larger private domain so that carrying across the old boundary is permitted. ¹

Lechi. The thin rod attached vertically to a utility pole to stand in for a doorpost when the overhead cable does not rest directly above the pole. ¹ Courts have described lechis as nearly identical in appearance to ordinary ground wire coverings. ⁵

Reshut harabim. The public domain, one of the Talmud's four Shabbat domains, defined as a main street or large plaza and alleyways open at both ends. ³ Typical modern examples are streets, thoroughfares, plazas, and highways. ¹

Karmelit. The semipublic in-between domain, "neither like the public domain... nor like the private domain," covering things like seas and open valleys. ³

The doorway form. The construction principle that a wall may contain many doorways and still enclose an area, which is what lets poles and overhead wire function as a boundary instead of masonry. ¹

Eruv techumin. A different kind of eruv, used to redefine one's Shabbat "home" location and shift the permitted travel area. ¹