Summer conjures up notions of ease and freedom, a release from the strictures and tensions of everyday life. You could even say that the allure of summer rests on the erasure of boundaries.
Little wonder, then, that many residents of Southampton, Long Island -- that doyenne of summer resorts -- are up in arms at the prospect in their very own backyard of an eruv, a boundary-setting device that enables observant Jews to reconfigure public space as private space and, as a result, to proceed unimpeded on Shabbat. They've even gone to court to block it.
According to The Southampton Press, which featured the story on its front page, the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals denied the East End Eruv Association a variance that would allow it to proceed any further with its plans to erect an eruv.
The zoning board’s ruling was based on a provision of the town code that prohibits the posting of signs on utility poles. Since an eruv deploys utility poles (though in ways that are visible only to those in the know), its creation and maintenance, strictly speaking, ran counter to the law of the land (or the town). And that’s that.
But, of course, there’s much more to the story. Whether or not to install an eruv in Southampton is not just a legal issue or one of collective aesthetics, but an expression of social norms and values: neighborliness run amuck. The situation has quickly devolved into an ugly contretemps, pitting one set of residents against another. Property values, the First Amendment, and, sad to say, more than a hint or two of anti-Semitism entered the mix.
More disturbingly still, the emergence of a real divide between the Jews who favored an eruv and those who did not also made itself sharply felt. The Jews who fell into the latter camp formed a group called “Jewish People Opposed to the Eruv,” to press their claim that the eruv was a potential affront to the values they held dear. We have a right, they said, “not to be confronted on a daily basis … by the permanent display on multiple public utility poles of a deeply religious and sectarian symbol of a particular religious belief that they do not share, and in some cases find offensive.”
The carefree days of summer, anyone?
