[Avodah] pikuach nefesh?

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 10:16:09PM -0500, Zev Sero via Avodah wrote:
: >But he opens the door and thereby turns on the light for you. He is
: >driving a particular route for you.
: 
: Why does it matter what route he takes? It's the same melacha no
: matter what the route is, and he'd be opening the door for whoever
: his passenger was.    He's doing it because it's his job, and he's
: employed by the Secret Service, not by you...
:                        ..., so you determine how much melacha he
: does.  It's more like riding  bus or train that would be going
: whether you're on it or not.

... or he could be the one extra driver and spending the night in the
back room surfing Facebbok. And the "bus or train" would not be going
either way -- as I said, he would otherwise be doing a different act --
even if the same melakhah. Who knows what this person's life would have
been in some hypothetical other world? But I don't think it's relevant.

This isn't lifnei iveir, where the goal is to minimize chilul Shabbos.
Then some would let you say -- well, since he would otherwise drive to
whatever entertainment he would fill his evening with, might as well
have him drive to shul. And some wouldn't. Even that's not a given.

But here we are trying to avoid getting hana'ah for something a non-Jew
did for us. And one may not get hana'ah from the melakhah done by an
employee, eg the employee of a dry cleaner -- if the clothing were dropped
off right before and picked up right after Shabbos so that doing it on
Shabbos was the only way it can be done and not his parsonal choice.
And we don't say that since he was in the shop anyway, if he didn't work
on your suit, he would have done someone else's.

"Doing it for the paycheck, not for me", is not a blanket heter for amirah
le'akum. It's whether or not what he actually did is on my behalf, or not.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "I hear, then I forget; I see, then I remember;
micha at aishdas.org        I do, then I understand." - Confucius
http://www.aishdas.org   "Hearing doesn't compare to seeing." - Mechilta
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