[Avodah] the Sne and the Aish

[Chana Luntz]

I wrote:
> I was looking at Shemot 3:2 the other day and thinking about the Sne, 
> and it struck me that what Moshe Rabbanu saw in the Sne is described 
> as "aish" and "bo'ar eish" despite it not being consumed.  And it 
> struck me that these are the same words used in the pasuk in Shemot 
> 35:3 ie the same root in lo t'vairu aish.  Now we usually think of 
> aish as being fuel + oxygen -> carbon dioxide + water, ie the 
> scientific definition of fire - and certainly that is mostly what they 
> were kindling over the years, and what they were avoiding kindling on
Shabbat in the midbar.

And RMB replied:

<<Not only "aish", but also the word "bi'ur", which names the melakhah.>>

I thought that was part of the point I was making, sorry if it was not
clear.

<<Lemaaseh, though, the "seneh bo'er ba'iesh vehasneh enunu ukal" was an
illusion. That's what the pasuq says "vayar". But what actually happened was
that the mal'akh appeared "belabas-eish mitokh hasseneh". Notice the fire
was really smaller, within the bush, and just gave the appearance of
engulfing it.>>

What do you mean by "an illusion"?  What is an illusion in this context?  I
would understand the word illusion to mean it didn't really happen - like a
kind of mirage or dream.  But isn't that an assumption?  Why cannot we say
that in fact it is described exactly as it happened, no illusion?  It was
just a physical form that Moshe and the people of his generation had never
seen, eish that does not ukal.

<<RYBS notes (given in a motza"sh shiur to his congregants) that it was
Moshe looking again and realizing that the fire was metzamzeim that Moshe's
nevu'ah went up from being a message from a malach to "Vayiqra eilav Elokim
mitokh haseneh". When he realized Hashem wouldn't need the flashier
presentation Moshe became the anav mikol adam that merited his being the av
hanevi'im.
To get to why I brought all of this up... I'm not sure what the story was
with the bush not burning. Maybe the small fire that was within the bush did
burn it, but the bush was not consumed (ukal) because the fire that seemed
to totally engulf it wasn't real.>>

If there was a small "fire" that did "burn" then the centre of the bush
would be reduced to ash, even if the rest of it was not.  And what does
"real" mean.  Why cannot a phenomenon that engulfs a bush not be real on its
own terms, even if it is not something known to the physics of its day?

>                              Now at the time of the midbar and Chazal, 
> we were not in a position to deliberately generate visible light 
> photons in any other way than by classic fire - but now we are (inter alia
LEDs)!

<<In any case, in terms of the melakhah.... It's a machloqes whether making
a gacheles shel mateches is bishul or havarah. Seems to me this issue -- is
aish causing a glow in general or only if something is burning -- is the
root of that machloqes.
This was the case with the filament in the old-school incandescent bulb.>>

Yes - but in the case of the filament, people took comfort from the fact
that just like a gacheles shel mateches, it was also very hot and would burn
other things.  Ie while it itself would not be consumed, it would burn
anything around it were it not isolated, whereas LEDs don't even do that.  I
agree fluorescents might be considered even more obviously a shabbat issur. 

<<What the case of LEDs adds is the possibility of making light without
anything reaching yad soledes bo, so a lack of havarah doesn't leave you
with bishul. But I don't see how the old bulb was more about combustion than
an LED is.>>

Because people could say well it is probably havarah, and if it is not
havarah it is bishul, and something very similar is described in the Rambam
and other poskim as an issur d'orita.

The problem we have with LEDs is that there is nothing remotely similar
described in the poskim, because nothing like LEDs were known at the time.
While they most likely did heat a gacheles shel mateches in building the
mishkan (so truth is, whether or not it is bishul or havara is an academic
exercise, it is clearly assur), they most certainly did not use LEDs.  RSZA
after debating the whole question of electricity ends up a) falling back on
minhag but b) strengthens this by noting that the vast majority of uses of
electricity was for the purpose of doing a melacha d'orisa - particularly
that of incandescent bulbs and similar. Today I would say that the vast
majority of our uses of electricity is to activate LEDs (not just lights but
screens/phones/computers etc).  We barely have an incandescent or florescent
in the house.  And as you say, you cannot say LEDs are bishul.  If they are
not havara - you end up turning most of what we do not do on Shabbat
increasingly into mere minhag.  Rav Weiss wants to solve with the makeh
b'patish. I understand the driving force here, but find it very difficult to
see this as makeh b'patish - partly because RZSA and others considered this
and rejected it, and partly because, as applied to electricity, the
mechanism is no different to that for flushing a toilet, and I cannot see
how one can assur the one as a melacha d'orita without the other (and the
world is noheg to flush toilets).  And, it seems to me, we can live with
electricity as minhag, as RZSA did, if the ultimate product ie what it
generates, is understood to be an issur d'orisa.  The reality of electricity
is that it is never an end in itself - we use electricity to enable the
production of light or heat or work or whatever - we don't actually have any
use for electrons flowing round circuits in and of themselves.  LEDs in that
sense are much more fundamental, as they are the end product, they are what
we want to achieve. They are our light sources that have replaced candles
and oil lamps and fires.

But one cannot say that LEDs were used in the work to produce the mishkan.
What however it seemed to me we *might* be able to say is that given that
havarah and eish are the one melacha that is specifically mentioned in the
Torah (and yes we have gemarot that explain why there is a need for that),
but maybe one of the reasons for it being specifically chosen to be the one
and only is because there is an aspect of it that was not used to construct
the mishkan and could not be because it is so different to the technology
they had.  But that of course HKBH had the tools to generate and produce
eish in a form similar to LEDs, and one way of showing that was in the
ma'ase of the Sne - with the specific use of the key words to make the link.

>-Micha

Regards

Chana