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Jul. 19th, 2007 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuSo of course there's been all this discussion about how a shomer-Shabbat Jew can obtain HP7 at midnight tomorrow. (Of course, if Michiko Kakutani could find a copy, so could you :-)
Here's my solution (not that it's practical at this point, and I'm not a rabbi so maybe I missed something). Go to a Jewish bookseller who's closed on Shabbat; you pre-order and do a formal kinyan so that halachically the book is yours; you then lend the book to the nice fellow who happens to be a bookseller. Before Shabbat begins the person to whom you've loaned the book brings the sealed carton of books to the local shul, so there'll be no marit ayin, unseals the carton (which may technically violate the Scholastic rules, I'll admit) but places the unsealed carton in a locked box (so the spirit of the Scholastic rules is maintained). The shul has an oneg. Shortly after midnight, the person who has borrowed all these books unlocks the box in which they've been stored and returns them to their rightful owners.
(Edited to Add: And, of course, there are authorities who have no problem with receiving and opening non-business mail that arrives on Shabbat, so an Amazon pre-order would work out fine as long as the box is opened carefully enough to avoid ripping through text but carelessly enough that the box can't be reused.)
Now, having solved the problem (I believe) from the standpoint of the halachic technicalities, I have come to the conclusion that, if your rabbi rules that there's no way to do it, this craving to read the book at 12:01 is not really that different than the craving to eat Chicken Cordon Bleu or the desire to someday compete at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. It's one of those desires that one realizes must go unfulfilled when one accepts the ol hamitzvot.
Here's my solution (not that it's practical at this point, and I'm not a rabbi so maybe I missed something). Go to a Jewish bookseller who's closed on Shabbat; you pre-order and do a formal kinyan so that halachically the book is yours; you then lend the book to the nice fellow who happens to be a bookseller. Before Shabbat begins the person to whom you've loaned the book brings the sealed carton of books to the local shul, so there'll be no marit ayin, unseals the carton (which may technically violate the Scholastic rules, I'll admit) but places the unsealed carton in a locked box (so the spirit of the Scholastic rules is maintained). The shul has an oneg. Shortly after midnight, the person who has borrowed all these books unlocks the box in which they've been stored and returns them to their rightful owners.
(Edited to Add: And, of course, there are authorities who have no problem with receiving and opening non-business mail that arrives on Shabbat, so an Amazon pre-order would work out fine as long as the box is opened carefully enough to avoid ripping through text but carelessly enough that the box can't be reused.)
Now, having solved the problem (I believe) from the standpoint of the halachic technicalities, I have come to the conclusion that, if your rabbi rules that there's no way to do it, this craving to read the book at 12:01 is not really that different than the craving to eat Chicken Cordon Bleu or the desire to someday compete at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. It's one of those desires that one realizes must go unfulfilled when one accepts the ol hamitzvot.