Tuesday, July 12, 2011

243:1 - Drilling for Oil on Shabbat #3 - Response from Machon Tzomet

After sending my letter to Machon Tzomet last week, I received a brief response from R' Rozen via email. He basically assured me that there are no non-Jews working in the drilling site on Shabbat and the oil flows totally on its own.

I responded again by stressing that the non-Jewish presence at the site was not the focus of my question and that it was mentioned only to illustrate a possible concern with the current setup.

I have not yet received a second response... 

Two additional updates on this front are actually a tag-team assist from my sister and brother in law (Shira & Chaim). Chaim summarized some very good points for and against the Machon Tzomet solution for oil drilling. I've included his comments at the end of the post. Shira actually attended a shiur from R' Rozen the other day and subsequently spoke to him about the issues we raised. R' Rozen reportedly made 2 interesting comments:
  1. He acknowledged that Machon Tzomet's approach in general is somewhat controversial and has historically been the source of disagreement with other Rabbinic authorities
  2. He confirmed what we suspected in previous posts - the reason for the media coverage was to try and mitigate the possible mar'it ayin factor. This may be a chiddush as we pointed out, but it does seem to make sense.
Chaim's comments are as follows:

1 comment:

  1. Just to add: R' Rozen also said something on the topic of mar'it ayin (I don't remember his exact phrasing): from what I understood he said that mar'it ayin is not really an objective/defined halachic principle in itself - it is dependent on other factors - so he wouldn't really say that Tzomet has a defined "mar'it ayin policy," rather they take the relevant factors of each situation into account.
    Thanks for the double shout-out!

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