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:

243:1 - Drilling for Oil on Shabbat #2 - My Letter to Machon Tzomet

In light of the issues we began discussing here I sent a letter to Machon Tzomet yesterday outlining my questions. I am posting a copy of the letter here:

They responded with a brief note telling me that the letter would be passed to Rav Rozen's desk for further review and follow-up.

Cool.

243:1 - Drilling for Oil on Shabbat

We've previously discussed some of the halachot pertaining to keeping a business running on Shabbat (See here). We mentioned that a central criterion for allowing/disallowing a business to run on Shabbat is the chance that people will get the wrong impression and suspect the Jewish business owner of wrong-doing (a.k.a. "mar'it ayin").

If the business is known to belong to Yossle and it is located in the heart of the Jewish community, it may not remain open on Shabbat no matter how many kosher arrangements are made previously with the non-Jewish workers or partners since we assume other members of the community will misunderstand when they see activity on Shabbat afternoon.

From my cursory review of these halachot it seems that the only ways to avoid running into this problem is to make sure your business is situated well outside the confines of the Jewish community or alternatively to make sure that no one knows it's a Jewish-owned business in the first place.

Theoretically though, there seems to be another solution. What if everyone knew that it was a Jewish business and it was situated in a Jewish area, but you had a way to make sure everyone knew that your business was being run in a permitted manner on Shabbat? It seems that if you could somehow avoid the possibility of such a misunderstanding through publicity and ensure that everyone in the community was on the same page then this concern would fall away.

This brings me to a real-world example I saw in the news today. Givot Olam is an Israeli gas and oil exploration firm. They are currently in the process of drilling for oil in the Megged 5 oil well near Rosh Ha'ayin in Israel.

An article in last week's news publicized the company's announcement that the drilling would continue on Shabbat - without violating a single melacha.

Together with Machon Tzomet, the company has come up with a way to automate the drilling process on Shabbat with the use of timers and other technologies, making human intervention for those 24 hours a week unnecessary.

While I am sure the experts at Machon Tzomet have their bases covered, I am still curious as to how they deal with the issue of mar'it ayin discussed by the poskim. Granted, no melachot are violated with the arrangement outlined in the article, but it would seem that there is still a big chance for mar'it ayin. After all, it is a Jewish-owned well that is operating in Israel on Shabbat...

My first thought was that this is the reason for including the media in the first place - maybe the publicity itself is their solution to the mar'it ayin. If everyone knows what's really going on, there is no chance for misunderstanding. In practice though, this does not seem like a fool-proof solution to the problem and it is likely that most of the country will not be aware of this.

Not quite sure I know what to make of it. Maybe I'll get in touch with Machon Tzomet to discuss this a little more at length. I'll also try to look into the halacha one more time to make sure I didn't miss anything...