Shomer Negiah again
Jul. 29th, 2010 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
We moved into our new house today. By coincidence, the geographic area that met our location requirements (walking distance to the park, the grocery store, the library, major bus routes) is coterminous with the area that is walking distance to Squirrel Hill's various Orthodox synagogues, so we seem to have become the token Gentiles on the block.
There's something kind of funny to me about leaving a land of modestly dressed women and men who won't shake my hand, only to move into a neighborhood full of modestly dressed women and men who won't shake my hand.
Today's interesting cultural interaction occurred when our movers, who are Israeli, arrived at the new house. Bringing in the first load of boxes, one of them noticed the mezuzah on our front doorway and said, "Oh! You're Jewish?"
"No," I said, "The former owners left that there."
The next time I walked through the doorway, I noticed the mezuzah was gone.
I was somewhat relieved, since I didn't know what I was supposed to do with it -- I think it's supposed to be buried, like an old Torah, but I wasn't sure.
However, then the former owners called to say they'd come by to collect their mezuzot today. So, awkwardly, we had to ask the mover if he'd taken it. He replied that it was obligatory to remove the mezuzah if the new houseowners weren't Jewish, and did not offer to give it back to us. So, I hope the former owners were just coming by to make sure the mezuzot were correctly disposed of, and not because they had any particular sentimental value!
There's something kind of funny to me about leaving a land of modestly dressed women and men who won't shake my hand, only to move into a neighborhood full of modestly dressed women and men who won't shake my hand.
Today's interesting cultural interaction occurred when our movers, who are Israeli, arrived at the new house. Bringing in the first load of boxes, one of them noticed the mezuzah on our front doorway and said, "Oh! You're Jewish?"
"No," I said, "The former owners left that there."
The next time I walked through the doorway, I noticed the mezuzah was gone.
I was somewhat relieved, since I didn't know what I was supposed to do with it -- I think it's supposed to be buried, like an old Torah, but I wasn't sure.
However, then the former owners called to say they'd come by to collect their mezuzot today. So, awkwardly, we had to ask the mover if he'd taken it. He replied that it was obligatory to remove the mezuzah if the new houseowners weren't Jewish, and did not offer to give it back to us. So, I hope the former owners were just coming by to make sure the mezuzot were correctly disposed of, and not because they had any particular sentimental value!
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Date: 2010-07-30 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-30 11:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-30 11:44 am (UTC)- I'm sorry, our religion prohibits you sitting on this special chair
- But I'm sorry, I tend to prohibit people taking things out of my house without asking me first
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Date: 2010-07-30 11:52 am (UTC)On the other hand, I think the mover understood what happened, which I didn't at the time: when they vacated the house, the house sellers didn't yet know whether we were Jewish, and if we had been, apparently the right thing to do would have been for for them to leave their mezuzot in place until we'd had a chance to put OUR mezuzot up. So it definitely wasn't like a chair or something; he knew it had been left there for a specific purpose, and that purpose turned out not to obtain in this situation.
The weirder part for me is that he obviously didn't trust us not to desecrate it in the 12 hours before the former owners showed up to reclaim it. Or else he didn't trust them to actually show up, I guess.
I refrained from telling him that I grew up in a non-Jewish household with a mezuzah on the door. I don't think he would have approved. :-p
(I also refrained from telling him he missed the one on the cellar door.)
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Date: 2010-07-30 11:59 am (UTC)I did think of the fact that, because of what you said, it was quite a reasonable likelihood that the next family to move into a house in that neighborhood would be jewish --- but then again, I would expect the leaving family to determine this, and then decide whether to leave the mezuzah or not.
Maybe, like you said, there exist families that aren't Jewish, but want to keep mezuzot arond for some reason anyway. It sounds like you're possibly "not allowed" to do this, but that's verging on really legal-philosophically uncomfortable. It reminds me very directly of Peter Suber's comments:
(from http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm)
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Date: 2010-07-30 05:49 pm (UTC)See http://gustavolacerda.livejournal.com/413306.html
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Date: 2010-07-30 09:16 pm (UTC)I have learned that they are still keen to give me Latkes and Dreidls but won't give me Tefillin. Some of my Orthodox friends won't give me Chometz and others are eager to give it to me. Hooray for confusion!
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Date: 2010-07-30 05:55 pm (UTC)But I find this very weird and somewhat imposing.
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Date: 2010-07-30 06:00 pm (UTC)In the end, the sellers came over today for their mezuzot and were quite content that the movers did what they did, so it all works out OK.
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Date: 2010-07-30 06:09 pm (UTC)In sort of parallel terms (and this is going to sound really dorky) there's a bit in the seventh Harry Potter book, which I just re-read, in which it is explained that goblins consider everything goblin-made to fundamentally belong to them. Humans that "buy" goblin-made items are just renting them until the death of that human, and goblins consider it criminal that humans will such items to their kin (and therefore, the vast majority of human-owned goblin-made artifacts are "stolen" -- this, of course, generates a certain amount of plot, since many of the important artifacts in the story are goblin-made).
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Date: 2010-07-30 06:17 pm (UTC)Then again, of course if this actually happened to me I would totally be like "oh ok sure have it" since I have no use for a mezuzah.
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Date: 2010-07-30 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 02:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 06:35 am (UTC)