You know how it is when you love two things individually, and then someone comes along and suggests mixing them together, like chocolate and peanut butter, or Scully and Mulder? A light turns on in your head, and you think “Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Where has this been all my life?” Well. When I was a little girl, I loved playing dress-up. Truth to tell, I still do. I also loved camping, and I still love that as well. The day someone from the Society for Creative Anachronism spoke to me and told me I could do both at once, I was hooked, even before I ever attended my first SCA event. Just knowing that I could put on a costume and run around in the woods was a freeing, exhilarating idea. Doing it a couple of years later was even better than imagining it.
It’s been several years now since I attended an SCA tournament, revel, or any other type of event. However, I once made a commitment not to get staid and boring, but to remain an Action/Adventure Jew until I could no longer manage to move from my bed in the old folks’ home. I went on a cruise a few years back, a trip to Paris, innumerable road trips all over the US and Canada, but in none of these adventures have I gone camping, nor have I played dress-up, since college.
Until now.
That’s right, I’m planning it. I can’t just pitch a normal tent any more than I can just serve sandwiches for dinner. That is to say, I suppose I could, but I wouldn’t get nearly as much enjoyment out of it. Even as we speak, the plans are in the works, and I am going to be building a tent of my own. That’s right, I said building. It will be based on a modification of a Mongolian gher (yurt, cloud-house, go look it up). I’m excited to get started, but am taking my time so I can be sure of doing it correctly. I could buy what I want if I was willing and able to spend $2000 to $8000 on the finished product, but instead I’m going to make it myself, exactly the way I want it, and spend only about $600 on materials, tools, and the assistance of a seamstress with an industrial-strength sewing machine.
I also can’t go camping without camping as a Jew. What that means is that, if an SCA event starts Friday at noon and ends Sunday at noon, I’m going to be spending Shabbat camping. The few people to whom I’ve mentioned this plan are highly skeptical. Jews can camp? Jews can camp on Shabbat? To their surprised faces I have always replied the same thing: “Of course we can! Didn’t we spend 40 years camping out in the desert between Egypt and the Holy Land? There were roughly 2,000 Shabbatot during that time. Do you think we ran back to Egypt every Friday at sundown? Do you imagine that we scurried to the cities along the way every single week of that 40 years, rather than face a single Sabbath in our own tents, on our own terms? Camping is one of the most natural things for Jews to do, even — especially — on Shabbat and holidays.”
But that doesn’t mean I, personally, am perfectly assured that I know how to do it. In fact, I’m a bit intimidated by the prospect. Oh, I’m going to do it, but first I’m going to be doing a lot of research and asking a lot of questions. The situations and questions I need to resolve:
1. Carrying. Carrying is forbidden on Shabbat, but an eruv (‘boundary’) creates a “common area” in which it is permitted to carry. Within an eruv, a Jew may carry whatever is essential: house keys, food to be shared with the neighbors, a prayer book, a baby pushed in a carriage, a coat/hat/gloves. Some SCA events are in campsites that have an actual boundary already around them, and can therefore be considered “eruv communities,” making this a non-issue. Others don’t have boundaries, which means that it’s not permitted to pick up anything and carry it anywhere — a spoon moved from a spoon-rest to the pot for stirring, for instance, or a plate of food transported from the folding table outside to the table inside to avoid sudden rain. At an event with no physical boundary delineating the event grounds, I’ll need to learn how to set up my own eruv, at least around my own encampment.
2. Tearing. Tearing is another category of work which is forbidden on Shabbat. I know, you’re thinking “how much tearing does one really do, on a daily basis?” Next time you use the bathroom (pardon the immodesty of having to mention it), try to clean up afterward without tearing off a bit of toilet paper. Yeah, that’s a problem. It’s not so bad if you remember to pre-tear your paper and bring it with you to the port-a-privy that is a fixture at all SCA events (and you can carry it from your tent to the privy, if there’s an eruv), but still, it’s a consideration, especially if there is no eruv.
3. Building. Most of the time this isn’t much of an issue, but what if someone stumbles into your tent wall and the tent falls down? It’s forbidden to re-erect the tent, fix a tent pole that’s been broken, re-lash a slipped guy line, safety-pin a torn seam.
4. Kindling. Lighting a fire before Shabbat and letting it burn is not just permitted, but also very intelligent, especially when the temperature can drop so suddenly during some times of the year. But if your fire goes out — or if a trigger-happy safety marshall sees that it’s unattended and helpfully puts it out for you — you can’t re-light it on Shabbat.
5. Extinguishing. If lives are endangered, one may put out a fire, but one may not put out a fire on the Sabbath unless actual lives are threatened. SCA rules demand that a fire either be attended constantly or put out, and they much prefer it if everyone puts out their fires when most people start heading to bed.
6. Cooking. It is acceptable to cook something before Shabbat and keep it warm at the edge of a fire. It is acceptable to cook a solid (non-liquid) food before Shabbat, move it off to the side (but still on the same surface, such as a plata or blech designed to hold foods for Sabbath), and then move it back onto the warm spot on the same surface in order to reheat it. It is not, however, acceptable to take something from a raw state to a cooked state on Sabbath itself. It is also not acceptable to move something from a cooking surface to a different surface and then back to the cooking surface to reheat it. If everyone in the encampment understands these rules, there’s no problem. If they don’t, someone can render a cooking pot and its contents unfit for Jewish use, meaning that you’ll starve on Shabbat rather than feasting. Also, if the fire goes out, it is forbidden to relight the fire in order to keep the food warm and unspoiled. Food that isn’t kept above 140 Fahrenheit or below 40 Fahrenheit can grow harmful bacteria at an alarming rate, rendering the food unsafe, especially meat products.
7. Muktzeh. This isn’t a category of work, itself, but rather a designation meaning that one must not use it. That is, if an object is used only for one of the 39 categories of labor, you may not handle it on Shabbat, even for a non-work purpose, even to move it aside in order to handle something beneath or beside it that is permitted on Shabbat. If you set a pretty Shabbat table including a tablecloth, and someone spills on the tablecloth at dinner, you’ll want to move the tablecloth and put out a fresh one at breakfast or lunch the next morning. But if your candlesticks are kept on the table, you may not pick them up in order to move them and get the tablecloth out from under the candlesticks, because candlesticks are used for lighting candles or oil for light — kindling a fire, forbidden on Shabbat — and are therefore muktzeh.
8. Laundering. No blotting stains, no wringing moisture. If someone spills food on your best dress (or the tablecloth mentioned above), you can’t soak it in a bucket to lessen the impact of the stain. You can’t wipe up a spill because you may forget and wring out the cloth afterward. If your best friend’s one-year-old baby stands up, flings off his full diaper, and urinates on your bedroll, you can forget about using the bedroll that night, because you can’t wring it out, blot it up, rinse it off. Just move the bedroll and sleep on the cold ground.
9. Scouring/smoothing. No scrubbing baked-on, burnt-on food from your dishes until after Shabbat ends on Saturday night. You can let the dishes soak in (biodegradable) soap and water, but remember not to touch a sponge or rag to them, lest you forget and wring them out afterward.
10. Smearing. I have dry, easily sun-damaged skin. On any other day, I could apply moisturizing body-spray and let that be the end of it, because I spend most of Shabbat indoors at home, synagogue, or friends’ homes. Camping, though, I’m going to be spending a lot more time outdoors. That would normally mean sunscreen, but the only paba-free sunscreen with a high enough Sun Protection Factor (SPF) for me is Coppertone Water Babies SPF 70. That’s not a spray-on, but a smear-on. You guessed it: I can’t use it on Shabbat. Actually, hm, maybe I could, since sun cancer is life-threatening. I’ll have to ask my doctor and then my rabbi, because the principle of pikuach nefesh (preservation of the soul, i.e. within the body) may apply: do what’s necessary to protect life and health. But the rabbi might also say that if I really cared about protecting my life and health, I’d stay home instead of go camping. It’s entirely possible that I may wind up wearing a veil as well as Period clothing that covers the usual (all but face, hands, and feet). Come to think of it, a bourka wouldn’t be entirely out of place for a Jewish Medieval woman who had spent her life in Islamic countries, and it would shade me from sunburn as well as look pretty neat. I may go for that option.
Then there’s the question of bowing, not a concern restricted to the Sabbath at all. In the SCA, typical greetings involve bowing and curtseying, especially when facing the ‘royals’ and ‘nobility’ of the Society — people who have contributed a great deal in the way of learning, service, and so on, and have been recognized for it by being given titles. A Jew isn’t supposed to bow before any deity or monarch. However, in my research when contemplating a trip to Japan to see relatives, I came across a Chabad rabbi who indicated that there was provision for bowing when surrounded by a people/culture who use bowing as a greeting (rather than, say, a handshake or friendly wave) rather than as an indication of subservience. Since the Society for Creative Anachronism is a culture, albeit a new one in terms of world history, one could argue that its rules for behavior would be considered appropriate even for a Jew. That is, everyone knows you’re not worshipping, but only greeting, or acknowledging that a titled person has given greater levels of service than oneself. So in short, I’m not going to try to make a pasuq (a formal ruling, only given by a poseq, a rabbinical authority who is qualified to make such a ruling), but I will say that I’m taking the pasuq that was given to someone else and use that as my example. I’ll dip a curtsey rather than bow from the waist or head, and kneel upright rather than kneel bowing if called upon to do so, so as to subtly differentiate my courtesies from those that are used in worship.
There are other issues of Jewish law as applies to campers/travelers and also to people enacting a theatrical role (which is what this sort of is, I guess), but these are the major ones that Jews have to face when camping over Shabbat or Jewish holidays. I intend to overcome these issues. Meanwhile, if anyone can help me with the ones related to fire and cooking, I’d be grateful. How do you build a fire that will last and keep food warm all during the night and all the next day, so that you can have three hot meals on Shabbat as the Talmudic sages enjoined? What food will be “minimally edible” before sundown Friday, yet won’t be burned to complete inedibility by lunchtime on Saturday? Any help would be very, very appreciated. Please comment.
