An Uphill Climb for Stamford Hill

While I extended a mazel tov to the residents of Tottenham in Stamford Hill, London upon the establishment of their new eruv, in truth, it was said with great trepidation. As we shall see, whenever limiting excuses are asserted, the simcha is incomplete.

The central halachic issue, reshus harabbim, has been explained away by manufacturing a pretext, namely mechitzos. The argument that Tottenham is encompassed by mechitzos is clearly an excuse. The mechitzos are a metzius and were in existence from the get go. Hence, the only explanation as to why their existence was only acknowledged at this point in time was to allow the opposition to climb down from the tall tree that they erected, the reshus harabbim issue.

So, dear reader, this is the issue. The argument that Tottenham is encompassed by mechitzos is unfortunately going to limit the areas that the London rabbanim would allow to be encompassed by an eruv. I was not going to comment on this matter since I believed that the grassroots support, which was the reason for the establishment of the eruv, would eventually overcome this issue and would force the enlargement of the eruv in the future even without the use of mechitzos.  However, they are making use of the mechitzos argument in their excuse for their objection to the Golders Green eruv and for its planned expansion. Furthermore, the rabbanim in their need to excuse themselves in Stamford Hill keep on harping on the fact that the area is encompassed by mechitzos in order to forestall any action to broaden its borders.

In the past, I ran a series (here) demonstrating that the arguments in the kuntres opposing the Golders Green eruv are totally incorrect. Some have mentioned to me that I had only rebutted the issue of shishim ribo. However, since the majority of the kuntres is regarding shishim ribo, I think that I demonstrated with my rebuttal that the authors did not know the subject. In any case, there are many posts on this blog that demonstrate that the additional issues mentioned in the kuntres such as mefulash u’mechavanim, asu rabbim, and pirtzos esser have not been properly addressed by the authors and contain inaccuracies, both intentional and otherwise.

For an overview of the fundamental reasons to allow an eruv in all large cities, look out for Section One of my rebuttal of The Laws Of An Eruv, which will be posted soon.