In 2013, as two Fellows at New York University, we embarked on an “eruv tour” of Manhattan. Created through almost invisible strings attached to poles that envelope part of the city, this imaginary enclosure serves to delineate a religious space in which it is permissible to carry out the Jewish Sabbath.
Today, we contemplate this almost invisible boundary running down Sixth Avenue with new appreciation of the insights it may yet bring to our current predicament as a pandemic of unprecedented proportions forces us to reinvent our common space, the boundaries which define it and the ways we can and should interact within it.
The eruv was introduced in Roman Palestine around 50AD for a Jewish community where many of the daily activities were performed in the shared courtyard, which was deemed a public space. To overcome the prohibition to carry objects in such public spaces during the Sabbath, an “eruv” was created in order to enclose these commons and join the inhabitants in an imaginary private space.
