The the following obviously isn't universal since people have different approaches to their faith, but I would argue the exact opposite. Many people don't do this because they are dishonest or because they don't care about these laws. They do this because they are honest with themselves and they do care about these laws.

Modern society is now setup in such a way as to often give people a choice between living a modern lifestyle or living strictly by laws written thousands of years ago before this life was possible. If presented with the choice between breaking these law and having that lifestyle, people chose to be honest with themselves and adopt that modern lifestyle. However the laws are so important that they must be maintained even if that maintenance now only exists in a symbolic way. That is how you might get people that maintain these seemingly bizarre workarounds. They are able to live a more normal life while constantly reinforcing and reminding themselves of the importance of their religion.

Some believe that this dedication in pleasing God might be just as if not even more important than following some law written thousands of years ago as strictly as possible.

The core set of rules comes from specific actions that were banned in the ancient Tabernacle on the Sabbath. Electricity use is not banned per se on the Sabbath (as electricity was not discovered several thousand years ago); instead, the core law of "do not fix things on the Sabbath" was ruled to ban completing circuits on the Sabbath once electricity became widespread; similarly, "do not break things on the Sabbath" covers breaking a circuit. The rules only cover actions performed by Jews during the Sabbath; they don't cover actions taken on other days even if those actions result in changes on the Sabbath, so for example setting up a timer to turn lights on or off is permissible as long as you set it up prior to the Sabbath. Ditto for these kinds of elevators.

The Sabbath rules have pretty much nothing to do with environmentalism or energy use.

- "do not fix things on the Sabbath" ban[s] completing circuits

- "do not break things on the Sabbath" covers breaking a circuit

sound extremely convoluted to me. A switch's express purpose is to break and complete circuits to direct current. It is part of the object's usage, part of the creator's intent on the object's utility. It has modes of operation where the circuit is broken and complete by design. The saner interpretation of this law IMO would be along the lines of "if a switch got stuck on a Sabbath, good luck on the energy bill, mate".

I have one of those trash cans with a pedal that opens the lid. It is a switch but none of it is electronic. Are Jews not allowed to operate these contraptions on a Sabbath too? It arguably introduces a break in the object, namely the opening for the trash can. Heck, does Jewish law even allow opening trash cans on a Sabbath, at all? By such broad applicability, the only difference between any lidded trash can (a closed object most of the time) and an electric circuit is the presence/absence of current. Can a Jew unlock padlocks on a Sabbath? What about opening doors?

(FINAL NOTE: HN mostly has charged---pun intended---discussions over things we deem ridiculous. Such discussion is NOT my intent here. I know J. Random Netizen like me isn't going to change Jewish culture in two paragraphs. I just wanted to waste actuations of my mechanical keyboard to register my astonishment and confusion over this interpretation.)

This is an excellent point and is a big reason why a lot of rabbis would not give "building" as an answer. Another answer commonly given is that electricity is like fire (made a lot more sense when "electricity" was 99.9% stuff like starting your car with a spark and incandescent lightbulbs) and lighting a fire is prohibited; this doesn't really hold much water anymore. Another reason given is that there's a rabbinic prohibition on "creating", but that doesn't really work because, like you said, all electric appliances are made to be turned off too. Basically electricity on the sabbath is pretty weak as far as prohibitions go and any explanation you hear for why it's banned will always be post-hoc, and the real reason why it's banned is because rabbis are afraid that letting people use electricity will "destroy the spirit of shabbat" (but they can't actually say that's the only reason because it's not strong enough to prohibit it). In fact, on holidays (like passover and the like) the prohibition becomes much, much weaker (to the point where some poskim say that turning on and off LED lights is permitted, among other things.)

But the proper way to address this question is to ask your rabbi of course. If you're an observant Jew, you have one. If he says it's OK then it's OK, if he says it's not then it's not. Sometimes they disagree, and sometimes the disagreement grows big so some strict people for example only eat food that has the Kosher stamp of a specific authority and not the others, and so on.

Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, a very prominent orthodox Jewish halachist held that closing/opening an electrical circuit does not constitute the biblical prohibition of building and destroying.

Instead, he held that that electricity was prohibited "Rabbinically" for an unrelated reason (which is of a lower degree of severity, which has practical implications).

Notwithstanding this, if one say, turns on an incondescent lightbulb I believe that is biblically prohibited according to all because of the heat it generates.

Most rabbinic authorities still prohibit Sabbath mode ovens on Shabbat for different reasons, but on holidays with weaker restrictions but that still have electricity bans, like Passover, permit their use.

I remember when my parents first got a "Sabbath mode" oven, the local Orthodox rabbi came over excitedly just to see it at work.

But they're explicitly dedicated for times of need and not for leisure purposes.

As a former LDS/Mormon (now effectively humanist/atheist), this concept of authority is pretty interesting. One of our core lessons when I was a missionary was that God's authority was lost from the Earth, and had to be restored by a new line of prophets. Some of my fellow missionaries enjoyed discussing this with messianic Jews in the area, sharing interpretations back and forth.

So in Judaism, are there tiers of rulemaking authority? Could a rabbi override a previous rabbi, but not a prophet?

Instead, they're following these rules as a social decree. In their circles, it is the obvious and accepted thing to do to follow these rules, which the community's leading Rabbi sets (or well, gives guidelines which are socially considered binding). If you don't follow the rules, then you're a weird one, and religious communities tend not to be accepting of the different, so they will shun you for turning on the light on Sabbath (if you keep doing it..)

So for one born into a religious community, you're taught to do so and there is a strong social incentive to do so: if you don't, you're first branded an odd one, and in some cases shunned, depending on how severe your straying off the path is. If you were told that were you to use the elevator normally, your parents would be very upset with you and may stop talking to you altogether, you'd think about it twice, even if you don't personally feel that you want to follow Judaism.

Finally, the religious authorities have a power incentive to do this: by setting rules and maintaining their position as the authorities who set rules, they keep a lot of power over a large number of people. Often this even manifests financially, as a respected religious authority can give Kosher certificates (and many products which are not food, like phones, can also be Kosher) - of course, the certification costs money, just like a SOC2 audit. Same goes for Sabbath certified electric devices - someone gave their stamp of approval, and the developer paid for it.

So to summarize - religious authorities enjoy power and money by being those who set the rules, everyday people have a strong social incentive to follow the rules as breaking them is taboo.

I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it.

But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to.

I'd like to point out that this isn't all there is to it - there are very obviously other incentives to do things this way (e.g. personal belief), but I'm just trying to make an analogy with terms from the HNer's day to day to show why you might follow religious rules even if you're (say) a teenager who doesn't care one bit.

> I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it. But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to.

In general there are a huge swaths of rules in Judaism that are expected even within Orthodox Judaism to serve no practical purpose, other than simply God (supposedly) said to follow them. If you believe that God said you can eat a goose, but you cannot eat a stork, why is it any more ridiculous to believe God said you must not light a fire on Shabbat? It's all kind of silly unless you believe in the fundamental premise that these are rules from God, in which case none of it is silly. In the Orthodox communities I was raised in, the idea of a checkbox that you feel silly complying with didn't really exist: either you believed in the premise that God really wanted you to check those checkboxes, or you didn't, at which point why were you not eating shellfish or driving on Shabbat?

There are social norms too, of course. But at least for religious adults, in my experience it's mostly uncynical.

In the case of the Sabbath elevator, obviously it was not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, so it's what the Rabbi thinks. So why believe the Rabbi when the logic doesn't seem to be 100% there? I think the reason is there is massive social incentive to comply instead of asking questions about such widely accepted ideas.

It does seem you're speaking from more personal experience than mine, so I defer to you, but I'd like to reiterate that I'm just trying to provide a plausible explanation for why one who doesn't have such a strong belief might still end up doing it (the hypothetical person in the post of the poster I was replying to who's asking themselves why a Sabbath elevator makes sense), but I'm not trying to say that's all there is to it. People who don't question it in the first place because their thought process is that the Halacha is telling them what God meant and thus they are merely following God's instructions don't question whether a Shabbat elevator makes sense in the first place.