If you’re Orthodox Jewish, you can’t work or do physical labor outside your home on the Sabbath. But because this is a rather inconvenient tradition, a solution allows for several city blocks to be enclosed by chain link fence or fishing wire strung between lamp posts to create a symbolic extension of the home into the public domain. To non-believers this practice may seem like the Orthodox Jewish version of avoiding cooties infection by miming an aerosol can and saying “I’m sprayed,” but to those in the community it is enough to keep them from moving away in mass numbers, as they have from Venice, CA, in recent years. Therefore, a proposal was made to use fishing line to turn a large area of Venice Beach in one of these symbolic enclosures.
The problem: California law calls for the protection of public views along the coast and the habitats of nesting shore birds. Some fear that endangered California least terns that nest nearby will fly into the fishing line and get killed. Others say that the galvanized steel poles that will be erected to hold up the fishing line along the beach will be an eyesore.
In particular, the project has caused a great deal of strife for the local Orthodox Jewish community of nesting least terns, who are torn between their religious beliefs and their desire not to be sliced in half while flying on the beach.
Past religious traditions have created similar environmental controversies, most notably the Buddhist practice of “bodhinasta,” which is mountaintop coal-mine blasting to attain prajna, or Enlightenment, and the Protestant-Christian tradition of clubbing seals to death on Palm Sunday.
Jewish Symbolic Wall Raises Environmental Concerns (AP)