opinion
The Torah Supports Me
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
id-work / DigitalVision Vectors
F or years I worked in an office where, in order
to make an outside phone call, you had to dial
9 plus 1 plus your number. At least once a week,
the police would show up in the lobby because
someone had accidentally dialed 9-1-1. The head of
HR would scold us for not being more careful, and I
would think, just change the system!
In Jewish law, there is a name for rules or
actions that would tempt even the innocent to
make a mistake — or worse, a sin: “lifnei iver.”
It comes from Leviticus 19:14: “You shall not …
place a stumbling block before the blind.” Beyond
its literal meaning, the verse has been used to
establish the principle that you should remove
temptation from the path of those who may be
morally weak.

This became a thing in my house recently, when
my wife asked if I could be more careful when
opening our kitchen cabinets. The cabinets are
off-white, and I was leaving smudges. I replied —
with admirable honesty, I thought — that I couldn’t
break a lifetime habit of the way I reach for a cab-
inet handle, and if I said I would try I would proba-
bly be lying. Smudges, I said, are the price we pay
for beige cabinets and dainty handles. Blame the
design, not me.

What ensued was what diplomats call a frank
and honest discussion.

Convinced I was right, I sought an outside voice:
“Judge” John Hodgman, the comedian who writes
a satiric ethical advice column for The New York
Times Magazine. I explained our impasse in an
email, and Hodgman replied in the May 20 issue:
“Seen from 10,000 feet, I would agree that your
wife’s request is unreasonable. That said, from
10,000 feet, I can’t see your disgusting hands. I
can’t see what kind of muck you get into, or what
kind of smears you’re leaving as you blindly paw
at the cabinet face until you hit the handle. (Maybe
you can’t, either. Spouses often see cleanliness
differently depending on how they grew up, and
some are just dirt-blind.) Even if your hands are
clean of all sin, don’t meet one marital crime with
another. Don’t lie and promise to try. Just promise
to try, and tell the truth.”
The comments that followed were not friendly
to my cause, to put it mildly. One reader com-
pared me to Tarzan. Another urged me to be a
“grown-up.” But my favorite response came from a self-de-
scribed architect and former interior designer,
who I felt got closest to my original point, writing,
“If your home’s aesthetic is so fragile that it’s
ruined by normal daily use it’s a serious design
flaw. Everyone living in a home should feel at ease
interacting with their environment, and everyone
has different sensitivities and habits. The design
should support them all.”
In other words, home design shouldn’t be a
stumbling block before a guy with Tarzan hands.

The urban planner Jane Jacobs advocated this
sort of user-first architecture, writing, “There is
no logic that can be superimposed on the city;
people make it, and it is to them … that we must fit
our plans.” For example, if you want to keep mail
from piling up on the dining room table, you need
another little table closer to the front door (another
recurring argument from what is, astoundingly, my
first and still extant marriage).

Probably the best-known demonstration of
user-first design comes from so-called “desire
lines”: the footpaths created by people who
ignore the actual sidewalks around a building or
park and create their own routes of least resis-
tance. The smart planner pays attention to the
routes people actually want to take, and then
pours the concrete.

A close cousin of this approach is behavioral
design, which tries to influence the way people
use spaces and objects. Good behavioral design
might, for instance, put a hand sanitizer right near
the place where you are likely to pick up or spread
germs. Or, in the case of my kitchen cabinets, it
would make the handles big enough or inviting
enough that my chances of smudging the doors
is minimized.

I obsess about this topic not only because
I want to win the argument with my wife, but
because I think “lifnei iver” has important public
policy implications. As Jacobs understood, good,
intuitive design can turn private and public spaces
into friendlier, safer places by putting users first.

For decades public housing was a disaster in
part because designers ignored the ways people
actually congregated, relaxed and kept an eye
on each other. My son the engineer helps design
hospital equipment intended to keep tired, over-
worked doctors and nurses from pushing the
wrong buttons or forgetting a crucial step.

On the flip side, sinister behavioral design might
coerce someone into, say, racking up debts on an
addictive gambling app, or hooking kids on vap-
ing, as the Food and Drug Administration argued
in ordering Juul to remove its e-cigarettes from
the U.S. marketplace.

The latter is exactly the scenario that “lifnei iver”
proscribes: setting a vulnerable person up for fail-
ure. In an article for Chabad.org, Yehuda Shurpin
discusses the possibilities — and dilemmas — of
applying lifnei iver to the current debate over gun
safety. On the one hand, he writes, “The Talmud
tells us that one is forbidden to sell dangerous
items — including weapons, or anything com-
monly used to manufacture weapons, as well as
their accessories — to any person who may have
the intent to use them to cause harm or perpetrate
a crime.”
On the other hand, the law is understandably
complex when it comes to determining how to
anticipate that “intent” — and under what circum-
stances the seller is culpable. And yet, the tradi-
tion understands that the idea that “guns don’t
kill, people do” is specious: “We do not want peo-
ple getting hurt or dying,” writes Shurpin. “And
restricting evil-doers’ access to materials that
make this possible is an obvious course of action.”
Whether we are talking about gun control,
office phones or kitchen design, the principle is
the same: People are inherently clumsy and fal-
lible, and relying on their best intentions to solve
a problem is a recipe for failure. Sometimes you
have to ban the dangerous tool — or change the
number from 9 to, well, any. other. number.

Ultimately, I didn’t consult a rabbi to solve my
kitchen dilemma. But I did answer to a higher
authority: It’s now my job to clean the cabinets. JE
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 13