Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house.
Prayer shawls, prayer books, bottles of wine, platters of food and, perhaps most important, strollers with children in them — Orthodox Jews can haul or tote such items within the eruv. When a section of an eruv is knocked down by, let’s say, a big snowstorm, then the alerts go out by Internet and robocall, and human behavior changes dramatically.
So if the eruv blows down, then little kids can't carry tissues with them on the walk to the shul [synagogue], for instance, on Shabbat—the problem, you see, is not the tissues (or any other object), but rather the act of carrying or transporting an object from one place to another on the Sabbath. If, however, you put a boundary—an eruv—around a home or a community, then you can move something from place to place within that boundary.
The damage to eruvim this winter evokes another kind of convergence, as well. It draws attention to the concept of the eruv itself, a combination of religious obligation, historical phenomenon and what academics call a social construction. In more than one way, an eruv is a through line.
The walls of European Jewish ghettos in olden times once served as eruvim, but when Jews were finally permitted to live elsewhere, then other boundaries were selected (a river, for instance), and then also erected (making eruvin, which Wikipedia says is the correct plural of eruv—the NYT writer used eruvim, but as I am not qualified to know the reasons why it should be eruvin instead of eruvim, I will assume the Wikipedia version is correct).
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