Shabbat lifts? It’s a very long storey - The Jewish Chronicle

Could there be anything else in this world more quintessentially Jewish than the enigmatic wonder that is the Shabbat Elevator?

For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing this invention, or are unfamiliar with this concept, I shall generously explain – despite the fact it will trigger my Shabbat Elevator PTSD. But that’s just the selfless Jewish daughter I am, the secular but dutiful type accompanying her elderly religious parents to hotels for Jewish holidays where Orthodox Jews rely on Shabbat Elevators to get them up to their rooms.

You know how a regular lift works. It’s a piece of machinery that hoists you up or down smoothly and swiftly and, one hopes, without the cables snapping, plummeting you to almost certain death.

You press a button to summon a regular lift. When it arrives the doors open and you step inside and press the button for the floor you want. If others enter the lift, you politely ask which floor they need. When one steps out, you might give a courteous little smile or a “have a lovely day”. All this is regular lift etiquette and I’m fairly sure you’re familiar with it.

But the Shabbat, or Shabbos, Elevator, now that is a whole other kettle of gefilte fish. None of the normal rules of elevator life apply here. The Shabbat Elevator can actually make you want the cables to snap.

At first, the Shabbat Elevator appears to be a regular one. Maybe you yourself have naively entered one from your 20th-storey room to go down to your hotel breakfast. To your consternation, instead of going straight down, the lift stops at every single floor and the doors open for a minute and then close – whether or not there’s any need – and then slowly makes its way to the next floor down. What should take one minute takes aeons and you soon lose the will to live. The Shabbat elevator exists so that you can use it without touching a single button. It will stop at every single floor, even in an 80-storey building.

There were three lifts and eight floors in our last hotel. Only one was set to normal. Crowds in their hundreds clamoured in the lobby at the doors of the elevators. Only a handful of other guests chose to use the regular one. The rest waited for ever to squeeze into the kosher lifts, while I would skip into my private lift like a VIP A-Lister.

My mother persuaded me to go into the Shabbat Elevator with her and it was torture. Ignoring the stipulated maximum capacity, the crowds shoved and elbowed their way inside, oblivious to “health and safety”, the airborne spread of deadly viruses, and any societal etiquette such as not standing with your nose in someone’s ear or armpit.

After one interminable journey to the eighth floor in one of these lifts, my 90-year-old dad refused to enter one again. Instead he took to the stairs. Whenever he wasn’t in the prayer or dining rooms, he was slowly climbing the stairs. Like a mountain climber. Often, when the Shabbat Lift doors would open on some random floor and we waited awkwardly and suffocatingly for the doors to close again, I’d spy my dad’s arms clutching the stair rail and then the rest of him coming breathlessly into view as he hauled himself up.

My mother, finally fed up with the torture of the Shabbat lifts, made the scandalous decision to get into the normal lift with me. As she entered, a religious woman she knew screamed out her name in horror. “Yehudit!!! That’s not the Shabbat Lift!” Caught out, my mother was quite the actress, feigning shock and bewilderment. She pretended to attempt extracting herself from the forbidden lift but so slowly and clumsily the doors closed before she could leave.

Over the holiday, more and more religious people defected to the non-kosher lift. Some sheepishly. Some in defiance. Some, like my mother, pretending not to realise (every single time). Nearly all broken. It broke a lot of people.

The Shabbat Elevator really should come with this sign: “You don’t have to press any buttons – the only buttons pressed will be yours.”

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