Followup to Sabbath Hard and Go Home
In Talmudic/Rabbinical (also known somewhat misleadingly as "Orthodox") Judaism, the sabbath laws forbid carrying objects across property boundaries, but not through shared communal spaces. The standard workaround is an "eruv," a physical boundary within which a community notionally combines its territorial holdings into a single communal plot on the Sabbath, allowing Sabbath-keeping Jews to bring items such as strollers and housekeys to and from the synagogue.
I am not Shomer Shabbas, because I am not a member of a Talmudic/Rabbinical Jewish community, because their collective intelligence is intentionally incurious about the generators of Enlightenment thought. And, living in highly atomized and digitalized contemporary America, it's hard to maintain a social life for my children without keeping my phone on. I do, however, leave it in the car when I bring the children to the local Conservative-affiliated synagogue. I do this because I can afford to. I can, likewise, afford to go without my phone during other well-bounded intervals when I don't need to coordinate with people who are physically distant.
I think the basic principle that makes an Eruv work, is the same one that motivates me to leave my phone behind when I walk into the synagogue: I'm entering a space with a high density of people who have applied their collective prudence to providing in advance for likely needs during that length of time in that physical space.
Likewise, the boundaries of an Eruv are likely limited to areas walkable to a single synagogue (or, in cases like Pittsburgh, a cluster of mutually walkable synagogues), and contain a high density of people who care about the Eruv and the sabbath and have mutually acceptable standards for Sabbath observance, so that they're jointly motivated to e.g. make social plans in advance of the Sabbath or when they're physically collocated at a conventional meeting place like the Synagogue.
I was better able to observe a Sabbath when I was mostly unattached and not working on anything urgent, and I'd be better able to observe one in community with others.
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"Likewise, the boundaries of an Eruv are likely limited to areas walkable to a single synagogue"
not in Israel, when the Eruv is all the city.
also, why not Orthodox? Conservatives and Reforms have Rabbis too, and read the Talmud too.
In my model, Eruv was from the time when people have community and didn't have phone. when i was a child, i was calling other friends to come to play - physically going to their home and calling their name. the Synagogue was, of course, walking distance, like anything else relevant. you don't need prudence, you coordinate using your voice because that is the only option that exist, for good and for ill.
I found the comparison between the Eruv and leaving the phone behind in synagogue really insightful. It highlights how community and shared expectations create a sense of order, making religious observance more manageable.