Shabbat 122: What Gentiles Can Do For Jews on Shabbat

Chairs and wine transported by wagons belonging to Gentiles is permitted as well.  The rabbis disagree about whether one seal on the wine is enough to protect that wine from ritual impurity.

A new Mishna teaches that if a Gentile kindled a lamp on Shabbat for his own purposes, a Jew also uses its light, and if the Gentile kindled it for a Jew, the Sages did not allow us to use the light.  If a Gentile drew water from a well in the public domain for his animal to drink, a Jew gives his own animal to drink after him from that water, and the water was drawn for the benefit of the Jew, it is. prohibited for the Jew's animal to drink that water.  If a Gentile makes a ramp on Shabbat to get off of a ship and a Jew disembarks after him and he made a ramp for a Jew, it is prohibited.  Once Rabban Gamliel and the Elders were traveling on a ship and a Gentile made a ramp on Shabbat to disembark and these scholars used the ramp to get off of the ship as well.

The Gemara asks why we teach these similar examples.  The answer is that a light can be used for one hundred people but a Gentile will increase the amount of water that is drawn to share with a Jew.  Why does the Mishna mention the ramp as well?  It taught us to demonstrate that this was the ruling in practice.  Similar examples are shared regarding a Gentile collecting grass.  Heated water is similar, because it is heated for the majority of the city's residents.  

We begin Perek XVI with a new Mishna: All vessels may be moved on Shabbat and their doors, even if they were dismantled on Shabbat.  We cannot use the doors of a house on Shabbat because they are not prepared from before Shabbat.  Similarly we cannot move a mallet, used for prohibited labour, to crack nuts.  We are permitted to use an axe, usually used to chop wood, to cut a cake of figs and we may move a saw to cut cheese.  We may also move a spade to scoop dried figs.  We can move a winnowing shovel and a pitchfork to place food on it for a child.  We can take a reed or a shuttle from a spindle to use it like a fork.  We can move an ordinary hand needle to extract a thorn with it and a sack maker's needle to open the door with it.

The Gemara emphasizes that we are permitted to move vessels and their parts on Shabbat.  We may not be able to restore them to their original places, though.  A chicken coop is attached to the ground and we are prohibited from dismantling on the ground.  We cannot build or dismantle regarding vessels, and so perhaps we are not to fix them firmly in place, which is strictly prohibited.