On Shabbat it is forbidden to pour water on to the ground because this would be part of work that is associated with growing crops.
When camping over Shabbat you can make a washing station where you pour water over rocks and not directly onto the ground. This is fine on Shabbat.
Here are pictures of two water stations we made.
One Response to “Washing Over Rocks on Shabbat”
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For our Camp Outs, we bring a spare large trash can for used water. We usually wash over this so the water isn’t on the ground, and we dump our dish washing water in there as well. Then after Shabbat, we dump the water, preferably into a stream/canal. Of course, if dumping dish washing liquid, it’s important to use a biodegradable “soap” to avoid flooding the ecosystem with nitrates, those the reality is that we use sparingly on Shabbat so little its not that big a deal.
The pictures are no longer up, but I’ll bring up the idea of the rocks before our next camp out to avoid needing to maintain so much water, we could have a designated dump station with rocks.