To elaborate on another comment: Jewish law is seldom concerned with absolute certainty; it much more often is a question of degrees of doubt. In many cases two disjoint causes for reasonable doubt about facts that would impact the whether a certain action is forbidden are sufficient to render it permitted. When coming from a mindset of mathematical/logical proof, it can seem like "fuzzy logic" or, as you said, innumerate, but in actuality it's typically more like a hypothesis and the body of evidence that supports it (and depending on the specific hypothesis, a higher or lower degree of certainty may be considered sufficient).
>You have three pieces of meat, two kosher, one not. You lose track of which is which. Can you eat them? Answer, according to (my memory of Sternberg’s account of) the Talmud: Each individual piece of meat has a 2/3 chance of being kosher. So if you choose one of them and ask “Is this kosher?”, a “yes” answer gives you a 2/3 chance to be right and a “no” answer gives you only a 1/3 chance to be right. A 2/3 chance is better than a 1/3 chance, so you should say yes. Repeat three times and you’re allowed to eat all of the meat.
>There is much that is troubling here, because that strategy actually gives you a 100% chance of eating a non-kosher piece of meat, so it matters whether you inquire about each piece separately or whether you inquire about all three as a group. I’m not sure what principle the Talmud invokes to settle that issue. But that’s not the point that concerns us here. The point here is that we’re instructed to focus strictly on probabilities, without regard to any measure of how bad it would be to be wrong in either direction.
>You’re traveling to town with a left pocket full of coins designated for charity and a right pocket full of coins designated for your personal expenses. (In certain circumstances, you’re required to designate these coins in advance, and cannot substitute a coin from one pocket for a coin from the other, even if they’re otherwise identical.) You fall off your horse, and the coins all spill out into one great heap.
>If there were more coins in your left pocket to begin with, then each individual coin has a greater-than-fifty-percent chance to be a charity coin, so each individual coin must be given to charity. If there were more in your right pocket, you can spend all the coins on yourself.
>You take in an abandoned child. Should you raise him as a Jew? It depends on whether he was born as a Jew. Suppose you don’t have that information. Answer: If the majority of your neighbors are Jewish, you assume he’s Jewish. If not, not.
>(A later commentary amends this prescription by directing your attention not to the majority of your neighbors but to a majority of those neighbors who are of such character that they would abandon a child.)
So I could start a Kosher meat factory that mixed in non Kosher patties 49.999% of the time and then all the meat would be Kosher? Sounds like a great way to launder my non-Kosher meat!
for the record, no, it can't be done purposefully. i.e. all students of jewish law no inherently the concepts of a priori and posteriori. i.e. many things are prohibited a priori (i.e. to purposefully do), but would be permitted posteriori.
A simple example example is one can't mix milk and meat at all apriori. But if accidentally mixed a small amount of milk into a meat dish (example: one wasn't thinking and took a spoon directly from a milk pot directly into a meat dish), it would be permitted posteriori. But that's only because the act wasn't intentional.
Outside of Israel, there are enough people of non-Jewish faith to be able to arrange labor schedules around individual needs. I work in a diverse company with a number of co-workers who observe Sabbath, and it has never been any hardship to arrange on-call schedules so they will never be paged on their day of rest.
on the flips side, observant jews in tech companies sometimes struggle with this in Israel, as the on call people who take over for them will still be jews. Even if said jew doesn't mind not observing the sabbath, the observant jew doesn't want them to do it on their behalf (so to speak).
It's about the degree of certainty. OP isn't doing the work directly and hasn't hired them to specifically do it. They might not. They also are probably not Jewish. Two doubts and it's not a violation of a d'Rabbanan prohibition. (Note I am not orthodox nor a rabbi so this explanation may be mangled).
Compared to secular best practices, here we're working with different logic and different epistemology, among other things. A religious worldview not just about agreeing to this or that proposition.
