Wow. That's pedantic.

It strikes me that if you're deriving whether an action is safe for your religion based on a technicality like "a signal light turns on", then either:

1. Your religion needs to lighten up a bit. I doubt any deity cares about small technical details like that.

or

2. You're in violation of rules anyway. The intent is still there, so even if you're using a loophole, there's no practical difference between those two actions. Both you and whatever deity know you're committing an offense.

There are religious scholars in Judaism who deal with these issues -- you aren't the first to question it and your concerns are enumerated and addressed thoroughly.

The Jewish belief is explicitly contrary to that: whether you obey the letter of the rule is what matters, not the intention of it, and this is as God wills it.

I don’t think there are many Orthodox Jews out there who haven’t heard some variation of those two points countless times in their lives. I think your apparent belief that there’s any amount of novelty in what you wrote is actually a lot more telling here.

This whole discussion strikes me as pure insanity.