The months-long effort of gedolei Yisroel led by Maran
HaRav Eliashiv shlita bore fruit last week as an
agreement was signed between the Vaadat Rabbonim LeInyonei
Tikshoret and the MIRS company to supply special cell phones
for the chareidi community. The new phones actually have a
kashrus emblem engraved on their front that indicates that
they are certified.
Befitting an issue that touches the entire community, the
Committee included rabbonim representing every major part.
Without fanfare, the entire community quietly joined the
struggle to protect ourselves from the encroaching tide of
filth.
Our demand was a simple consumer request: we want new phones
that just provide basic phone service. We want voice
communication and nothing more.
At first the cell phone companies claimed that they could not
do what the chareidi community wanted. In retrospect it is
clear that they simply did not want to do it. Now that MIRS
is doing it, others seem to have also discovered the secret.
More likely, it was not a technological breakthrough, but
just that they did not want to forgo the revenues that they
anticipated from selling "content services" in addition to
the basic telephone service. After all, the new revenue from
"content services" is the pot of gold that the cell phone
companies had been promising their investors for some time:
they plan to enter a new stage of growth once they can
provide a new level of service.
This time, boruch Hashem, the chareidi community got
organized and took a stand right at the beginning, before the
new generation of cell phones became an established fact. As
soon as the new "content" began to be distributed, it was
obvious that whatever was not utterly destructive was just
merely bad. It may be that the market will not reward the new
advances in phone technology and they will not last in any
case, but we did not want to participate in the
experiment.
It is clear that success was achieved because the entire
community stood together and refused to allow any marketing
until an acceptable arrangement was made. No small part of
this united stand is the fact that Yated and all of
the other publications directed at the chareidi community
accepted no advertising from any of the cellular operators
for months while a solution was sought. This was a sacrifice
but there were no significant breeches and no real
complaining, since it was a struggle whose importance was
easily understood.
It is also clear that the success is a reflection of the
consumer power of the chareidi community. Although it was not
conducted with the formal tools of the marketplace like a
consumer boycott, it was crucial that access to the chareidi
market was possible only through the Rabbinical Committee.
Without a lot of fuss, the community made it clear that the
Committee must be satisfied before anyone would buy.
There is no way that the issue can be cast as having to do
with progress, technological or otherwise. There is nothing
essentially new in the phones. The new generation is just a
matter of building them with capabilities that already exist
in other instruments, and the motivation is not a consumer
need that anyone has identified, but rather a business need
for higher profits. Nowadays, the easiest path to profits is
through providing soul-destroying content.
All too often, the modern world is proving to be chachomim
lehora — smart people who use their talents
destructively. It is up to us to defend ourselves and to take
only what is truly beneficial — until the day comes
when the whole world is filled with knowledge of Hashem.
