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5 Adar II 5765 - March 16, 2005 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Opinion & Comment
Kosher Cell Phones

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.


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