Sunday, September 23, 2012

Burn The IPHONE!!!!!!!

No no, I'm not a crazed Android fan, I'm just following Harav Kanievsky's new Psak:


The box reads:

The ruling of Harav Kanievsky Shelita
To BURN the "IPHONE"
In answer to a question posed by a businessman who owns an Iphone
which is crucial for his business, our rabbi instrutcted that:
You may not own it, and he must burn it, and it is forbidden to
Sell it to a non Jew, similar to the instruction forbidding selling a weapon to a non Jew.

Some points of interest -
  •  This was published on the front page, to the left of the title of Yated Ne'eman - a leading Haredi paper.
  • The comparison to selling a weapon to a non Jew is really interesting. You may not sell a weapon to a non Jew, so that they may not use it against Jews. I can only assume that you may not sell the Iphone to a non Jew, as he may sell it to another Jew.
  • "Iphone" is apparently being used as a name for all smart phones. 
  • And amusingly..this was published in The Marker in Israel. Clearly, at least one of  the commentators at the bottom did not understand what a כלי זיין is. (the term is rabbinic Hebrew for weapon, but in modern Hebrew sounds too much like a part of the male anatomy).
***UPDATE

Oneg Shabbat has a great post on this topic, including some other Iphone Chumras. I especially liked this picture:


This is a picture of a reciept with the added text at the bottom - "1944 years since the destruction of the temple, and if you keep using the Iphone you will postpone building it anew".

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