The Making of the Kosher Phone (2014)
blog.assafnativ.com
blog.assafnativ.com
An interesting challenge. I imagine the market is large enough to support such a device.
- the term kosher applies directly to food, not technology; this is a metaphor
- the insularity of a particular subgroup of Jews should not be considered to apply to all the rest of us. Even for most Orthodox Jews, turning off your phone Friday evening and turning it back on Saturday evening is a perfectly cromulent option.
[1] Pashkevil from an ultra-orthodox community warning people off the internet and not to use non-kosher phones: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%A8...
> the term kosher applies directly to food, not
> technology; this is a metaphor
Source: דובר עברית
But most of the world is goyim, and an awful lot of people don't know what they're talking about. They hear "kosher phone" and immediately their minds turn to wondering if there are phones that Jews can't use. I have been asked on multiple occasions if I only buy kosher pickles, and once whether it was cultural appropriation for non-Jews to buy kosher salt.
So when someone decides to label a phone as kosher, I think an explanatory note is in order. There are no halachic requirements for phones that don't also apply to lights and fireplaces.
I doubt you meant to use it this way, but that word is seen by many as an offensive slur against non-Jews. It's frequently used in a way that has racist and derogatory undertones. Googling "goyim" returns some colorful results.
I suppose one could use it derogatorily, but that's not my experience.
I assure you that context is everything. When Jews say "Jews", we just mean Jews. And when lots of goyim say "Jews", they mean "sub-human monsters".
Please feel free to censor your own language. And if you see me use "goyim" to be offensive, feel free to call me out on that.
Just so you know I'm not making this up; Merriam-Webster lists "goy" as "sometimes disparaging":
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goy
Use of this word in 2017 got Huffington Post in trouble with the Anti-Defamation League, and others who felt it was over the line:
https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/huffpost-bannon-headlin...
I repeat: feel free to call out people who are being derogatory, no matter what the term. Banning words regardless of context hurts everyone.
I'd also disagree that kosher just means food in plain english. Plenty of non jews are known to say "that's not kosher" (i.e. as in "not right") in things that have nothing to do with food.
The equivalent in Islam is sharia and fiqh.
The equivalent in Catholicism is called canon law.
Interestingly, the opposite of kosher in this mishna is פסול, which I'd translate as "invalid".
Also interesting is the apparent relationship between the word כשר and the modern Hebrew מכשיר, meaning "device", or "thing that does something specific".
Edit: took me another moment to realize the root is used a lot in modern Hebrew, such as in the word כושר (ironically pronounced like the English kosher), which means (physical) fitness.
[0] https://he.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A0%D7%94_%D...
Everyone here is discussing Hebrew and semantics but I see what you did.
They aren't supposed to be using the internet, speaking to people of other genders... sending and receiving multi-media, etc.
It's common to see orthodox jewish doctors who are on call, walk out of a synagouge while praying to take a call. Or for emergency medics to have a walkie talkie that they can be buzzed on if they have to go to an emergency call.
We could get into a discussion about the details of what that means and how a society can function when people would die if certain things aren't taken care of (say maintaining the electrical grid), but that's beyond the scope of this forum. At the most simplistic level, I'd equate it to round the world tech support. We don't need people in one place being able to stay up 24/7 to provide 24/7 support, we can have people located in many different parts of the world handing off the baton as planet rotates. So the same would be true for the sabbath observant techie on call. Most likely its possible for someone else to do it. Of course, this is more complicated in Israel (than say in the US) where the person doing the call will more likely be jewish, but again, that's getting into the weeds and beyond the scope of this forum. In the US, you'd probably see orthodox jewish tech coworkers doing sat night/sunday calls but not friday night/saturday calls for weekend calls.
Large scale consumer technology has a lot of central planning in it, by nature of how specialised the skills required to produce many aspects of it are.
But central planning has its tail risks and other downsides as history attests.
I'm curious about how communities can be better empowered to make these choices for themselves, be it how moderation is done on social media, or what features are prioritised in consumer electronics.
The problem is that _my_ two important features are different from _your_ two important features. Almost by definition, no reduced feature phone would be fit for a large audience, unless that large audience has a single common denominator. Like with this Kosher Phone and it's religious target demographic.
We're still a long way from there RE smartphones, though projects like the PinePhone with hardware switches for things like microphone, camera, WiFi etc, along with a less locked down OS perhaps show a path to achieving this.
I remember helping a family member still in the community, but after I had left, using an email-as-the-browser service to get around the kosher phone some time back (not sure if this is still possible with the current kosher phone version). I realized something like that must exist so I found https://www.labnol.org/internet/receive-web-pages-by-email/1... for them. But that service doesn't seem to work anymore.
A different family member works on the opposite side, people call him to whitelist websites from their kosher filtering software so they can visit it. He has to check it out and then allows it if it is ok. But having these filters is a requirement for having a PC.
The Christian god wants people to behave in a certain way, and has made laws accordingly. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is defying god, and is bad.
The Jewish god has made laws as a test of faith. Following the letter of the law but not the spirit is creative, and is fine.
After all, "it is not in heaven": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai
But I fail to see how this is relevant to kosher phones. How is God being tricked? The claim is that God desires purity, which is damaged by unfiltered exposure to the outside world, and so adherents who want cell phones must purchase models that will not give them easy access to temptation.
It's a pretty reasonable position if you accept the initial premise. It's like not buying heroin because you know it's harmful.
They have a severe lack of information which brings them to rely upon their leaders (rabbis) for every single piece of advice, even not pertaining to their religious needs directly.
AMA
If by "them" you mean religious community as a whole, this statement is true.
If by "them" you mean actual users, this statement is a lie
This kind of devices are forced on users by community leaders as a method of limiting access to independent information.
Secular society is battling many problems (tech addiction, isolation, burnout, collapse of community etc) which religious society is protected from because of these superficially backwards practices.
As we watch our society grapple with issues that the religious community doesn't suffer from, won't at some point it make sense to question whether we are the rational ones?
To make this point another way, the more people on HN learn about the issues of tech addiction, lack of privacy etc, the more their technological preference "converges" to what you are currently making fun of.
I actually really enjoy this kind of discourse and happy to connect in some direct way if you are interested. But here's one train of thought.
A rabbi and an atheist are debating whether there is a creator. The atheist says "there isn't. The universe just randomly happened to be."
The rabbi asks if the man reads the NY times and the man says yes. The rabbi says "you know how that got printed, right? In the morning, a paper truck collided with an ink truck and it just happened to come out as the times". The man says there's no way that happened, the NY times is too complex to come out as an outcome of the accident. The rabbi replies: if the times is too complex to occur randomly, how much less likely that the universe, which is infinitely more complex "just happened" to be.
That's just the flavor of the ideas. An animal does not contemplate the origin of the world, neither does a simple man. A lightly educated man can be told that the universe just is, and can accept that. A deeply questioning man is not satisfied with that explanation.
If you are genuinely interested, you can look into Jewish views on science and how much of what for a long time seemed like fairy tales in religion is actually aligned with scientific thought.
Eg on the topic of creation. Science did not know until the 20th century that the universe did not exist one moment and existed the next (the big bang) but religion knew it all along. In fact big bang was first theorized by a Catholic priest. That doesn't prove the existence of G-d as that's a matter of faith, but it speaks to the intellectual rigor of advanced religious thought.
The real hard question we each need to answer is to determine which really dumb things we believe despite our intelligence.
PS Isaac Newton spent a large portion of his life on alchemy and the hidden mysterious of the Bible. We all have blind spots, we just don't know they're there.