The practice has become so widespread – some say half of Modern Orthodox teens text on Shabbat – that it has developed its own nomenclature – keeping “half Shabbos,” for those who observe all the Shabbat regulations except for texting; “gd Shbs,” is the shorthand text greeting that means good Shabbos.
For Many Orthodox Teens, ‘Half Shabbos’ Is A Way Of Life
Texting on Saturdays seen as increasingly common ‘addiction.’
Steve Lipman • The Jewish Week
At a recent campgrounds Shabbaton sponsored by a local Modern Orthodox high school, the teenage participants broke into small groups after the meals, as is usual, to talk with their friends.
On their cell phones.
Of the 17 students who attended the weekend program, said 17-year-old Julia, a junior at the day school, most sent text messages on Shabbat – a violation of the halachic ban on using electricity in non-emergency situations.
“Only three [of the 17 students] didn’t text on Shabbos,” Julia says. Most did it “out in the open,” sitting at picnic tables. “They weren’t hiding it.”
The students at the Shabbaton were not the exception for their age group. According to interviews with several students and administrators at Modern Orthodox day schools, the practice of texting on Shabbat is becoming increasingly prevalent, especially, but not exclusively, among Modern Orthodox teens.
It’s a literally hot-button issue that teachers and principals at yeshiva day schools, whose academic year ends this week, acknowledge and deal with it in both tacit and oblique ways. For the most part, they extol the virtues of keeping Shabbat rather than chastising those who violate it.
The practice has become so widespread – some say half of Modern Orthodox teens text on Shabbat – that it has developed its own nomenclature – keeping “half Shabbos,” for those who observe all the Shabbat regulations except for texting; “gd Shbs,” is the shorthand text greeting that means good Shabbos.
Not surprisingly, because of texting’s high-tech nature, it is the frequent subject of bloggers and discussion groups on the Internet.
Schools are still looking for ways to deal with the issue, how to recognize the extent of the problem without issuing directives that are likely to be ignored.
Bottom line: The teens who text probably won’t stop.
“It’s a big problem,” says Rabbi Steven Burg, international director of the Orthodox Union’s NCSY youth group. Teens who text on Shabbat are an open secret in their schools and social circles, he says.
“Adults don’t know how common it is,” one student at a local yeshiva day school says. “Everyone is doing it.”…
The Shabbat texters, according to anecdotal evidence, include kids who grew up in less-observant homes as well as students from chasidic or so-called black hat backgrounds.…
The Jewish Week's report goes on to cite an expert, Michelle Friedman, who doesn't see this kids as "at risk," and mentions that some kids think that because a cell phone doesn't use very much electricity, their sin is lower than say, turning on a TV. A kid is quoted who says Shabbat is boring. And the problem is treated as an addiction by Rabbi Burg.
But here's an interesting series of facts that again demonstrates the problems that happen when rabbis use Jewish law to enfore their own ideology:
Telephone usage on Shabbat was originally permitted by some of the world's most important rabbis/poskim. In Lithuania, Belarus, parts of Poland and in Western Europe, telephone usage wasn't seen as a Shabbat problem.
Why?
Because electricity was not seen as fire or as boneh (another Jewish legal category of non-permitted Shabbat work).
Indeed, initially many rabbis were willing to permit full electricity usage on Shabbat.
But there were two exceptions: making light and making heat to cook. These exceptions were done more to be careful, to include the opinions of other rabbis who prohibited electricity all together on Shabbat. The first was seen as being too close to fire when done with incandescant bulbs; the second was seen as leading to actual cooking on Shabbat, which is forbidden in its own right, as opposed to warming pre-cooked food, which is permissible using certain methods.
Until the end of WW2, many hasidic rebbes turned electric lights on and off on Yom Tov, Jewish holidays, seeing electricity as a possible form of fire but viewing that form as a constant flow, meaning turning on an electric light was the same as lighting a candle from an existing flame – something permitted on Jewish holidays but not Shabbat. And some Orthodox synagogues in the US were using microphones on Shabbat and Yom Tov both, because there was no heat generated to cook and no light involved.
But there was a problem wil all of this normalcy – Hungarians.
When rabbis from the communities that followed the Chatam Sofer arrived in America and Western Europe, they rejected many halakhic (Jewish legal) norms of their new communities. They demanded halav yisrael milk (milk watched from the milking process to bottling to prevent non-kosher milk from being added in) even though the normative rabbinic opinion was that halav yisrael milk was not necessary because non-kosher milk was not commercially milk and because the pasteurization process and government regulation both made it functionally impossible to mix pig's milk or camel's milk with cow's milk.
The rejected the rabbis and the customs of their new communities.
And they rejected electricity use on Shabbt or Yom Tov because hadash assur min HaTorah, the aphorism of the Hatam Sofer, a play on a biblical verse: everything new is forbidden by the Torah.
These Hungarian rabbis and their non-Hungarian allies fought a war against electricity usage on Shabbat and Yom Tov. And they won.
In Israel, the Hazon Ish, unable to base his ruling prohibiting electricity usage on Shabbat solely on the fire issue created another issue out of whole cloth. It involves completing an electrical circuit, which the Hazon Is related to building a building, another prohibited Shabbat activity. The Hazon Ish's understanding of electricity was seriously flawed and it does not stand up to scientific fact – something many rabbis admit. But he was the major halakic force in Israel at that time and his ruling became – and remains – law.
One of those non-Hungarian allies was the 6th Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, who as he was was wheeled of his rescue ship from Europe declared that "America is not different," meaning that the halakha and customs of America could not be allowed to stand, just as much as it meant that America would have to become a European shtel, and its Jews ultra-Orthodox.
Eventually, Schneersohn sent his son-in-law, Menacchem Mendel, to various wavering rabbis to explain to these men that electricity wasn't what they thought it was – it was, instead, assur, forbidden to use of Shabbat and Yom Tov. And Mendel Schneerson was believed because he came with a titile that was only half true, and that barely. Mendel Schneerson had been billed by his father-in-law as a famous electrical engineer. Yes, Schneerson had a degree from a Paris technical college in Electrical Engineering. But he had almost flunked out (another son-in-law of the 6th rebbe and classmate of Mendel Schneerson there had flunked out), and he had barely worked in the field.
Mendel Schneerson's spin on electricity does not hold up scientifically, and most major poskim – rabbis who decide difficult halakhic issues – never embraced it as fact.
As Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, the leading posek in Israel a quarter century ago, electricity is not technically prohibited on Shabbat. It does not have the status of a biblically-based or rabbinic prohibition. It's like a custom, but less than a custom. When asked by doctors what should be done with electric medical equipment on Shabbat he invoked the old light/heat for cooking rule.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the leading posek in America at that time, ruled that batteries are not electricity under halakha, a fact that allowed certain medical devices to be used.
But neither rabbi advocated or would allow a return to the correct, pre-WW2 views of electricity.
And now we have texing.
Because a cellphone relies on a battery to run, it isn't electricity according to Moshe Feinstein. And because the light those screens and buttons generate does not come from incandescent bulbs, there is no light generated in a way that would violate the light-making prohibition.
So a cellphone is not in a nd of itself a true Shabbat violation.
But what about texting? Doesn't typing letters violate the Shabbat prohibition of writing?
No, because that prohibition requires two letters to be handwritten, and the writing must be permanent. Writing that has no permanence and that exists only in electric bits that will display when called up is not permanent.
I don't write this to encourage or endorse texting on Shabbat.
I write this to show what rabbis who pursued ideology above truth did to Judaism. They unnecessarily and often dishonestly restricted something that would have made Jews' lives easier – too much easier in these rabbis' view.
And now something has come along that is very addictive, can be done in private or in public almost unnoticed, and 'violates' the restrictive Shabbat these rabbis cheated to obtain – and thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Jews ignore them.
But these Jews for the most part do not know the ins and outs of halakha. They think they are violating Shabbat just like lighting a campfire would violate Shabbat, except maybe, somehow, a little bit less.
That is a situation far more dangerous to Orthodox Judaism in any of its stripes than open endorsement of electricty usage on Shabbat by ultra-Orthodox rabbis ever would have posed.
And that is another example of the law of unintended rabbinically-generated consequences.