Q&A: Outsmarting the Fools
Outsmarting the Fools
Question
Hello Rabbi,
A report reached my ears that some shofar blowers are planning to intend not to fulfill the obligation for people who own a smartphone. Now one of my acquaintances suggested declaring the smartphone ownerless before Rosh Hashanah and reacquiring it afterward, and that way to fulfill the obligation out of concern that those fools will carry out their threat. The question is whether the ownerless declaration is valid as long as the phone is inside the house and it is impossible for a stranger to acquire it?
Answer
An amusing question. A few comments that occurred to me off the cuff.
- I don’t think this would help, because the blower intends not to fulfill the obligation for someone who uses a smartphone regardless of the formal ownership. On the holiday nobody uses it anyway.
- If he is such a fool or wicked person, it is doubtful whether he can fulfill anyone’s obligation at all through the shofar blowing.
- If he adopts such a policy on his own, he is not carrying out his mission as the congregation’s agent unless the congregation itself established this as a rule. And if he is not their agent, then again it is doubtful whether he fulfills anyone’s obligation. An agent who deviated from his mission. True, one could analyze whether “hearing is like responding” works without agency, but this is not the place.
- As for your question, of course the ownerless declaration is valid, since you declared it ownerless and intended not to reacquire it automatically through your courtyard. So it is ownerless. Are Sabbatical-year fruits not ownerless when you did not declare the field and the path to them ownerless? Of course they are.
Bottom line, if there really is such an intention, it is proper for the congregation to check very carefully whether their shofar blower is such a person, because if this is his policy it may be that they are not fulfilling their obligation.
Discussion on Answer
Obviously. But the question was on the side that the intent of the one causing others to hear is indeed required.
One should consider, according to the view that “there is no retroactive clarification,” whether he fulfills the obligation even for those who do not have a smartphone, since he does not know whom he is fulfilling it for! You’d have to search this on Google 🙂
In any case, someone who has a smartphone can find an online course for learning how to blow the shofar, and blow it himself. Maybe he can get a cheap shofar online 🙂
Submitted as a public service by the “Shofar Market” network, with the blessing: “May the words of our lips on the web be pleasing before You.”
This is not always a case of the shofar blower deciding on his own; many times the community rabbi decides this.
For example, the Vizhnitz Rebbe announced in the past in advance that he does not fulfill the obligation for smartphone users, and this is a congregation of thousands of worshippers.
It seemed to me that one could suggest an innovation here: he does not even need to declare it ownerless.
As Maimonides writes (in detail in Pe’er HaDor, no. 51), and likewise the Tur and Shulchan Arukh in the laws of shofar blowing, the commandment is to hear and not to blow. This is evident from the case of one who blows into a pit: if what he hears is the sound of the pit, he has not fulfilled his obligation. For if the commandment were to blow, why would he not fulfill it? Though one could push this aside, and this is not the place. If so, the listener fulfills the obligation by his own act of hearing, and not by the rule of “hearing is like responding,” with the blower fulfilling the listener’s obligation for him. However, certainly there must be the sound of a commandment-fulfilling shofar; there must be an object of commandment and not just any sound, as the Hazon Ish discussed at length (Orach Chayim 29:4). Therefore, among other things, the intent of both blower and listener is required. And if the blower intends to fulfill the obligation only for certain people, and not for everyone who hears, it still seems that this counts as the sound of a commandment-fulfilling shofar. It does not seem reasonable to distinguish and say that for So-and-so it is the sound/object of a commandment and for someone else it is not. Therefore in such a case the others too fulfill their obligation, even though the blower did not have them in mind.
Does the Rabbi agree?