Q&A: Beeping and beeping and beeping until he breathed his last
Beeping and beeping and beeping until he breathed his last
Question
A question: in a certain town, someone put a barrier on a parking space so that only he could park there. It may really be more connected to him because it’s close to his house, but of course it isn’t registered to him or anything like that.
The device beeped and beeped and beeped and apparently drove all the neighbors crazy. Someone apparently uprooted it from the parking spot and threw it in the trash.
The person who put in the device is crying out, and crying out again, and once more crying out (he learned from his broken device) that he was robbed, because the device costs 500 shekels, according to him.
1. Is it permitted to block off a parking space that is not necessarily connected to a particular homeowner, just on the reasonable assumption that at least one parking spot somewhere on the street belongs to him?
2. If a device is disturbing people nonstop and beeping, is it permitted to throw it into the garbage? (For example, a car with an alarm.) Of course, this is after a reasonable amount of time in which the owner could have dealt with it and silenced it, but was negligent.
3. Even if in general it is forbidden to throw out the harmful device, if this is in a place where it is known that mainly people live there who think more with their gut and less with their head (Bibi supporters), and a lot of what goes on there is, nebekh, run from the gut and not from the mind, and it is reasonable that this is also how they would act toward a device that is causing a disturbance — can one say that he installed it on that understanding, and that this is the local custom of that place, and therefore it is ownerless and it was permitted to throw it in the trash?
Answer
The man seized a place that wasn’t his and caused noise damage to the surroundings. A person may take the law into his own hands, and it is permitted to silence the device. If there is no way except to damage it, then that too is permitted, unless it was possible to warn the owner and they did not do so.
I don’t think it depends on the character of the people there.