The rabbi of Beit-El, Religious Zionist leader Shlomo Aviner, writes and receives an average of no less than 3,000 cellphone text (SMS) messages a month. Almost all are questions of halakha (Jewish law), to which Aviner responds in short, permitted or forbidden, without giving the reason.

The questions vary: Is it permissible to prepare tehina on Shabbat?

Only if it is watery, Aviner responds.

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Can I have physical contact with my three-year-old niece? Up to age nine is the answer.

Can one steal from an Arab, who probably stole one's merchandise? No, stealing from a thief is prohibited.

It is not easy to see the 2,000 years of rabbinic responsa (answers to questions on Jewish law and practice) in the SMS answers to texted questions. But they are part of the same genre. Rabbinic leaders always received questions in writing. Some collected them and published them, including previous source material, analogies and finally, the bottom line.

When rabbis started answering halakhic questions on the radio, the more conservative were aghast, as they were over the advent of Internet responsa. What is next, the detractors asked, cellular responsa? "A prophesy that a few years ago was considered a joke has now fulfilled itself," someone wrote on the Internet site Kipah.

Intimate questions
Ultra-Orthodox rabbis prohibit the use of SMS even for secular purposes. But Orthodox Zionism adopted it some years ago as a means of direct communication, for example, between rabbis and residents of their communities needing an immediate answer. Aviner was one of the pioneers. "My phone number is not unlisted," he told Haaretz. "That's the rabbi's job, to be available. During the war, I received 600 SMS messages a day. A soldier wrote me from inside a Lebanese house in the middle of the battle, asking whether he could use the electricity to recharge his cellphone. I said yes. The next day he wrote me that he had in any case decided to leave NIS 10 in the house."

In recent months the use of the SMS has become established with some rabbis, including the chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, the son of former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, publishing their cellular rulings in pamphlets distributed on Shabbat in synagogues. Magazines in the Orthodox sector have special sections devoted to cellphone responsa.

"It suits our generation," Aviad, a high school yeshiva student from Jerusalem, said. "This is a lazy generation, and the advantage is that you are suddenly accessible to a great rabbi like Rabbi Aviner." Anonymity is an advantage, too, the young man said. They can ask simple questions they would be embarrassed to ask their yeshiva head, or intimate ones. The disadvantage is that "you don't go to the bookshelf to find the answer yourself."

In the SMS responsa department in the Orthodox magazine Olam Katan ("Small world"), not only the rabbi's views on various matters come to light, but the fact that the National Religious camp is becoming more Orthodox; many do not move without the rabbi's say-so. "Can you use shampoos rumored to have been tested on animals"? "There is no prohibition, but clearly it is more righteous not to cause suffering to animals or assist someone who tortures them." Another SMS question dealt with whether it was permissible to pop a pimple of the Sabbath, due to prohibitions involving the spilling of blood.

Rabbi Aviner is also asked questions beyond halakha. "Are the Arabs under curfew and at road-blocks not suffering because of us?" No, the rabbi answered, "but because they are murderers. I remember before they started murdering we all traveled everywhere freely," he texted back.

The rabbi's recent controversial ruling that listening to Aviv Gefen songs is prohibited, was also an SMS.

Superficial?

Some criticism in the Orthodox sector has been leveled at the medium, though not the message. After publication of the SMSes began in weekly magazines, some readers responded that the medium was superficial and caused the rabbis and halakha to be taken lightly for dealing with less important matters. Eitam, a blogger on Kipah, wrote, "The idea is terrible not because of the limitations of the cellular medium, but because of its essence. Is a rabbi to be a kind of human Google or walking index that you feed with a question and get an answer in seconds?" Rabbi Aviner is now careful to append sources to his SMS responsa. "The critics don't know how the medium works. There are plenty of questions I don't answer, or suggest the texter call me if I see the issue is complex or there is distress. Critics don't understand there are people behind the SMS."