“The Great Residential Cell Tower Feud ”

A Moral Dilemma for the Shabbos Table

By Rabbi Yitzi Weiner

This week’s Torah portion deals with the feud of Korach against Moshe and Aaron. Korach inspired many people to join him in his feud. In this week’s parsha, the Torah teaches us a mitzva “not to be like Korach and his assembly” (Bamidbar 17, 5). This is a warning for future generations not to join in or participate in a feud as Korach did.

The following true story involves a feud between two groups of people.

A cell phone company in Israel wanted to install a cell tower on top of an apartment building. As is common in Israel, the apartment building was a co-op, and the apartments were owned by each of the tenants. The phone company  offered each tenant in the building $100 a month if they would allow a cell phone tower to be placed on top of the building. The offer was cleared with the municipality and zoning board. The tenants agreed and the company began to build the tower.

Shortly after the phone company began the installation of the tower, the neighbors in the neighboring apartment buildings began to complain about the tower. They had two basic complaints against the installation of the tower.

One was that that there were reports that living too close to cell phone tower can cause cancer or other illnesses. The neighbors did not want to take that risk. The second argument was that they were told by a realtor that the presence of the tower would lower the real estate value of their apartments.  The owners of the building with the tower argued that their complaints were baseless and they were just arguing because they were jealous of the high payments that they were each receiving.

The argument led to very hard feelings between all of the parties.

The residents of the building with the tower wondered if from a Torah perspective, they were allowed to install the tower even against the complaints of their neighbors. Did they have to be concerned that they were causing physical or financial damage to their neighbors? Did the neighbors have the right to stop the residential cell phone tower from being built?

See Chashukei Chemed Baba Basra page 170

Answer to last week’s moral dilemma

This story is discussed in Veharev Na Volume Two page 371

Rabbi Zilberstein answered that if Ronen is not ready to keep Shabbos, it would be better not to wear the tzitzes when he played on Shabbos. That would be  a Chillul Hashem which is more important to avoid than putting on tzitzes (which is not an absolute commandment when he is not wearing  four cornered garment).

Have a very beautiful shabbos!

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