Faith-based Shopping

I've written about politicization of the marketplace before. I've seen plenty of ads for local business that carried religious symbols, I suppose in the belief that some people are happier doing business with people who share their faith. But this is much more organized:

Mr. Sun! posted a story about an Israeli bank that is working towards offering credit cards which will not make charges on the Jewish Sabbath (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday). My family has been having some discussion of this, particularly about the intended audience. After all, as my father pointed out, the people who would be most interested in the card would be the Sabbath-observant (shomer shabbat in the Hebrew) ones least likely to shop on the Sabbath, anyway. It could be a sort of preventive thing: the card you give to your child going away to college, but you want them to keep the Sabbath and you don't want to facilitate them not keeping Sabbath.... but that seems like a terribly limited market. There is a Rabbinic tradition of the"fence around the Torah," restricting not only based on law but on concern about the appearance of breaking the law (how chicken came to be defined as 'meat' for the purposes of kashrut, for example) and about activities which might inadvertently lead to breaking the law. But shopping with credit cards isn't exactly a"borderline" case with regard to commerce on Sabbath.

The kicker comes towards the end, when the article says that they are considering designing the card such that not only will it not work on Shabbat, but it will not work at retailers which do not observe Shabbat closures. In other words, it's not really about observance: it's a form of boycott against non-observant commercial establishments. It's a way of expressing economic power without seeming to, and a card which carries moral superiority with it in the form of forced ritual observance. This goes way beyond the branded credit cards, even the fundraising ones: this is an organized effort to use modern information and financial technology to enforce ancient laws.

UPDATE: Want your money to go to companies that donate to your prefered party? You can look them up.