By Yochanan Gordon
I am not a conspiracy theorist. But if you are the type that digs a good conspiracy every now and then, a friend of mine told me that there are people linking COVID-19 to the proliferation of 5G cellphone towers. With Elul coming up this will be great fodder for the yeshiva mashgichim who are always railing about the dangers of every new invention, especially smartphones and the internet, despite the fact that there is no science to back it up. But hey, since when has that stopped anyone from advancing official policy positions?
Don’t get too excited, this isn’t an article about COVID-19, the Delta variant, or my own personal scientifically unsubstantiated views on the COVID vaccine, not to be confused with the scientifically unsubstantiated policies being advanced on both a local and nationwide level. But before I drift further afield on my satirical take and forget completely where I was going with this whole conspiracy thing, I have a conspiracy theory of my own.
Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that cellphone chargers are preprogrammed to die one month after they are first used? I tend to Google these things to see if there are discussions on message boards or articles on tech sites that address these issues, but unlike the connection between COVID-19 and 5G phone towers, I could not find any supportive evidence that chargers are preprogrammed into obsolescence about a month after they are removed from its original packaging.
Regardless of whether or not this is a trend that is discussed on a professional or even pedestrian level, it has certainly been my experience with every charger that I have bought for as long as I can remember. As such, as with everything in life, there has to be a moral or, as we say in the realm of Jewish ethics, a mussar haskel that would explain this phenomenon.
In a program that aired last week in commemoration of Reb Yoel Kahn, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe’s choizer, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Jacobson reminisced when Reb Yoel taught that oftentimes we will be treated to a number of interpretations across the spectrum of Jewish academic sources for one sugya, all of which are true in a different realm of existence. Contrary to the common belief that the world we live in is composed of three dimensions, Einstein came along and revealed a fourth dimension. The truth, however, is that the soul that permeates us consists of five parts—namely, nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, and yechidah. This is a correspondence with the Tetragrammaton, G-d’s four-letter name, which, counting the crown on top of the yud, has five levels as well. In the revealed realm of Torah, this would correspond to the five books of the Torah and so on and so forth. The point is that while some believe there are three or four dimensions, in reality there are five.
As such, each of these interpretations of one sugya is aligned with the other and essentially interrelated. As an example, Reb Yoel once offered that the only mitzvah that the Rambam, despite offering rationales for all the mitzvos, left without any rationale was the mitzvah of lechem ha’panim. The interesting thing is that if you look in the pizmon that the Arizal wrote for Shabbos that begins with the “Asader L’seudasa,” there is a line there where the Arizal requests, “Reveal for us the reason for the twelve breads…” Reb Yoel then explained, “If there is a reason in atzilus then there is a reason in beriyah, yetzirah, and asiyah.”
Chargers provide the devices they are plugged into with the tech equivalence of life. It is the electricity that these devices need to function. Torah, too, is life, as the verse states, “For they are our life and the length of our days and in them we contemplate both day and night.” But there is an interesting caveat when it comes to the mitzvah of talmud Torah, which fluctuates depending on the person learning. If someone who has finished Shas, poskim, Shulchan Aruch, and the Nosei Keilim decides to take it easy and focus his time on Chumash, Rashi, and Rashbam, I am not a rabbi but I would say it’s possible that his time spent learning Chumash, Rashi, and Rashbam may not be counted as limud HaTorah. A proof-text to this is the Gemara in Megillah, which states, “Mevatlin talmud Torah l’mikra Megillah.” The question many commentators grapple with is why the Gemara writes “Mevatlin talmud Torah” if Megillah is also a cheilek in Torah?
The answer offered to this is that if people need to pause the learning in which they’re engaged in order to discharge their obligation to hear the Megillah, qualitatively, in relation to their immersion in what they were learning, listening to Megillah is not considered talmud Torah. Similarly, I would suggest that being infused with the same frequency of life day in and day out without advancing and constantly growing causes the life that these chargers provide these devices to grow stale and ultimately die.
Anyone who exercises often knows that if you are not always pushing the envelope and increasing the resistance in your quest towards optimal strength you are not growing. The Mishnah in Avos states it best when it says: “L’fum tzaara agra.” One’s reward is commensurate with the pain he is met with on the path towards growth. We all know that a flat line on an EKG monitor is an indication of death. Life, then, is defined by constant movement, vibrancy, and fluctuations.
As I type these ideas, my phone battery is down to 15% and I’m afraid it will not climb any further up until I go out and buy yet another charger, which I know will only last me another month or so. At least this time around I won’t be so surprised and perhaps it will drive home the ephemerality of all those things which Shlomo HaMelech describes as tachas ha’shemesh. Ultimately, the only way to be able to cheat death and live on forever is to access the point of chiddush, which constantly renews itself intuitively.
I am sure the mashgichim will be talking a lot about that, too, come the month of Elul and the new z’man. But lest I start to spoil all of their divrei hachanah for the Yomim Nora’im, I will stop here.
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at ygordon5t@gmail.com. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.